Has overtourism reached the Maltese Islands?

Abstract

Tourism is often considered as a desirable activity for the visitors, in terms of recreation, adventure, cultural enhancement and other benefits of travel, and for the host community mostly in terms of the income and employment it generates. With improvements in income and decreases in the cost of travelling, tourism has increased rapidly over the past decades, and in many destinations, the host communities have started to experience the negative side of high rates of tourist inflows, mostly arising from overcrowding, traffic congestion, misbehaviour by visitors and damage to the physical environment. In 2017 and 2018 there were several reports in the media and papers in many academic journals describing the exasperation of the local residents with what became known as ‘overtourism’ – signifying that there are too many visitors to a particular destination at the same time. The objectives of this paper are two-fold, namely (a) to present a literature review on the upsides and downsides of tourism and (b) to assess, by means of a survey, the attitudes towards tourism in Malta, so as to consider whether Malta has reached the stage of ‘overtourism’. The main conclusion of the paper is that overtourism can lead to various social and environmental pitfalls which could outweigh the economic benefits of tourism for the host community. The responses to this survey indicate that this is the situation in Malta at present.