We all know or should know that more reasonable airline travel fares currently on offer are being totally eclipsed by our crazy airport taxes, which are not only putting us off travelling, but are also helping to make Malta, among many other things, much too expensive, or not at all competitive for your average European tourist.

So the news that a decision is imminent on low cost airlines is a good thing. The tourism industry and the travelling public wait with bated breath. The potential tourist who might come to Malta is not bothered one bit. Tourists today are practically being paid to travel to certain destinations.

There is now a fantastic selection of low cost airports for the European tourist, and more and more travellers, when deciding where to travel, are simply just choosing between the low cost destinations on offer, and shunning traditional expensive fares and airports instead. But are we actually waiting in vain? Is the decision more or as much about our high cost airport, than whether low cost airlines can come to Malta?

As the director general of the GRTU wrote recently “Can we have a low cost airport? Yes we can. MIA is a commercial company and a monopoly, operating on a cost plus basis, enjoying irregular profit mark up. Government should now act and remove a number of costly impositions from MIA and have these costs reversed back to government.”

So our airport is certainly part of the problem too. And travelling through it recently I did wonder whether the right decision was made when our airport was partly privatised. Whatever happened to the preferred bidders who actually had far more experience running airports that are gems? Has anyone seen any dramatic improvements in our airport since privatisation? Has the public benefitted? Has the tourist industry?

Not enough for sure.

But whether the airport was privatised in the true interest of the Maltese public is another story for another article. The challenge for the government is now both how to accommodate the inbound traveller who practically wants to pay nothing to fly here, as well as the beleaguered Maltese taxpayer who cannot afford our sky high airport taxes.

Of course, it is also true that some form of low cost carriers are already here, but this provision is still too small a scale to be affecting inbound and outbound travel. You see them advertising their flights which seem like a low cost bargain, but when you phone and add our wretched airport taxes which come to over Lm100 for a totally normal Maltese family of five you begin to understand why outbound travel is on the decline, because these low cost fares are totally eclipsed by our unfair airport taxes.

Yes, tax revenue does have to come from somewhere but our airport taxes are an unbearable burden, unfairly high and serving as a real disincentive to travelling for Maltese families. And you know what we all say. Malta is a great place to live but you do need to get away, and the government perhaps, by not letting enough of us get away too often thanks to these sky high charges, is helping to further fuel the existing discontent which is inevitable when any political party has been in power for so long.

Low cost carriers are negotiating with the government. They have guaranteed a number of tourists. Once we get them in and tourists start arriving, we still have the problem of why anyone would want to come here? Our beaches are full and dirty in summer. The same can be said for our towns. We still insist on packing our tourists into small areas like Bugibba and Qawra and don’t have enough tourists able to enjoy travelling around, sipping a drink in a village square as is so easy to do in neighbouring Sicily.

We are basically asking our tourists to come and visit a building site and I can understand why fewer and fewer want to do so.

This is not the 1980s, man! Our product is as old fashioned as our attitude to politics. Malta has to wake up and not only have low cost carriers but make this island worth a visit, as well as making it affordable for us Maltese to get away from it to keep our sanity. Get low cost carriers in and make our airport low cost.

We need both and we need it now.