Online Controversy As Foreigners Charged More Than Locals On Maltese Beaches
Photo: Federico Fioretti
Now that summer has kicked off (all thanks to the spell of gorgeous weather we’re enjoying in Malta lately), tens of thousands of people have already started descending onto beaches all over the islands to make the most of their weekends. As a post on The Salott highlighted, however, not everyone seems to be met with the same prices when it comes to renting out sunbeds and umbrellas.
A woman who is not Maltese but has been living here for years posted about her experience at Għadira Beach last weekend, where she was charged €8 for a sunbed. Perfectly reasonable, if a little steep. But she then went on to explain that “three Maltese guys come along 20 minutes later and pay €5 per sunbed.” To top it all off, she spoke to another person who said she was charged €7.
What’s even more worrying is that, following the original post, many more users reported similar cases happening both in Għadira and elsewhere around Malta.
“People do the same thing in many different places to my partner, who’s not Maltese,” commented one person. “We were told different prices in a span of two minutes!”
“I’m Italian and my wife is Maltese,” one man said. “Once I paid €3 for a Red Bull and she was charged €1.80 for the same shop a couple of minutes later.”
While the online debate quickly veered into other issues like whether or not it’s actually understandable to charge foreigners more because it happens all over the world, most of the people agreed that this is quite unfair and should be stopped ASAP.
And as some users commented, this phenomenon seemed to have spread to far more than just our beaches.
If you’ve tried talking, and posting and all else has failed, you could just follow this user’s perfect piece of advice… for everything in life, really.