Google Has Listed Malta Under An Insultingly Incorrect Name
Back in 2011, tech giants Google launched Google Flights, an online flight booking search service. And while in Malta thousands of people still use Air Malta or Ryanair’s websites to book their flights, Google Flights’s ability to compare and calculate each and every single price for any flight going out each day of a whole year has definitely helped to its large amount of users. If you’re looking to book a flight to the Maltese Islands, however, you’ll be surprised to find us listed under a weirdly different name.
While Malta does show up in the search results, another country also oddly appears right under that… The Crown Colony of Malta, Malta.
In case you’ve never heard of that name, that’s quite okay. The last time Malta held that name was 53 years ago.
The Crown Colony of the Island of Malta and its Dependencies (the actual full name which definitely rolls off the tongue), was the official name of Malta when it was part of the British Empire. The islands got the name when the Malta Protectorate was transformed into a British Crown Colony in 1813, and the whole thing was made official one year later by the Treaty of Paris.
We also had two different flags back then, an official and an unofficial one. Both of them look quite strange in retrospect, and you guessed it; both of them have been defunct for over half a century.
There’s currently one flight listed with ‘Crown Colony of Malta’ as the destination; a non-stop flight from San Franciso which costs over $2,500.
So yeah, if you’re looking into booking a flight to Malta with Google Flights, be careful; you might incur extra charges because they’d also be including fees for using the onboard time machine.
Tag a friend who’s stuck in the past.
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