Ever since the last election, the government has taken clear steps to allow hotel owners to raise their properties by up to two storeys.

This will, no doubt, be pleasing news to the many construction companies which always complain they do not have enough work on their order books.

Whether it will be good news to people living next to or behind the hotels is yet to be seen.

But one should be concerned about the impact of such a blanket decision on the industry as a whole.

As far as one can see, this decision was not preceded by any holistic study of the tourism market as a whole, nor, if one remembers correctly, on the pondered opinion of the stakeholders in the tourism sector.

There has been talk, over the past days, of a tourism holistic plan, although the minister who kick-started that has been, as we all know, moved. This decision to allow hotels to go up by two storeys antedates such a plan.

The hotel sector in Malta is still coming out from some terrible years of recession, lower tourism numbers and a market dominated by tour operators who demanded, and usually got, the lowest possible rates.

We normally boast that the tourism sector in Malta is all private sector, with no input by the government (except occasionally in giving out public land). However, there has been a steady decline in hotel numbers with some key hotels being closed up, others converted controversially to apartments and a general decline in hotel profitability.

The arrival of low cost airlines has allowed the sector to turn a corner but we are still far, far away from ensuring the sustainability of the sector as a whole. Many hotels still face years and years of uphill struggle as they wipe away the losses they suffered over the past years. Many hotels have huge need for infrastructural changes to give their hotels a real and proper uplift.

Many hotels have now installed web pages and are taking direct bookings so they are shaking off, to some extent, the stranglehold of tour operators. But internet bookings also bring with them internet websites which offer comparisons and which allow people with gripes, or grudges, free opportunity to air them. So hotels are urged to offer a tip-top service and to come up with a reasonable price.

Over the past years, EU help was available to help hotels upgrade and improve their offering, but not many hotels, it would seem, availed themselves of this opportunity. There have been allegations, recently, that the government office handling the applications for EU help has not been coping with the demand. Whether this is true or not, the fact seems to be that EU help has been lost.

So why, one may ask, is this paper warning that allowing hotels to raise their properties by two additional storeys may be detrimental.

This paper admits that some hotels do suffer from a critical mass problem, in that they do not have enough rooms to ensure the sustainability of their operation as a whole. Increasing the number of rooms would address this issue.

But what would be the cumulative impact on the industry as a whole? The past year has seen that even with an increase even in the hottest months, an increase no one would have bet on, there was no problem of overbooking. All tourists somehow found accommodation and we did not have tourists sleeping on the streets. The industry could cope.

But what will be the impact of more room numbers, especially in the lean shoulder months. Will hotels engage, once again in a price war, as they did just some years ago when the market was dominated by tour operators? And as they still do in the winter and shoulder months? We still get five-star hotels charging four-star prices. Will the competition become more deadly?

Whatever the impact on the hotel’s stability as a building, whatever the impact construction work will have on the hotel guests, whatever the impact on the hotel’s aesthetic appearance, and whatever the impact on the neighbours, this, the impact of a flood of rooms on a sector slowly emerging from years of recession, is probably the issue that should be looked at in all seriousness.