Tourism: the road to recovery is uphill

All over the world, tourism was one of the first economic sectors to feel the full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic – the control of the spread of the virus obliged authorities to stop all non-essential international flights, with airports across the globe having to close down.

According to The Malta Independent last Thursday, when replying to a question made by a journalist from that paper, the Minister of Finance, Edward Scicluna, gave the earth-shattering ‘news’ that the complete recovery of the tourism industry lies in the demand for its products and services. He also speculated that the industry will take a year or a year and a half to get back on its feet.

Easier said than done, of course. Forget the cruise liner business that will probably never get back to what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Otherwise, Malta’s tourism depends on a functioning airport. Few realise that the birth of Malta’s tourism industry coincided with the time when the jet engine started being utilised for passenger planes. This was, of course, a very happy coincidence. Without air trips becoming shorter in terms of time, going for a holiday in the Mediterranean was not a sensible proposition for Northern Europeans, which – in the case of Malta – meant the British.

In the beginning, the idea of Malta as a sun, sea and sand destination created the problem of seasonality, especially where the labour force was concerned. The impact of tourism on our resources exacerbated to a point where Malta started to experience a shortage of water supply, a problem of sewage disposal in the peak months of summer, and, high dependence on British visitors.

This is all in the past. Over the years, many of these problems have been overcome – but our dependence on flights to and from Malta was to remain a permanent element of our tourism industry. In fact, route connectivity and increase of aircraft movements – and the resulting increase in seat capacity – are major supply-side factors in Malta’s tourism market.

So long as our airport is closed for regular air traffic, the tourism industry is practically dead. It is believed that the pandemic could cost Malta up to €3 billion in tourism revenue and lead to thousands of redundancies.

The rantings of the incensed and impatient Tony Zahra, the MHRA President, about the need to lift the suspension of all passenger flights is understandable, even though his take on this did not coincide with professional medical advice.

The airport will be reopened for commercial flights on 1 July with some 19 countries already planning to share flights with Malta. However, the airport will be running a very limited flight schedule, more so as some of these countries have a travel ban extending beyond that date.

There is therefore no fixed date as yet when previous flights to and from Malta will all be reinstated. Even if that date were known, it does not mean that everything will be suddenly back as normal.

COVID-19 has led to many people changing their lifestyles and habits, and nobody can as yet fathom the changes in appetite for travel and on the type of holidays people prefer.

The future is therefore not so clear. The amount of persons whose job depends on the tourism sector is over 25,000 and the sector represented some 27% of Malta’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), when the wider effects from investment in tourism and its supply chain are taken into account. Tourist expenditure amounts to some €2 billion annually.

In the tourism sector, the road to recovery is uphill with government having to keep on spending money to support it, probably even after the pandemic would have become a historic blip.

Trump going overboard

Two developments reported this week in Washington cast a dark shadow on Donald Trump’s respect for the democratic rights of the US people.

Last Wednesday, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, declared that he does not support using active duty troops to quell the large-scale protests across the United States triggered by the death of George Floyd, and those forces should only be used in a law enforcement role as a last resort, directly contradicting President Donald Trump.

On the same day, Esper’s predecessor, former Defense Secretary James Mattis, launched an extraordinary attack on Trump, calling him “the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try”.

Despite the fact that Mattis had avoided attacking the President in his public remarks since resigning in December 2018 – claiming he owed the Trump administration a “duty of silence” – he broke this self-imposed ban. In his statement Mattis explained the current situation in the US as follows: “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.”

In Washington this week, protestors were confronted with a number of heavily-armed law enforcement officers who shared an unexpected characteristic: neither their affiliation nor their personal identities were discernible – all insignias and name plates were removed.

Writing in The Washington Post, Philip Bump said that on Tuesday that Mother Jones reporter Dan Friedman had encountered these individuals, who gave no more specific identification than that they were associated with the Justice Department.

The former New York City police commissioner William Bratton in a phone interview with The Washington Post put it this way: “The idea that the federal government is putting law enforcement personnel on the line without appropriate designation of agency, name, etc. is a direct contradiction of the oversight that they’ve been providing for many years to local police and demanding in all of their various monitorships and accreditation.’

Such anonymity echoes the way in which enforcers in autocratic regimes, such as that of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, work to avoid accountability.