Tourism into the Maltese islands improved by 19.5% between 2023 and 2024, the CEO of the Malta Tourism Authority (MTA) announced on Wednesday morning.

MTA CEO Carlo Micallef shared that over 3.56 million people visited Malta in 2024 – an improvement of over 500,000 people to the total recorded in 2023.

These numbers translated to 22.9 million nights spent in the Maltese islands by tourists and a total spend of €3.3 billion by them during their stays. Tourist expenditure increased by 23.1% over last year and by 48.2% since 2019.

Throughout 2024, Malta attracted a total of 3,593,788 visitors. In 2023, Malta welcomed a record number of 3,008,629 inbound tourists – a record which has now been broken.

Since 2019, these tourism rates indicate a 29% increase, up from 2.75 million visitors before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.

While sharing these “great results,” MTA CEO Carlo Micallef stated that during this period, Malta well outperformed the European continent and the rest of the Southern Mediterranean European region when analysing tourism growth since 2023 and since pre-pandemic times.

Micallef observed that between 2023 and 2024, tourism grew by 5% across Europe and by 6% across the Southern Mediterranean sections of Europe, while Malta’s growth was just shy of 20%.

When comparing to 2019, this contrast was even starker. In the past five years, Malta’s tourism rates have increased by 29% from 2.75 million inbound visitors to experiencing around 800,000 more. Meanwhile, Southern Europe observed increases of 8% (from 304 million to 328 million visitors), and the European continent has since recorded an increase of just 1% (from 742 million to 747 million people).

“These are great results for the tourism industry and for Malta’s economy,” Micallef said.

The most popular age group of tourists were adults between 25-44 years old (36.6%), followed by the 45-64 year olds (29.5%), under 25s (24.2%), and 65+ year olds (9.7%). During his presentation, Micallef stated that senior citizens were the age group worst affected by rising inflation worldwide, and that this resulted in the age group decreasing in travelling overall.

The majority of tourists majorly hailed from the United Kingdom (19.8%) and Italy (17.3%). The next top markets came from France (8.3%), Poland (7.4%), and Germany (7.0%). These five markets account for 59.8% of all tourists throughout 2024. Poland was the largest growing market since 2023, increasing in popularity by a whopping 58.3%; the next greatest increase came from Hungary (35.6%).

Nearly all (3.29 million or 92%) tourists came to Malta for a holiday, approximately 172,000 people (5%) came for business reasons, and the remaining 100,000 persons (3%) visited for other reasons.

Around four out of every five tourists (79% or 2.82 million) last year visited the Maltese islands for their first time; the remaining 21% – amounting to 746,000 people were repeat visitors.

The average length of stay for tourists in Malta was 6.4 nights.

Micallef factored these results to the country’s marketing approach to promote itself abroad. This includes online campaigns, utilising social media to maximize exposure of the country and activities taking place, placing VisitMalta advertisements in prominent locations within major European capitals, and working closely with online travel agencies (OTAs).

For the upcoming year, additional growth is expected. Micallef said that the MTA is forecasting 9.25 million return passengers during 2025, approximately 20% of which will be Maltese; he then explained that the expected number of inbound tourists this year should stand at around 3.7 million.

OTAs are predicting for inbound tourists to come to Malta for more experiential travel, to experience some luxury dining, and for set-jetting (seeing where movies and series were filmed).

The MTA CEO concluded that over the coming months, Malta’s focus areas shall be to target “high-value demographics,” to expand upon long-haul marketing efforts and boost traffic in North America, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific regions, to further promote winter tourism (which grew by over 23% in the past year alone), to continue existing collaboration programmes, and to invest in artificial intelligence and “big data” to better predict future trends and analyse tourism patterns.

The new chairman of the Malta Tourism Authority Charles Mangion, gave his first speech in his role after only being appointed as the new MTA chairperson the previous evening.

Mangion said he is “honoured” to be given the trust to work in this role, showed satisfaction with 2024’s “excellent results,” and addressed some challenges that await the local tourism industry.

Mangion told present stakeholders that under his tenure, the MTA’s principal target shall be to achieve balance in its various interests while upholding “quality tourism aspirations.” Amongst these challenges were to continue promoting sustainability – not just through the environmental aspect, he described, but also for it to extend to social and economic realms.