MALTA: No Tourist Spillover To Malta After Tunisia Attack

38 tourists were killed when an armed gunman attacked a tourist resort in Sousse

Despite closure of hotels in Tunisia local operators not expecting surge in tourist arrivals.

A recent terror attack on a Tunisian beach resort does not appear to have significantly boosted tourist arrivals to Malta.

“We might have gained a trickle of tourists who would have otherwise visited Tunisia, perhaps 5,000 people,” tourism entrepreneur and Nationalist MP Robert Arrigo told MaltaToday. “It’s a boost, but pittance when one considers that around 180,000 tourists arrive in Malta every July. We’re certainly not experiencing a tourism rush that outsiders might have imagined.”

Tunisia’s tourism industry has suffered a massive blow since a gunman killed 38 tourists at a resort on 26 June, an attack that ISIS has claimed responsibility for.

Tunisia is expected to lose some 2 million tourist nights over the next year, as European governments warned last week that the North African country is no longer a safe destination.

23 hotels have already shuttered since the attack, and the Tunisian Hotel Federation has claimed that practically no European tourists remain in the country.

Yet, despite sharing a Mediterranean climate with Tunisia, Malta does not seem to have benefitted from a tourism spillover effect. A Malta International Airport spokesperson confirmed that no flights have been added to their schedule since 26 June. While passenger arrivals have increased, they have been on the rise for the past few years, rendering it impossible for the airport to isolate the impact of the Tunisia effect.

Similarly, an Air Malta spokesperson said that they have continued to receive flight bookings normally and have not experienced any effects following the Tunisia attack.

“We continue to monitor the situation and will react accordingly should the need arises,” he said.

Arrigo, managing director of Robert Arrigo & Sons, explained that Malta and Tunisia don’t share the same tourist clientele.

“Most tourist who visit Tunisia are after a cheap Mediterranean holiday,” he said. “A two-week stay at a four-star Tunisian beach resort costs around €400, around the same price as an Air Malta flight to London. Therefore, tourists searching for an alternative holiday to Tunisia would probably first look at Greece, then Spain, then Turkey, and then Malta.”

Malta Hotels Association President Tony Zahra also said that the Tunisia spillover only had a “marginal” impact on Maltese tourism, if that.

“Malta’s hotel bookings were already very high before the attacks, and we didn’t conduct an empirical study to ascertain whether they rose by some 1% or 2% after the attack. Either way, any spillover wasn’t significant.”