Will Malta follow Morocco's lead?

Claire Bonello, writing in Malta Today, asks an interesting question.

They cleaned up the Kasbah 12 years ago – why can’t we?

Tourists will head for the kasbah instead of the pjazza if we continue to criticise them, instead of taking up their criticisms. Former environmental heroes too, are losing their way

Before I first visited Morocco some twelve years ago I was swamped with a deluge of warnings from anxious relatives and friends. “They don’t have toilets there, you know”, I was told “…or toilet paper”. “Be careful – it’s very dirty”, and finally, “Never, ever make eye contact with Moroccan shop or market stall owners, they’re horribly insistent and won’t let you go unless you’ve bought out half the shop.”

Their repeated warnings were not quite enough to cloud over the prospects of the romantic Casablanca of Humphrey Bogart and Ingmar Bergman fame (actually Casablanca does not live up to its celluloid reputation) but I did entertain some niggles of doubt about this supposedly loo-less, filthy destination with leech-like vendors. The Morocco-detractors were to be proved wrong. There were normal, European-style toilets in most places. Although I did encounter the dreaded hole-in-the-ground set-up a couple of times, this did not happen more often than in closer, familiar Italy. The place was clean – cleaner than Malta at any rate – there was no junk-food debris or strewn papers littering the street.

And the annoying vendors? They weren’t annoying at all, they simply made their sales pitch, sometimes accompanied by offers of minute glasses of Coca-Cola (not mint tea anymore – even Marrakesh has fallen for the powers of the multinationals) and got on with their job. There was no insistent tugging at sleeves or being detained interminably in some back room stacked with carpets. At no point did they prove to be the souk-limpets they had been described as. I had wondered whether my co-nationals had been as wrong about them as they were about the lack of toilets and the filth. I found out that in this case, their impressions of the Moroccan vendors was not so unfounded after all. There had, in fact, been numerous complaints about tourists being harassed by market stall owners and other shop owners. In some cases, tourists swore that they would never again.

But then, the Moroccan government did something very extraordinary – by Maltese standards at least – it listened to the complaints and acted upon them. It did so in a very sensible manner, introducing special “tourist police” to ensure that visitors were not harassed, pestered, fleeced off or annoyed in any way. They weren’t.
The measure worked because the Moroccan administration of the day was astute enough to realise that the criticism coming its way about the touts was well-founded and not sarcastic griping coming from hard-to-please tourists.

It didn’t get all defensive and adopt that “put up, or shut up attitude” that many of us do whenever visitors have the temerity to criticise the failings of some aspect of the Maltese service industry or infrastructure.

No, the Moroccan government made use of all the free advice coming its way and used it to turn the situation to its advantage. Look at it now. Last year 5.84 million foreign visitors made their way to riyadhs in gorgeous Marrakesh, Fez, Meknes or Rabat and 10 million arrivals are expected to pour into the country over the next four years. And though the lure of swaying palms and exotic food and culture is strong, the rapid response from the Moroccan government to the complaints of tourist harassment, must have had something to do with it.

And if we (for we, read “the Maltese government”) were wise enough to try and pick up something from the experience of other countries, it would be this – that you can have a beautiful country and a fantastic marketing and promotional strategy, but if you’re out to attract tourists, you have to identify and act upon their specific complaints. The ones which they take the trouble and effort to write to the local newspapers after their holiday. We can’t afford to shrug them off as bothersome, pampered pests who should go elsewhere if they don’t like it here.

Tags: Morocco Fes, Maghreb news