Fact. It is too expensive to fly to Malta. We can rebrand ourselves till the cows come home or the gbejniet go sour. We can commission consultants to write reports, we can change boards and appoint new CEOs, we can improve our product, but we are still left with one enormous problem. It is too expensive to fly to Malta. If you were living in London, or Milan, would you fly say to Prague for about 39 euros per person, or for 250 euros plus per person (!) to Malta?

This year, my sister and her family have flown out of the UK three times for much less than it would have cost her to come to Malta once! Once to Vienna, which cost her around Lm60 for a family of four, once to Venice for a little more, and once to Zurich. Flying to Malta is prohibitively expensive. She is Maltese and would like to visit more often, but when you can take a family of four on holiday for Lm60 or Lm70 why come to Malta where the flight alone for the family could set you back Lm600!

We all know it is too expensive to fly to Malta. It is much, much too expensive for us to fly out as well. And although Air Malta and others have now started offering more reasonable fares than a few years ago, this improvement is totally eclipsed by the taxes. So, you see ads offering a flight for Lm40 return but know you will have to add a fortune in taxes and the price doubles. And even without taxes these so-called cheaper flights are still double what companies like Ryanair are offering.

Yes, I know government revenue has to come from somewhere but Malta’s motor is tourism. We are a tiny island. It doesn’t matter that Mdina’s paving has been changed, or how beautifully majestic the Valletta Waterfront is, how good the new roads are, or how much we need to clean up Malta’s reputation as the litter louts of Europe. We need more tourists and we are not getting them because it is too expensive to fly here.

I watched Ryanair’s deputy CEO being interviewed on PBS. He didn’t look as if he thought Ryanair was close to clinching a deal with us, which is a pity. He has promised that if Ryanair comes to an agreement with the Maltese government, it will bring an additional two million tourists in five years. This would create at least 2000 more jobs and bring millions and millions of liri into Malta. It will give those small hotel operators a much-needed boost, as well as everyone who supplies the tourist industry, from the guide to the souvenir shop, from the bar to the three-star restaurant

But what are we captivated by? What are our newspapers full of? The 10,000 or more golf tourists that a golf course would bring, if that. It’s not at all clear. I am sure the government has a lot to consider and worry about, not least the fate of Air Malta if Ryanair has six planes based here, but can we afford to lose these two million tourists over five years? This year we aimed to get 50,000 more tourists and didn’t manage even that! Now that is not the minister’s fault, or the Opposition’s fault for complaining, or the fault of the Malta Tourism Authority.

It is basically because it is too expensive to fly to Malta. We have been burdened with expensive flights for so long that we don’t even know what it means to fly somewhere for Lm20 return. It’s almost beyond our comprehension.

But millions of people all over Europe are buying into the Ryanair (and other low cost airlines) dream and making it a reality. They are dashing around all over Europe practically for free and spending their cash in the country they visit, rather than spending about half their cash on plane fares, as used to be the case in the past.

And flying is not what it used to be. People felt uneasy boarding a plane after 9/11, and more and more people dislike flying but love travelling. One way or another, these ridiculously cheap flights manage to get bums on seats. We need to be in with the other destinations that have low cost airlines. We can’t afford to have another slow summer like we had, with more and more hotels being converted into more and more apartments, as people gave up on a business that was not leaving any profit.

Ryanair maintains it cannot pay a 25 euros airport tax per person when it only charges 39 euros for the flight. They are right. We would be wrong not to grab the opportunity to increase the number of tourists to Malta next summer. Then we have to make their trip worthwhile for them to recommend Malta to friends so that we can have the repeat business we appear to be losing

We need them more than they need us. Trouble is we don’t appear to believe it...