Look Back In Anger: Pedro Iriondo

The Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourism Board, is not a public, governmental agency. It is a private organisation. Its “junta”, its own board, comprises directors of Grupotel, MAC, Sol Melia and Iberostar hotels as well as representatives of a bank (Banca March), business associations and others. The Fomento is proud of its “independence”; it is one of its values, along with, inter alia, “altruism and plurality”. These words, respectively, mean concern for the welfare of others and a system of society which respects and includes minorities. They are fine, noble words. But they are just words.

The president of the Fomento, Pedro Iriondo, has been having some words of his own. They are extraordinary. They may be an expression of the independence that the Fomento holds so dear, but they do not accord with its other values. His attack on low-cost airlines, on the passengers they bring and on workers in hotels is anything but altruistic or pluralistic. It is small-minded and borders on the xenophobic. It is insular. No man is an island, and that includes Sr. Iriondo. No island is any longer an island in a global environment, and that includes Mallorca. Try telling Sr. Iriondo this.

At a forum organised by the university’s school of tourism, Sr. Iriondo launched into both RyanAir and easyJet, accusing them of not bringing “quality” tourists. He lambasted the airlines’ passengers, the British, who stay in unregulated apartments and in villas that they rent from other Britons. He attacked waiters and other workers who are not from Mallorca and who therefore cannot know Mallorca and cannot adequately “sell” Mallorca because they don’t have a feeling for the island.

He went on to criticise the lack of business tourists from Britain, those who might attend conferences (an area of hoped-for development in Mallorca), because they don’t want to fly with the low-cost airlines. He laid into the internet and into an image of Playa de Palma that is one of card-tricksters, Romanians, prostitutes and “masseurs”.

If the Fomento were a public body, Sr. Iriondo would be sacked. As the head of a private body which features hotel groups for whom, one might presume, foreign waiters work, quite what other members of the junta make of his remarks, who can tell. Independence and an independent voice are fine, but not when they fly around in all directions, attacking anyone and anything in sight. EasyJet and RyanAir may attract all manner of criticisms, but they are also big business when it comes to Mallorca. One feels pretty confident in saying that Sr. Iriondo’s predecessor, the director-general in Spain and Portugal of Air Berlin, Alvaro Middelmann, would never have uttered the same words.

When Sr. Iriondo rose to the presidency of the Fomento, he looked back at a time in Mallorca when everything was rosy, there were parties on the beach and everyone was happy. During his contribution to the forum, he looked back again, to his time when he started in tourism and when all waiters and other workers were Mallorcan and bought into an “I love tourists” philosophy. By looking back, not once, but twice, he has condemned himself. He is of the past.

He has looked back with a current-day anger to a time when everyone may allegedly have been happy, but they were also poorly paid (still are, many of them), lived under a dictatorship, were pretty much told what to do and what to think and did not have the greater opportunities that they now enjoy. Sr. Iriondo will know, but hasn’t said this, that the tourists who came to Mallorca did so partly because the island was dirt cheap. His insistence on referring to “quality” tourists, and he is not alone in this, can be interpreted as a shocking insult.

Those not afforded the quality status are branded with something else. Yet, he ignores the fact that Mallorca was largely built on an economy-class tourism. Its tourism history is one of the mass, and the mass does not always come with huge wads of cash. It has always been the case. It was in the 1970s and remains so. The difference, back then, was that not having huge wads of cash didn’t matter; indeed there weren’t always huge wads, among the British, because of foreign-exchange restrictions.

Had Sr. Iriondo moderated his language, had he been less inclined to reminisce, then his words might have been treated with greater sympathy. You can just about understand what he was driving at, if you were being kind, but instead an impression has been given that is no better than one of the bar bigot for whom altruism and plurality are alien concepts.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Personal Service – Tourism, information and banks

Our friend Pedro Iriondo, the head of the Mallorca tourist board (Fomento del Turismo) and a chap who looks variously like Nixon (the film version) or “Knuckles” Norman, an East End associate of the Krays, is back in the press pages singing a familiar song. In an interview with “The Diario”, he says basically the same as he has said elsewhere, including snatches in “The Bulletin”. While lengthy enough, the interview really doesn’t add to the sum of our existing knowledge. What is slightly new is that he has a chance to speak about the effects of corruption at the tourism ministry. It doesn’t give a very good image to tour operators – I think we could have guessed that, and indeed I have said this very thing – but it also has meant that money intended for tourism promotion (in short enough supply) has of course been allegedly filtered off in different directions. The only other thing, amidst the normal stuff about all-inclusives (bad but what can you do), seasonality (there has been lots of promotion – but how effective?) and what the coming season holds (hard to say), that was new – to me at any rate – was the idea that images of people wearing masks in Playa de Palma last summer was somehow a set up by other tourist destinations. This was all to do with swine flu, and Iriondo reckons that this, and the mask-wearing, had a negative impact on tourism numbers, more so than ETA and its bombs. Apart from stupid sensationalism by the German paper “Bild”, I don’t know that it did. As for suggesting that perhaps the Turks and Croats and Bulgarians had ganged together to get some bad publicity, well this does seem somewhat far-fetched.

Back in Bulletin-land, I am somewhat baffled by the paper’s email what’s on thing. Its website gives a daily running total of the numbers who have sent in their email address together with dates of when they plan to visit Mallorca, and for which they then get an email giving them a list of things that are going on. The daily total announcement, all a tad self-congratulatory one can’t help feeling, is a bit like the Blue Peter Christmas appeal. “We’ve now raised 296 Fairy Liquid bottles that will be turned into a Jeep to help the starving of (add as applicable).” The reason for bafflement is why they’re doing it. Seems like work for someone, when putting the information onto the website would, one might have thought, be less hassle and might also have the benefit of generating additional site traffic. There again, maybe this is all part of a more personal touch that the internet has dispensed with. Like banks. Touching on the news about the Halifax branch in Puerto Pollensa closing, what it, and indeed other Mallorcan banks, have going for them is that the customer isn’t simply left to the de-personalised cyberworld of internet banking as the means of communication. Personal contact. With the bank manager. How very quaint. However, I do wonder if there isn’t a drawback with this. Is the relationship with the bank manager or with the bank? When the manager leaves, might the customer also leave if there is a strong recommendation for another bank, or rather another manager? In fact this isn’t a “might”, it’s a yes. I’ve done it myself.

Still, at least a relationship with a bank can endure for some years. Unlike that between tour operators and Mallorcan tourism ministers. Unless the former intend to get themselves banged up in the next cell.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Happiness – Mallorca tourism promotion

How to win tourists and influence people. Smiling, happy people having fun. It starts at the top of the tourism trade and filters down, reminiscent of days when there was so much more of a personal touch, barbecues on beaches and even the local Guardia coming along and joining in. So recalls … . So recalls someone who needs to win tourists and influence people. Smiling, happy person. There, on the front page of yesterday’s “Bulletin”. A sullen Frank Langella as Nixon? No, this is the head of the Mallorca tourist board. Smiling, happy person, winning tourists and influencing people. Why oh why use a photo of someone who looks so terminally hacked off?

Pedro Iriondo, president of the Balearics travel agents association and founder of the agency Viajes Kontiki in 1974, became head of the tourism board at the end of last year. He has been a member of the board’s ruling committee for several years and had been its vice-president since 2005. Here he was, granting an interview, which unfortunately says little that we don’t already know: why don’t the shops open in Palma on a Sunday; the competition that is Turkey and Egypt; the reliance upon tourism in Mallorca; the need to exploit golf and other niches, such as nautical tourism; and the need to work closely with tour operators. I’m sure that Sr. Iriondo has some fine ideas, but the interview was thoroughly depressing; a re-hash of what we know to be the case and a distinct sense of the impotent. Take all-inclusives. He doesn’t approve, but accepts that there has been a market change. What we already know, and what we already know cannot be put back into the bottle. What we already know, that it is the tour operators who hold the whip-hand.

Iriondo has taken over from Alvaro Middelmann as president of what is known as the Fomento del Turismo. While referred to as the Mallorca Tourist Board, it is a private, non-governmental body. The promotion of Mallorca and the Balearics, via the government, is handled by the tourism institute IBATUR. The board is thus, as it says on its website, “a forum where everyone in tourism on the island can come and debate important issues, policies and decide on a future tourism strategy”. It continues by referring to the need for “forward thinking, consensual solutions for our future”, and by “our” one takes this to mean the island’s whole tourism industry. The Fomento can lay claim to being the oldest tourist board in Europe. It is, therefore, a body of some not inconsiderable significance and influence. But in its, if you like, mission statement, one comes back to an issue regarding who or which bodies actually drive “future tourism strategy”. Is it the government or the private sector? And if it is the latter, then which parts of it?

At the conclusion of the interview, Iriondo says that “we’ve go to sort out our prices, provide better quality and revive the personal touch”. Fine. But where does the impulse come from to do so and how can these things be done? In the interview, he refers to the fact that it is difficult to provide good product at low cost, unlike some competitor countries, to the fact that the personal touch has been lost because of the expansion in size of hotels, and to the know-how of Mallorca’s hotel groups – several of which can be credited with having high quality, yet which are also, through the export of know-how and their own international ambitions, contributing to the development of competitor destinations. Take a look, for instance, at the Iberostar site and its five-star Bellis complex in Turkey. But to come back to where that impulse might come from, it is worth taking account of the composition of the tourism board’s ruling body – three major hotel chains as well as the association of hotel chains, the associations for yacht clubs, golf courses and restaurants, a bank, a car-hire firm … one could go on. If that lot can’t sort something out, then who can.

Mallorca, and the Balearics, have experienced difficult times in the past, and the Fomento has acted in the past to revive the island’s tourism at times of recession. So it has something of a track record, but Sr. Iriondo believes that the current recession is “different” to previous ones, impacting hard on employment and the tourism industry as a whole and highlighting the economic reliance on tourism. He sees the need for more and more promotion, yet the promotional budget – the government’s – has been reduced.

It all, I’m afraid, does add to that rather depressing image. Forward thinking, consensual strategies. Indeed. But rather than an appraisal of what we know, it might be nice to learn what we don’t – those strategies in other words, and who exactly is going to implement them.

“The Bulletin” also reported on the launch of ABC Menorca (Association of British Companies Menorca). This really does look like something potentially quite impressive and of significance, certainly given the array of organisations and individuals who were present at the launch. Despite the scepticism referred to the other day, this body does seem, within terms of its British-market remit, to have broad support from other business groups and indeed at governmental level. It is a very different beast to the association that sprang out of Calvia at the end of 2008. But it has one important similarity, in that it is evidence of people taking an interest, becoming involved and looking to do their best for businesses. It should be applauded, and if it crosses into Mallorca, then it could also prove to be a force for good.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.