Support to Malta’s tourism ecosystem: towards a more sustainable, resilient and digital tourism

The European Commission supported this flagship technical support project targeted at EU Member States wishing to build a more sustainable, resilient and digital tourism ecosystem. The flagship seeks to promote the digital and green transitions, strengthen regional cohesion and support the post COVID-19 recovery of tourism in Europe to make it fit for the future challenges in the global market. The flagship offers activity packages to enable Member States to engage in effective reforms in the area of the tourism ecosystem.

Context 

Malta needs a stronger evidence base for tourism to support reforms and enhance the sustainability and resilience of tourism. Previous tourism strategies in Malta have encouraged sustainability but have not set clear strategic goals and timeframes for the sustainable development of the tourism sector. The lack of tools or indicator systems to assess the sustainability of tourism also means decision-making processes and tourism planning is not sufficiently grounded in evidence to guide the incorporation of sustainability and resilience. Inadequate availability and use of statistics and evidence to understand tourism developments, impact and economic contribution is currently a significant limiting factor to the development of evidence-based policy. Despite the substantial growth of the tourism sector, no updates to the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) have been conducted since. In addition, Malta has a number of data gaps that need to be addressed to produce reliable results.

Support delivered

• Analysing the current situation for the implementation of the TSA; 
• Presenting a guidance note on how to compile selected tables of the TSA; 
• Organising capacity building and technical workshops to support the pilot implementation of selected TSA tables and evaluating the pilot implementation; 
• Developing a proposal for a draft action plan to strengthen tourism statistics and support the implementation of the TSA; 
• Analysing the current situation and priorities for developing a system of indicators to measure and monitor sustainability of tourism in Malta; 
• Developing a set of the indicators and preparing a toolkit to operationalise it; 
• Supporting a multi-country workshop on data sharing and integration; 
• Supporting learning from relevant experiences in another country with reference to Tourism Hubs.

Results achieved  

The main results of this support project will be: 

• narrowed implementation gap of the TSA statistical framework;
• upgraded tourism statistics to include sustainability and put in place effective sustainable tourism management and monitoring tools at destination level.