St Paul's Bay is Malta's family and value heartland — a broad sweep of the north-east coast that gathers the neighbouring seaside towns of Buġibba, Qawra and Xemxija, and holds the biggest concentration of large all-inclusive hotels on the island. This is where a Malta package holiday most often means what British families expect it to mean: a big resort with pools and kids' clubs, a lively seafront promenade of restaurants and gelaterias, plenty to do for children, and prices that stretch further than they do in St Julian's. The swimming here is mostly off rock lidos and a couple of small beaches rather than long sand, but the position is superb — you're a short hop from Malta's best beaches in the north and the boats to Comino's Blue Lagoon.
Every St Paul's Bay package we sell carries full ATOL financial protection under licence #11211, and your ATOL Certificate lands the moment you book — you can read exactly how your ATOL financial protection works before you part with a penny. Every hotel on this page has been hand-picked and inspected in person against our 22-point criteria, which matters most in a value resort: the difference between a well-run all-inclusive and a tired one doesn't show in the photos, only in the walking.
"St Paul's Bay is the base I most often recommend to families watching the budget, and I'm careful about how I inspect it," says Thomas Kaplan, our Product Manager and Mediterranean specialist, whose twenty-eight years across TUI, Thomas Cook, Neckermann and Vrijuit have taught him where value resorts cut corners. "In a big all-inclusive I don't judge it from the lobby or the show suite — I ask for a standard family room, I eat in the main buffet on an ordinary night, not a gala one, and I look at whether the pool-to-guest ratio actually works in August. That's the honest test of an all-inclusive, and it's the one I apply to every hotel on this page. My question is always the same: would I send my own family here, at this price, for this week?" You can read more about Thomas and how he audits the hotels we sell.
