The Government has recently gone into electoral-campaign-mode by trumpeting vuvuzelas and exaggerating about results achieved in tourist numbers since the great depression of 2009.

When you listen to the paternalistic platitudes of the government on tourism results you run the risk of being duped into thinking that we are on top of the world, when indeed there is only reason for one to blow a small village trumpet.

It is true that visitor numbers have increased since 2009 when the industry was scraping the bottom because of the recession, so it was to be expected that numbers would naturally grow as demand in our source markets started to return to levels of normality. Some credit is due to the authorities, because some of the efforts made have paid off to attract as many tourists as possible to Malta and I have been on record to state it. What is fair is fair.

But to overstate it would be unrealistic. Self-praise is no recommendation as it seems that the government is also gloating over its own dismal performance of recent years to carry on magnifying the prevailing situation. It puts people off when one says that no one ever had it better, even, for the sake of argument, when truly no one ever had it better indeed, which, as you will see, is not the case anyway.

Firstly let me dispense of a great myth. The government has been trying to impress people with the idea that this year we had two million arrivals, cunningly adding the 600,000 cruise liner passenger arrivals to the tourist figures which by the end of the year should reach 1.4 million. The unprepared and untrained eye would not be able to distinguish between on the one hand the number of tourists arrivals, who, according to the Malta Travel and Tourism Act (Chap 409), spend at least one night in Malta, and, on the other, the number of cruise liner passengers who are merely day trippers, have little value added and are absolutely of no interest to hoteliers particularly.

Apparently the Government is not yet happy enough with the results obtained in respect of tourist arrivals, so it characteristically goes into hyperbole to overstate the figures by adding up cruise liner passenger figures to official NSO tourists stats. This is an exercise in sheer political dishonesty. It may and most probably does dupe the ordinary man in the street to which the strategy is targeted because the addition misleads those who do not understand the difference. But it certainly won’t impress the Opposition, the MHRA, its members, academics and the industry generally who are not stupid as the government is paternalistically depicting them to be.

The bottom line is that the World Tourism Organisation and Malta’s NSO does not include cruise liner passengers to their official tourist data, but it seems that the Tourism ministry sits on a higher seat than the WTO and the NSO!

A second myth is the gloating going on about records being broken over and over again in tourist arrivals. Hearing government speakers one would get the impression that we are sitting on top of the world. Again self-praise is no recommendation. The Malta Tourism Authority’s (MTA) budget for 2007 was initially Lm 8 million (circa €18.6M) to which another Lm 1 million was added to a total of €21million. According to NSO data, total tourist departures in 2007 stood at 1,243,510.

On the other hand the MTA budget for 2010 shot up to €35million and it is expected that the 1.4 million tourist arrival threshold is going to be reached. So for an increase of a mere 156,490 tourists over five years MTA is spending a staggering €14 million more. Too much for too little. All this hyperbole about records being broken must be taken in the context of a mere increase of a little more than 150,000 tourists over the span of a five year period. This is indeed poor.

Also the cost per tourist in 2007 stood at €16.8 while the cost per tourist in 2011 has reached €25 per tourist.

But for all the self-praise about chutzpah in sitting on top of the world and in drawing record-breaking tourists to Malta, Malta's brand has not grown stronger at all. It is in fact weaker as out there Malta is selling only on the good name and cheap flight prices offered by the likes of Ryanair, Easyjet, Norwegian, Vueling and others.

If these low cost carriers were to stop operating to Malta overnight, these cannot be readily replaced because the majority of the clients that these carriers are bringing to Malta are clients of the airline going to another new destination that the carrier offers, and not because the clients choose Malta. This is the fundamental difference and reality.

It is symptomatic of the short sighted, quick fix solution approach that the government has chosen in recent years for tourism.

With these results I wouldn’t buy a vuvuzela to blow. A village kurunetta would suffice.