One of the rather overlooked results of the MHRA survey of tourism trends in the second quarter pointed to an increase in the number of tourists coming to Malta who opt for private accommodation rather than stay in hotels.

This can be confirmed by anecdotal evidence available to one and all.

Places like St Paul’s Bay and Bugibba were bursting at the seams this summer while for all the increase in the number of tourists coming to Malta, they all seem to find accommodation somehow, no one seems to have ended up on the streets and it must have been possible to find a room in a hotel despite the highest of high seasons.

But one wonders if all the tourist accommodation, flats, self-catering and the like, which attracted increasing numbers of tourists was registered accommodation.

Such a comment usually elicits cries of protests by many people, not least the owners of such accommodation, who normally complain about the high cost of government compliance.

The fact remains, however, that staying in unregistered accommodation exposes the tourist (not really the ‘innocent’ tourist, for they would well know what they are letting themselves in for) to shoddy accommodation, shoddier environment and no means of redress.

The same goes for students and schools of English who opt to allocate students to unregistered accommodation, again with all the consequences this entails.

One would also like to add Gozo here, for there have been a spate of stories in the media about people finding that accommodation in farmhouses in Gozo in summer sometimes is nothing like what was promised on websites.

There was a case of a woman who seems to have taken money from people without the farmhouse itself existing. There have also been cases of downright dirty farmhouses offered for accommodation, and other cases of reluctant, or angry, owners who did not want to address the complaints made to them.

The probability here too is that these farmhouses are unregistered. But they are easily accessible on the many websites. Is it that difficult, one asks, for some government official to be set to trawl the websites and check the accommodation offered against the lists of registered farmhouses?

It must be clarified, both as regards farmhouses and as regards flats or other accommodation, that there are on the other hand many examples of good value for money, clean and efficient accommodation that is so beloved by people eager to get a family holiday that does not cost the earth.

At the same time, however, this segment takes a huge bite out of the potential market for hotels. At the MHRA meeting held some weeks ago, it was pointed out that some hotels, in the words of MHRA president Tony Zahra, “did not listen to the market but gave in to pressure to lower rates”.

This, in turn leads us to one other consideration: the past years have seen the closure of many hotels and very few openings of new hotels. There are good hotel sites still lying fallow or open to redevelopment. No new hotel chains have ventured to Malta. And, for all the talk on boutique hotels and hotels in towns, villages and cities, there have been very few instances of these in the past years.

Just as one swallow does not a summer make, so too one good, or ‘perfect’ season does not mean the crisis is over.