The Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association welcomed the Malta Labour Party’s plans to revitalise the Bugibba area if elected to government, and was ready to offer its support in the project, an MLP statement said yesterday.

The statement quoted MHRA president Josef Formosa Gauci as saying that entrepreneurs in the Bugibba, St Paul’s Bay and Qawra area were facing a number of difficulties and that the MHRA had for long been insisting with the government that it should give the localities a new lease of life.

There are a number of three-star hotels in the area, and this part of the hotel sector had been negatively hit. The MHRA was now working hand in hand with the Tourism Ministry to identify the problems three-star hotels were facing and come up with incentives, Mr Formosa Gauci said.

He was also reported to have said that the MHRA was concerned with the situation of the tourism industry in Gozo. As predicted by the association, 2006 was a bad year for tourism, and matters had only started to improve late last year when measures the MHRA had been insisting upon had started to be implemented.

At the same time, the MHRA president said that much more needed to be done for the tourism industry to recover from recent setbacks. Mr Formosa Gauci said low-cost airlines could be an important part in finding a solution to the prevailing problems. It has been calculated that 10 per cent of tourist traffic will be on such carriers, but he said that other countries were registering 40 per cent figures.

For his part, Labour leader Alfred Sant said that the tourism industry had passed through a bad patch, but the MLP believed that the sector could progress because the country still had a lot to offer. He said that an English newspaper had recently listed Ramla Bay in Gozo as one of the top 20 beaches in the world.