The public transport strike held last week will not only be remembered as having been the last attempt by the operators of the system to stop the liberalisation of their sector, but also as an example of what the country should avoid if it wants to protect the tourism industry.

The photos and footage that had the greatest impact on many people – apart from the ones in which drivers were seen rushing towards the closed door of the Prime Minister’s Office – were those of tourists dragging their luggage over fields and in the middle of roads leading to and from the airport, and others walking up the steep hill leading from the waterfront to the capital city.

The tourists who were in Malta last week – and particularly those who arrived here or whose holiday had ended during the course of the four-day strike – will certainly take negative images of the country with them back home. Few, if any, of them will recommend a holiday in Malta to their work colleagues, friends and relatives, and we all know that the best possible marketing is done by word of mouth.

This newspaper has already said that public transport operators have every right to strike and complain about working conditions, just like

anybody else. But it is the way things happened, and the way they wanted to bring the country to a standstill, that was wrong. It should never have gone that far.

They thought that by stopping their services and going to Castille they would have forced the government to backtrack. And they probably never realised the consequences they would have had to face in the aftermath. Companies and organisations that were deprived of transport services – also because private operators stopped theirs too when episodes of violence ensued against drivers of other coaches – have taken the matter to court to protect their interests, while some public transport operators were themselves charged in court because of their unlawful behaviour.

One other matter that could not be comprehended is that the public transport operators did not even provide emergency services, as is normally done, and then did all they could to stop the emergency services the government tried to introduce.

Yet, the worst of it all was the fact that Malta’s image of a hospitable country, where people could come over to enjoy a holiday in peace and quiet, was lost in a matter of a few days. And it is hard to quantify the damage that was caused because of what happened last week.

The way the strike was reported in the foreign media – some of them even wrote that even the train services stopped, but that is another matter – did not do Malta any good. It is already hard for a small country like Malta to remain competitive in the tourism industry; such reports destroyed the hard work that the government and the Malta Tourism Authority carried out through promotion campaigns.

It was a good thing that the parliamentary secretary responsible for tourism, Mario de Marco, and MTA officials were the first to rush to the airport to give a helping hand to each and every tourist who was in difficulty. It was also a good idea to present foreign students who witnessed an attack on a driver with a small gift.

These gestures will have attenuated the bad experiences tourists encountered during the strike, although it is hard to expect the tourists who were in Malta last week not to have left the country with a bad taste.

Let us hope that the repercussions of what happened during the strike last week will not be as bad as the industry is expecting them to be.