This year will no doubt see a record number of tourists visiting our island. The figures for the preceding months say so, and also the hotel and plane bookings. So too the people we see especially in Valletta and tourist areas.

The low cost carriers have indeed changed the face of tourism in Malta. As we look forward to break yet another record, we can even look ahead and plan to get 2 million tourists to Malta as the government says it wants to.

But the government and specifically the Malta Tourism Authority must redouble their vigilance on those operators who offer a shoddy service.

We all know who these shoddy operators are and if we know who they are, the government certainly knows them too.

We all know the complaints written by disgruntled tourists on sites like Trip Advisor and the like where the complaints usually focus on the same few operators. The complaints regarding these same hotels are sadly the same and repeated over and over by different tourists who fall for the cheap rates offered and find dirty rooms, bathrooms that defy description, noisy guests and a surrounding environment that ensures the guests do not get a decent restful night's sleep.

So, the tourists know it, we know it, and surely MTA knows it too. So why does enforcement seem to lack so much? Had there been proper enforcement, these episodes of disgruntled tourists would not keep repeating themselves.

It has been said for years and years that while the upper levels of hotels, the five- and four-star ones, do upgrade and refurbish, the three- and two-star ones are still finding the going difficult. It is difficult to plan ahead let alone to refurbish when the earnings are so meager due to intense competition.

But if the government intends to honour its commitment to turn Malta into a centre of excellence, it must find a way to help this segment of our tourism upgrade and improve. Otherwise, we will still get those complaints and what can enforcement do when the operator lack the necessary means to upgrade?

Whatever the operators might think, bringing the low cost carriers in has created a knock-on wave of impacts - primarily it has enabled the hotel operators to break out of the stranglehold that the tour operators exercised over them. It has opened up the potential of web bookings where no tour operator can exercise downward pressures on the prices charged. But that in turn depends on there being as few negative comments on Trip Advisor as possible. Internet bookings also provide cash at the booking stage rather than after the tourists have left, as tour operators tend to do.

Other hotel operators in Malta, the majority one would say, have taken to the Internet and benefited from it. Their bookings are up and occupancy rose spectacularly. So why not these few operators? Why do they allow negative comments to be written and shared across the world instead of replying and trying to correct the bad impression?

But the major task is that facing the government and MTA: the time for turning a blind eye to what goes on is now over. The government is called upon to launch a campaign to clean up Malta's tourism offering.