A Maltese former Prime Minister has questioned the intelligence of businesspeople on the island amidst a worrying forecast for the tourism industry.

“Have Maltese businesspeople become dumb, schizophrenic or do they see something which nobody else is seeing?” Alfred Sant, currently an MEP, asked on his social media.

Sant’s question comes shortly after a study by the Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association flagged a serious oversupply of hotel beds on the island.

Subsequently, business lobbyist Philip Fenech warned that some Maltese tourism businesses will inevitably collapse after a pre-pandemic investment frenzy led to oversupply on the market,

“The problem which came out clearly in the MHRA’s recent carrying capacity exercise is that we have a lot of excess capacity,” Fenech said. “We all know what happened. When we were hitting record tourism numbers in 2017, 2018, and 2019, we became cash-rich and everyone went on their own trip.”

“Some wanted to make their own Manhattan in Malta and everyone started investing without anyone looking at the bigger picture.”

Sant echoed these thoughts, questioning investors’ logic when looking to build new hotels.

“The MHRA publishes a study which claims that given the current available hotel stock in Malta, we would need an increase of some 60% on current tourism arrivals for such hotels to make a decent profit,” Sant said.

“Both the association and the government seem to be saying that such an increase would lead to a huge and unacceptable deterioration of the Maltese tourism product,” he continued.

“Yet week in, week out, we learn about new projects to build new hotels in Malta and Gozo.”