As I write, I am looking at Malta International Airport’s portal and the updated lists of arrivals and departures.

The flight to Brussels (Brussels Airlines, BMI, Air Malta) has just left, as have the flights to Munich (Lufthansa, Air Malta), and to Heathrow (Air Malta, BMI), while that to Paris has just closed (Air Malta).

These will soon be followed by the flights to Copenhagen (Norwegian Air Shuttle), Pisa (Ryanair), Oslo (Norwegian Air Shuttle again), followed by flights to Gatwick (BMI, Air Malta), Barcelona (Iberia, Vuelling), and newest addition BMI Baby to East Midlands. And so on and so forth, deep into the night.

The same congestion is clear when you turn to the arrivals page.

MIA is to publish the figures for May in the coming days. This will be the first smoke-free month since April, which saw the weeklong disruption of air traffic due to the Icelandic volcano.

They will show, as did the results for the other months before this disruption, the wisdom of the decision to free Malta for low-cost airlines, the battle we fought some three years ago against an obdurate government. The May figures will be even better than that since most of the new routes launched this summer only opened with the summer season.

Never has Malta had so many air connections to the world as it has now. Nor so many flights.

On their own, flights are just possibilities. It then depends on the attractiveness of the location, the advertising campaign, and the right fare structures, to fill the seats on the planes.

The sorry story is that one has to face up to the fact that as long as travel to Malta remained almost monopolistic, not only were there not so many flights and seats on planes, but also the fare structure was completely out of synch (it still is, in parts) with the fare structure offered by competition, and, it would seem, inversely related to the popularity of the outgoing destination.

Contrary to what one hears said sometimes, this is not ‘displaced traffic’; in other words the national airline would have brought these figures had there not been the low cost carriers. This is new traffic. Let me be bold: Malta can make a quantum leap as a tourist destination of quality if we play our cards right.

Of course, it is not a question of tourist numbers only. That is the benchmark we often use – the numbers of tourists in a month or a year, in which case this year we are on course to reverse the downward trend suffered last year when the recession hit everywhere in Europe. But just to see the tourist figures approach those of record year 2008, before Lehman collapsed, is not enough.

Time and again, we dream of other economic sectors as becoming the motors of the Maltese economy, such as financial services, online gaming and so on. Forget it: tourism remains the only, and true, motor of the Maltese economy.

It is a fragile motor, as the volcanic ash cloud crisis has demonstrated, since flying in by air is about the only way to get to Malta. But it is also fragile because in the end Malta’s attractiveness depends on which Maltese individual the tourists meet when they’re here: a surly service, a shoddy reception, a dirty hotel room, chaos on the roads, construction work next door to the hotel, grasping taxi drivers or karozzin drivers showing ignorance by their attempts at speaking English, irresponsive police attitudes to legitimate complaints – all these may and do put off people.

Let’s speak about hotels first. The information I have is that hotels in the four- or five-star categories are doing quite well. The problem could come in the last week of August when a 2,600-strong conference will be held. Will Malta collapse in the torrid days of Ferragosto? Will we have people sleeping on the streets because they did not find a hotel room? I have long suggested that a help-desk be set up in the MIA arrivals hall with the sole aim of helping people without a hotel booking, rather than let them be taken care of by unscrupulous taxi drivers.

The figures we are seeing this year should provide very welcome news to hotel owners in all categories to help them carry out much-needed upgrading and refurbishment. Because all the philippics about dwindling tourist numbers hid an awful truth: many of the three- or lower star hotels were built and operated by constructors who knew how to build buildings, and possibly hotels, but who knew zilch about running a hotel. Hence the skimping on quality service, and on room refurbishment. This situation was aided and abetted by lax or weak enforcement. Tourists who complained were given the run-around – I was witness to such cases. That is also why beds and rooms have been declining, as the crisis hit owners without a strategy to cater for a newer type of tourist – the low cost flight tourist.

The government has been offering them funds to help them upgrade, to help them set up web pages, to help them get out of the clutches of tour operators who peg them to the lowest rate they can get. But on many occasions, such an offer was not taken up.

On the contrary, we are seeing some interesting projects of hotel expansions, which show not just a belief in Malta as a tourist destination but also a courageous determination in the middle of a still ongoing recession.

We are also seeing the beginning of a new trend – that of setting up boutique hotels in places like Valletta and Vittoriosa. And a new trend too of some interesting experiments in agro-tourism. Our towns and villages, the real authentic Malta, outside the normal tourist areas, is still waiting to be discovered.

The low-cost wave can be expanded further. It would be wise not to put all our eggs in one basket, but it would be equally wise to encourage low cost airlines, especially Ryanair which had enough faith in Malta to base one plane here and set up its 42nd base in Europe, to use Malta to venture further afield, especially to North Africa and also the Middle East, including and especially Israel. There is unsuspected and untapped growth lying there for us to grab.

Equally, during the weeklong tour we made with Prime Minister Gonzi in the Gulf region, we witnessed repeated attempts by the Malta side to try and attract flights by the Gulf airlines – Qatar Airlines and Etihad above all. One particularly interesting concept floated at those meetings concerned Malta as a stepping-stone with Malta offering landing rights to Canada in return. One would like to ask what happened to such initiatives.

Last year, it used to be said that the Sterling’s weakness versus the euro and the recession that hit Britain affected Malta’s biggest tourist market. This year the euro has plummeted and a change of government seems to have put Britain on the way of recovery. Quite unconnected with this, the flights between Malta and the UK have increased beyond anything there was over the past year. However, price considerations, not just the price of flights but also of accommodation, and equally of about anything that tourists do, especially meals in restaurants, also account for the popularity or otherwise of a destination.

The problem, as I see it, is not filling seats on planes in mid-summer. The problem would be to ensure that people are not left without hotel accommodation and that people shunted to lesser hotels do not go back to tell scary stories about Maltese hotels. The problem is filling the shoulder months and the winter months.

On the one hand, Malta’s quality weather in winter should be an automatic inducement to get people away from cold and sunless environments. If the airlines see that people are still interested in coming to Malta for a short mid-week or weekend break, they will lay on flights. So too will the conference and inducement sector.

Through our sagacity in opening to low-cost airlines (or should I say, despite our hard-headed opposition to them) we are reversing the bad trends of the past year or so. Only we can get it wrong again.

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