Much has been said about Malta's tourism sector in the past years, particularly as it has recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic.  The sector bounced back from the pandemic by not just hitting its pre-pandemic numbers, but by exceeding them.

In 2025, for the first time on record, over four million tourists visited the Maltese islands.  This is a number equivalent to around eight times the country's population, and it is also a number which has brought both good and bad to the country.

The good is obvious: more numbers equals more economic activity, equals more wealth for the country that can then be re-invested elsewhere. The bad is, however, becoming increasingly obvious as well: crowds, particularly in peak months, dominate the country, hotel developments have an impact on urban streetscapes and communities, and residents in hotspot localities are finding themselves in a storm of noise and disruption.

The government has for the past months emphasised on the need to re-align Malta's tourism industry so that it attracts quality over quantity.  There are perhaps two ways to measure this: the average length of stay for a quality tourist tends to be longer, and their average spend is always higher.

A study by the Malta Chamber of Commerce, Enterprise and Industry shows that rather than Malta improving in these metrics, the country has regressed.

The Chamber's report - Rediscover to Align - which was published in recent weeks found that the average length of stay for inbound tourists has decreased by 20% over the last decade, from 7.9 nights in 2015 to 6.3 nights in 2025.

The report also shows that the average spending per tourist in real terms was €919.09 in 2015 and €771.01 in 2025 - this marks a 16% decrease over the last decade. Overall, total tourist expenditure last year amounted to €3.9 billion.

The strategy document features 115 proposals on how to ameliorate the Maltese tourism sector, and Malta Chamber Board of Management and Council member Alan Arrigo told The Malta Independent on Sunday in an interview that the Chamber hopes that the government will adopt most if not all measures so to "extract the higher spending tourist to come to Malta."

One of the main proposals within the Rediscover to Align document is to safeguard streetscapes and landscapes via a national aesthetic and landscape policy, with Arrigo adding that "we can only better tourism if we personalise and use our distinctiveness to offer that better value, because no-one in the world is Maltese except Malta."

Arrigo said that, in the chamber's view, the biggest threat to Malta's tourism product is if the government continues to look at tourism in silos. He said that if this persists, "we will have worse results, quality wise."

"We cannot consider tourism as a silo. Planning, heritage, education, transport, the environment, cleanliness all have a big bearing on tourism, even though they aren't [under the Tourism Ministry's cap]. Unfortunately, in this country, we have a lot of silos from the private and public sector," Arrigo said.

Malta's view of tourism must change.  The country cannot keep going down the road of purely attracting more and more numbers, without giving any attention to quality.  The data shows that efforts to reverse this have, thus far, proven to be futile.

Holistic studies like that carried out by the Chamber are what the country needs to start looking at in order to improve the situation and in order for Malta not to go the way of other cities around Europe which have been almost run over by tourism.