visitmalta.com – April facts and figures

Since last month's update, the visitmalta.com portal has continued to be enhanced in order to attract an ever-increasing number of visitors.

The volume of traffic achieved by the portal since its launch in mid-January has now exceeded 1.2 million visitors, with an average of more than 13, 000 visitors daily. The United States, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom continued to top the list of countries from where most of the portal visitors originate. Other countries in the top twenty list include most of Malta’s primary and secondary European markets such as Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden and Finland, as well as long haul destinations such as Australia, China, Japan and South Africa. Visitors from Malta account for less than 2.5% of total visitors to the portal.

One of the most significant enhancements carried out over the past weeks consisted in the development of the Car Hire module. This module is located within the ‘Plan & Book a Visit’ section of the portal, which lies at the heart of the redesigned version of the MTA website. The module includes a directory of Car Hire companies, searchable by location or by means of keywords. It also features a booking facility whereby portal users have the option of looking for availability of car hire services by entering a number of parameters in a search form. The search parameters that can be specified include the date and time for pick-up and return of the vehicle, the category of car that is required, the number of passengers, and the location from where the car will be picked up.

Judging by the initial take-up from the industry and the first indications from the user community, it is clear that this functionality will prove to be a useful and popular component of the site. In fact, more than twenty car hire companies already submitted their details and are listed in the directory. Several of them also started the process of joining the booking portal which will enable them to start accepting reservations directly via the visitmalta.com booking engine. In the meantime, those listed in the Directory are already receiving requests and bookings via email.

It is worth mentioning that the development of this module was carried out in close collaboration with the Rent-A-Car-Association, which was consulted throughout the planning and implementation stage.

Meanwhile, MTA recently signed an agreement with the developers of www.supercities.eu for the provision of videos of hotels, tourism service providers, locations and events on the visitmalta.com portal. Supercities.eu is a new website which targets the millions of potential European holidaymakers who use the internet to look for a European destination to holiday in. The special characteristic of the site is that it will consist primarily of videos, which will focus not just on the charm and beauty of Malta but also the individual services that Malta has to offer them including Hotels, Restaurants, Shopping, Entertainment and Nightlife, and many more. Supercities will be able to show, specifically on video, each one of the tourism-oriented businesses and products that visitors can utilise when they are on holiday in Malta. By means of the sponsorship agreement between MTA and Supercities, all the videos produced for the latter site will also appear on the visitmalta.com portal.

In the coming weeks, visitmalta.com will also benefit from another partnership, this time relating to events. In fact, the newly launched Events handbook, published by RMF and sponsored by MTA, will become available for viewing, downloading and printing directly from the portal. Moreover, the events information listed on the monthly publication will also be included on the visitmalta.com events calendar for easy reference by the portal’s users.

This issue is available at: 0705.