Malta Has Way Too Many Restaurants And It’s Become A Race To The Bottom, Industry Leader Warns
Malta has way too many restaurants and this over-saturation is causing a race to the bottom, vice president of the Association of Catering Establishments Matthew Pace warned.
Pace didn’t mince his words during a debate about the cost of living on TVM’s Popolin last night.
“For some reason or other, no one seems to notice that Malta is over-saturated in everything,” he said.
“Malta has over 3,500 licensed restaurants and, according to recent NSO figures, a population of around 526,000,” he added, calculating that this would average a restaurant per 150 residents.
Besides severe staff shortages across the industry that are forcing several restaurants to limit their opening hours and increase their prices further, he said the heavy competition is causing a race to the bottom.
“It’s so saturated that the product is becoming inferior.. it is impacting the market,” he warned.
Pace’s warning comes shortly after a study by the Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association flagged a serious oversupply of hotel beds.
The study found that if all proposed hospitality projects are implemented within the next five years, Malta will need to attract 4.7 million tourists a year staying an average of just under seven nights each to maintain the same bed occupancy rate as it did in 2019, the last year before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Finance Minister Clyde Caruana said yesterday that Malta must change its economic model, signalling a shift in policy from ‘Muscatonomics’, the economic model promoted by former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat which prioritised rapid economic growth at the cost of overdevelopment, overpopulation and related social problems.
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