After my recent letter entitled Branding Malta, that appeared in your newspaper (TMID, 8 August), where I criticised the Malta Tourism Authority for coming up with such futile and very expensive solutions to our problematic and ailing tourism industry, this time I am writing about some of the “incidents” one encounters in the real world of tourism at street level, with the slim hope that the MTA will finally do something really positive to put the industry back on its feet.

The following happened to me when I was with my foreign friends, who have visited Malta for about 11 times in total, with the first trip dating back to 1982.

Along with an English friend, I decided to eat in a Sliema restaurant, where to my astonishment, I was served a substandard spaghetti bolognese with the pasta still too hard to eat, the sauce tasteless and with a lot of water under the pasta.

When I complained to the waiter, it was as if I must have gone mad.

However, grudgingly, he did replace it but with the same result. I simply gave up, due to the incessant hunger pangs, managed to down this pasta, paid up and swore that I would never again set foot in this restaurant, due to the poor, tasteless food and quite exorbitant prices.

A few days later, when I dined with my Belgian friend in another restaurant, not far from the other one, I was served with tepid beer, tasted it and called over the waiter/ manager and asked him to do something about it, as I like my beer (local) cold. I should mention that my Belgian friend likes to drink local beer as she considers it a very good beer that compares well with a lot of the beers that one finds in Belgium.

The manager/waiter told me that he would change this beer into a better one. Yes, he did but the small and better beer that he brought had ice cubes in it.

I nearly hit the roof when I had a sip and one of the ice cubes hit my teeth. I complained bitterly to the same waiter/manager, who was on his own desperately trying to serve all the people, and told him that what he had done was totally unacceptable in a restaurant, especially when I was with a tourist. He mumbled an apology and went away.

To make matters worse, I was charged for the ice cube beer. Again the same vow – that I would never set foot in that restaurant again.

The MTA has to understand that what I have personally experienced would not be mentioned in any survey, poll or promotion that sections of the government love to base their rhetoric reasoning or lame excuses on to convince Joe Citizen that they are doing a grand job.

Together with my negative experience in this vital sector of our economy, one has to include the great number of letters that appear daily in the local newspapers regarding the worsening scenario in the tourist industry and other important sectors of our island. These clearly show that Joe Citizen is not happy with our government’s performance in recent years.

These letters are never written with the intention of maliciously criticising the government for every single thing that it does but because it is the only democratic right with which Joe Citizen has been left to show his total disapproval of the way in which things are happening here.

Philip Pace

Sliema