The Federation of English Language Teaching Organisations in Malta supports the Malta Chamber of Commerce and the Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association's calls to authorities to safeguard Air Malta's current operations to and from Europe and reiterates that any alliance and business developments by Air Malta need to keep the entire perspective of Malta's economic scenario well in focus.

The success of the ELT sector is a bi-product of Air Malta's direct flights to and from some of the major airports across Europe. In fact, the top performing eight markets for Feltom's member schools depend on direct flights to the main markets to the extent that half of the language students that come to Malta to study English, come from Europe. Connectivity to Europe therefore is key to further growth of Malta's English Language Teaching industry.

This is why recently published news reports of potential developments that could lead Air Malta to become a feeder airline in some global hub scenario have become a source of worry for Feltom because such a scenario will lead to a substantial loss of seats on those planes to persons whose final destination will never be Malta. Besides the adverse effect that this move could have on our industry as a whole, will also mean that Feltom will have to abandon any hopes for other potential new connections within Europe.

Feltom stresses that if we are to ensure the competitiveness of Malta's ELT industry, not only does the number of European destinations to which Air Malta operates need to remain the same but efforts have to be made to increase this number. Frequency of flights on the established routes also need to remain the same and ideally, increased. Any negative outcome to the current scenario will reduce the seat capacity we currently enjoy and will adversely affect our industry and tourism as a whole.

Feltom, therefore, hopes that the current European network is retained and that new European connections are created for the benefit of all the tourism industry.