When Leslie Vella joined what's now the Malta Tourism Authority in 1982, his business card had a Telex address and a Telegram address on it. Faxes were still science fiction. Malta had half a million tourists a year, 80% of them British, almost all of them arriving in summer.

43 years later, Leslie is Chief Officer of Strategic Development and Deputy CEO of the Malta Tourism Authority, the architect of Malta's national tourism strategy, and the person responsible for the airline conversations that turned a summer-only island into one of the most diversified year-round destinations in the Mediterranean.

In this episode, Ged sits down with Leslie to talk about how Malta actually pulled it off. The conversation moves through the early 1980s collapse that forced Malta to diversify, the siege mentality of being an island nation with no mainland to fall back on, and the practical mechanics of getting airlines to fly year-round rather than seasonal. Leslie also shares his animal analogy for what real seasonal repositioning requires, and explains why Malta now positions itself as an island with a city in summer, and a city on an island in winter.

There's a frank section on the gap between high-yield tourists and quality tourists, with Leslie making the case that they're not the same thing. He talks about the work of the Malta Tourism Observatory, the 37 sustainability indicators it tracks, and how satellite data is being used to measure the impact of climate on tourism, not just the other way round. The conversation closes with a preview of where Malta's 2035 tourism strategy is heading, and what carrying capacity actually looks like in practice when 14,000 people show up at the Blue Lagoon on a single day.

Leslie joins the Rebalancing Demand panel at the Tourism Seasonality Summit in Rimini on 17 May 2026.

Links

Tourism Seasonality Summit

Visit Malta

Malta Tourism Authority

Malta Tourism Observatory

Murmuration

What if the problem with tourism isn't that there are too many tourists, but that almost nobody is measuring capacity properly?

In this episode, Ged is joined by Saverio Bertolucci, an Italian tourism researcher whose work has taken him from the subsea tunnels of the Faroe Islands to a half-empty terminal in North Iceland, and now to Barcelona, where he lives, works, and has been pushing back hard against the city's anti-tourism narrative.

Saverio walks through what went wrong with the Faroese tunnel network — built for the fisheries, priced out of reach for tourists, and avoided even by locals. He explains why a startup airline trying to open up North Iceland collapsed inside a year, and what that says about the fragility of off-peak connectivity. And he introduces the concept at the heart of his upcoming keynote at the Tourism Seasonality Summit in Rimini: extended capacity, a way of thinking about destination planning that goes well beyond visitor numbers and into infrastructure, facilities, knowledge and strategic intent.

The conversation gets sharper when it turns to Barcelona. Saverio defends the city against the over tourism narrative, takes issue with the abolition of more than ten thousand short-term rental licences, and argues that the new rules will hurt the local economy more than they help it. Ged pushes back, and the result is a properly nuanced exchange about who actually benefits when destinations clamp down on visitor accommodation.

Whether you run a DMO, work in aviation, manage a hotel, or just care about where this industry is heading, this is a conversation worth your time.

Links Tourism Seasonality Summit, Low Season Traveller, Saverio Bertolucci on LinkedIn

Tom Jenkins has been CEO of the European Tourism Association (ETOA) for over twenty years. Before that, he was a tour guide. And in 1991, he sat in Venice and tried to tell the industry it had an overcrowding problem coming. He was roundly ignored.

Thirty-five years later, we're finally having the conversation properly.

In this episode we talk about where European tourism genuinely stands right now. The North American boom that has run out of steam, what is happening in Asia, and why the situation in the Gulf is creating headwinds that nobody quite knows how to plan around. Tom doesn't sugar coat it.

We also get into why the demographic shift in long-haul travel, with older, more affluent and more flexible visitors coming from the US, Japan, Korea and China, is quietly creating the conditions for low season travel to grow in a way it hasn't before. And why tour operators are actually better placed to add value when things are quiet than when everywhere is full and selling itself.

Plus: ETOA's shoulder and off-peak marketplace event SHOP 2026, the Tourism Seasonality Summit in Rimini, and Tom's personal off-peak recommendation which, in true form, turns out to be Wales.

Links

ETOA SHOP 2026, London, 12 June 2026: etoa.org

Tourism Seasonality Summit, Rimini, 17 and 18 May 2026: seasonalitysummit.com

Low Season Traveller: lowseasontraveller.com

Balancing Tourism is hosted by Ged Brown, Founder of Low Season Traveller and the Tourism Seasonality Summit.