Hoteliers and other tourism operators have been agitating with the government to allow low-cost airlines to fly to Malta. So far, they have had no luck. Now, some headway appears to have been made. I am really curious to see what will happen, because you can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. You can give people low-cost airfares to Malta, but it doesn’t mean they are going to want to come here.

The high price of air travel to Malta has served as a convenient whipping-boy. By blaming that factor for the lack of takers for Malta holidays, we have felt ourselves spared from the urgency of looking long and hard at the product on offer. If low-cost flights are available and people continue not to come in droves and hordes, then we can escape the deeper truth no longer. We should start looking at it even now.

Before you put a product or service on the market, you have to ask yourself why people would want to buy it. When answering that question, you have to be brutally honest, even if it means the destruction of your hopes and dreams, or a complete rethinking of them. Few people are able to do this with something they are selling themselves, because most have a tendency towards self-protection through self-delusion – and that’s where the trouble starts. If they have an adequate budget, they will bring in consultants to answer these questions for them, with the risk of more trouble when they continue to self-protect and self-delude by either not listening to the consultants or worse, contradicting them, telling them that they are wrong, and then sacking them. Weaker consultants, and those who are interested only in the money with little or no pride in their professional reputation, are aware of this latter possibility, and so tell their clients what they want to hear, keeping them happy with sweet talk and myths. Then it all goes belly-up, and they wonder what happened. Well, what happened is usually that nobody wanted to say that the emperor had no clothes on.

For the fact is that the emperor has been denuded progressively over the past 40 years, so that the Malta once able to compete directly in exactly the same market as the Greek Islands is now in a category all of its own – a category that no one appears to want. This category is best summed up by the answers to the question: “Forget the tourists, why would I want to go to Malta if I were not Maltese?” Not being prone to self-delusion (I sometimes wish I was – it would make life so much easier on the nerves) I can answer this question without a qualm and with no hesitation, which is how the most truthful answers come out. The answer is: no reason I can think of. I would not want to come to Malta. Ever. There are too many other places to see first, places that are more interesting, more enticing, and which have much more on offer.

People have limited time and money to be expended on holidays, and so careful choices have to be made. This is precisely where Malta loses out. Malta does not have an edge over the competition anywhere else in the world, still less in the tightly competitive Mediterranean. There is no reason why anyone, faced with the growing choice and the decreasing prices for long-haul and close-to-home destinations, would say: “Oh my God! I’ve always dreamed of going to Malta! Let’s go this summer, honey.”

When I talk like this to my fellow Maltese, they bridle and bristle. The hackles go up. They feel threatened. They see my explanation as a dereliction of duty, rather than its very opposite: concern at what is happening, the disaster lurking over the horizon. I can see that their reaction is rooted in national pride and patriotism, two qualities that do not sell many holidays when they do not drive you to do something to better the country you live in. What do I mean, they ask. How dare I, is the implication.

So I ask them for reasons why, if they lived in Britain, France, Germany or Italy, they would want to come to Malta for a week or two, their only annual holiday. There’s usually lots of humming and hawing, and then the lame answers: “The weather.” The weather? Italians? Anybody at all, in January, February or March? And Malta is not the only country in the world to have warm weather in the spring and autumn, and hot sultry weather (which many people, incidentally, dislike intensely) in the summer. There are countless destinations that have similar weather conditions and are far more attractive, with the added bonus of fantastic food and entertainment and much more to see and do. So that’s ruled out the weather as a reason why people would want to visit Malta rather than anywhere else.

Then the next reason is trotted out, this time in a more unsure way: “The history”. I take it that they mean the historical sites. Well, history and nothing else besides will appeal only to serious buffs, the kind who jump through all kinds of hoops to get a visa to Libya, then stay there for a couple of days without so much as a glass of wine or a beer, and nothing much else to see and do, just for the pleasure of visiting Leptis Magna, Sabratha or both. For the rest, you have to throw in something more: great restaurants, fabulous café life, spectacular art museums, amazing shops, long white beaches, and beautiful scenery. That’s why Rome tends to corner this particular market, with people willing even to give up on the long white beaches in order to be there. There’s another problem: Malta is not the only place in the Mediterranean with interesting historical sites. In fact, there is nowhere in the Mediterranean without interesting historical sites. It’s the nature of the place. The difference is that, with the exception of Libya and Algeria, all the other places have added pull: colour, life, great food, wonderful beaches for lazing around on in between visiting ruins, Arabic markets, European city zing.

“Entertainment,” they say – to which my reaction is: come off it. What entertainment? Even those of us who know our way around because we live here get bored stiff at the lack of things to do. Paceville is not entertainment for those who are over 25, and even Paceville is terrible when compared to the nightlife in Barcelona, say, which is attractive to people of all ages.

OK, so the next reason why people would want to come to Malta rather than anywhere else when they pick a holiday? “It’s safe.” You can hear the sound of scraping around at the bottom of the barrel. “It’s safe.” Well, so is everywhere else bar the aforementioned Algeria, and possibly Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. It’s usually people’s behaviour that gets them into trouble on holiday, as we have seen with tourists in Malta who fall to their deaths off balconies while drunk, or go off to dark corners with squalid chaps they’ve just met, and then get raped.

By now, we’ve run out of reasons why people would want to come to Malta rather than any of the other several hundred destinations on offer. Nobody can say “It’s cheap” or “It’s good value for money”, so there is silence. Then somebody makes the inevitable mistake of confusing realistic pragmatism with negativity: “Oh, you shouldn’t be negative.” This is usually the kind of Polly-Anna thinker who believes that “talking things up” will change their very nature – a sort of alchemic process by which base metal is turned into gold. It doesn’t. It only makes you come across as being detached from reality, admiring the emperor’s new clothes when your potential customers can see that he isn’t wearing any clothes at all. If the market doesn’t want to buy what you have on offer, the problem doesn’t lie with the market, it lies with your product, and with your inability to see that.

Before we can sell Malta, we have to address the thorny question of why anybody would want to come here, when the world is now thrown wide open, even to people travelling on a tight budget. If I did not live here and had never visited, I would not want to come here – and if I were persuaded to do so, then I would be sorely disappointed and go off and tell everyone: “Don’t go there. It’s just not worth it.” There are none of the things I like: no zingy street life, no glorious boutiques, no fabulous beaches, no thrilling restaurants, no food culture, no breath-taking scenery, no museums packed full of art treasures, no beautifully dressed people strolling through the streets, no Sunday morning café life with the smell of coffee and good-looking families out en masse for an aperitif. It would be like being forced to stay in Catania for a week. Ah, but here’s the catch. In Catania, you can hire a car and escape. There is the whole of Sicily, with its many wonders – culinary and

visual – to explore. Sicily has many areas that are like Malta and worse, but it also has scenery and historical towns and villages with which Malta can never compete. And as for the food… people go there for that alone.

You notice I keep mentioning food. That’s because food is the new sex in Europe. Good food has become one of the reasons why people choose a destination. Bad or indifferent food is a reason why they will not choose it. One of the reasons I will not come to Malta is because the food is terrible. There, I’ve said it. It’s bloody awful. People just don’t understand food. They just don’t get it. There’s a huge desire to learn, but at the learning stage, you shouldn’t be selling. It’s not enough to have just a few restaurants that are good or even exceptional, if the general food culture is abysmal and a restaurant chosen at random is an expensive and disappointing experience.

To my mind, the Mediterra-nean Food Festival held every winter sums up precisely why we keep making a hash of things. We don’t even begin to understand where we are going wrong. We don’t even begin to understand the celebration of food and its pleasures. In the rest of the Mediterranean – from Tunisia to Greece to Spain to southern Italy – food festivals are held in the spring and summer, outdoors in splendid locations, with stalls brimming over with traditional and seasonal foods.

Even in rainy Piemonte, the famous Slow Food Cheese Fair held in Bra every September takes place in the city’s streets under canopies, and likewise the October truffle fairs. Perugia has a massive chocolate festival every year – in the streets. Malta is the only place that insists on holding its food festivals indoors and, unbelievably, recreating a Maltese village out of kartapesta for the purpose – as though we were holding the Maltese food festival in Oslo in January, rather than in Malta where there are umpteen real Maltese villages outside. Talk about killing the spirit of the thing.

The event itself is hopelessly depressing, as far removed from the spirit of food culture as it is possible to be. Nobody is going to travel to see that. And if they did, they would be horrified – just as I am horrified every year, when I see the sterile mishmash of hotel cooks and people jumping around in fancy dress that goes under the name of “folklore”. Yet this event is organised by the Malta Tourism Authority.

I cannot even begin to understand the thinking behind it. What I do know is that, when it comes to giving the market what it wants, we are hopelessly, perhaps even irremediably, out of out our depth. We are trying to sell un bel zero to people who are faced with a choice between Malta and Barcelona, Malta and Rome, Malta and the idyllic Greek islands, Malta and the Seychelles, Malta and Bali, Malta and Cape Town, Malta and New York City – need I run on? Enough said, I think.