Sick And Tired

They’re gone. The scratch-cardists. The office in Puerto Alcúdia has closed. No-one will be lamenting the loss. All that remains for the moment is the sign – To Holiday and Real Liberty, sometimes known as right liberty. 

 

There has been a fair old turnover of the street sellers this season. More seem to have been taken on in an attempt to generate ever more business. Maybe it hasn’t worked. Maybe tourists are more resistant. Maybe those taken on did not like what they were doing. Maybe there were too many and they were not making their commissions. If there is any sympathy, it is for those who took up this employment in the hope of making some summer dosh. They may have antagonised a lot of people, but they were only the frontline operators for the backroom selling. I am told that there has been a fair amount of dashing around by people looking for transfers and flights out.

 

It was quite an impressive set-up. The offices were large. A kiddies area, the sales area, the separate offices, the plaques displaying some major names, such as hotel chains, the staff with ties. One looked familiar. There is a youtube knocking around of an exposé by the BBC in the Canaries. The salesman shown by the hidden camera looked similar to one from the Alcúdia office.

 

The website, for those who succumb to the sales pitch, is still up. It says that To Holiday is operated by Elite Holidays Royal Travel in the Canaries. The site is visually the same to that of Travelsafe, a company that the forums have been less than complimentary about. The revealing thread on the Holiday Watchdog site that has embraced To Holiday also has the names of Real Liberty and Elite in its title; its content also embraces an outfit known as Carpe Diem, which appears to be the company higher up the “organisation” above Elite.

 

The local police have, apparently, been issuing fines. Maybe they – the fines – have mounted up. Maybe business has just dried up. Maybe the pressure had been growing. Whatever. The office is closed. The police, who had grown “sick and tired” of the whole issue (as said to me,) may, from 2010, have more clout if the issue arises again. There is due to be a change in European law to deal with holiday clubs as from next year. Timeshare selling had been outlawed, but the holiday club was not. This appears to be set to change. The problem of the scratch-cardists in Alcúdia may now be over. We’ll see. 

 

 

Town hall troubles

Two town hall things lurking in “The Diario”. Pollensa town hall, which may or may not have yet set its budgets for this year, is one of a group of town hall administrations seeking credit – to the tune of slightly less than one million euros. The deficit that the town hall is running is partially due to an historic shortfall dating back to 2005. According to the head of finance, there is now also an issue in respect of unpaid taxes from bars and restaurants with terraces. And in Sa Pobla, the town hall, which had said that it would be pursuing a strategy of low- or no-cost acts in order to keep its fiesta programme intact, has more or less “exhausted” its budget of just under 350,000 euros, claims the opposition Partido Popular. 

Marching Onward

There was another march on Saturday, another one to do with language. Responding to the pro-Catalan demo of three weeks back and also in the context of the pro-Catalan “Acampallengua” in Sa Pobla, the latest one expressed the desire for people to be able to choose their language, be it Castilian or Catalan. Bit by bit, demo by demo, the whole language debate is being elevated into public consciousness to a degree that begins to suggest more serious divisions in local society. While Saturday’s march was said to be non-partisan, the presence of the Partido Popular gave it a political dimension, while a group of youths shouting “no to fascism and yes to Catalan” said something for how the language debate is still linked to old wounds. Separately, in an interview in yesterday’s “Bulletin”, the PP’s Rosa Estaras stated that the “local government (i.e. the Balearic one) has gone over the top on this issue”. That the two languages enjoy joint official status in the Balearics has not prevented Catalan from becoming THE language for many working in the public sector and official documentation from some town halls being issued in Catalan only.

A curiosity of this march was the fact that, though the organisers claimed that there were between 20 and 30,000 people, the police, the national and the local forces in Palma, did not issue numbers. Government sources said that the priority was security not counting people, which all seems a little odd when one considers that the police did issue figures for the pro-Catalan march (and their figures were just a bit more than a quarter of those claimed by the marchers).

To Holiday
There was an advert in “The Bulletin” over the weekend. It was for “British sales representatives”. The name of the company was To Holiday. And To Holiday is? The holiday club scratch card mob. In “The Bulletin” last June was a letter from a veteran holidaymaker to Alcúdia complaining bitterly about the abuse he and his wife had been subjected to by scratch card personnel.

Interesting that it says “sales representatives” because when someone local intervened during an exchange between one of the scratch-cardists and a gullible couple, the girl said that she was not selling anything. Maybe not, so maybe the ad is just for those at the office who do the real sale. After all, the ones on the street are only interested in doing so-called market surveys. As if.

Euro elections
The Euro elections are almost upon us. It is at such times, well it is on this occasion, that recipients become “friends” to Sr. Bean. The PSOE has sent its mailshot. In English. How very thoughtful of them. And it actually makes sense for once, as in the English makes sense, even if all the words don’t; if that makes sense. “Dear friend”, it starts, and is bottomed – to use a term that can have other connotations – with “warm regards” and signed by José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and the lead candidate for the socialists, a certain Juan Fernanado López Aguilar. And very happy they look in the photo at the very bottom.

This is all fascinating stuff. That the PSOE has taken the time to do an English version, which the PP has not, does suggest that they are quite keen to curry favour with the Brit voter, or maybe they’re desperate. However, when one gets to the actual text of what the PSOE has to say, there is one thing that stands out and requires a bit of taking to task. Talking about the economic crisis, the letter says: “The crisis was not brought about by workers, entrepreneurs or families. It was caused by the greed and lack of control over financial markets espoused by conservative politicians and policy”. While not wrong, this does rather fail to mention the fact that politicians of a different political hue, i.e. the Spanish socialists, as with New Labour, were quite happy to endorse the policy.

There was another advert, one linked to the Euro elections. It was in “Euro Weekly”. It was on behalf of a party called Alternativa Española. The ad was calling on “Costa Brits” to vote AES. And this party is? A far-right splinter from the PP. On the Tel Aviv University’s antisemitism and racism site, there is a reference to a meeting in 2005, of “right-wing extremist and neo-fascist parties” in Vienna, one of which was AES. It was a meeting organised by the late Jörg Haider’s FPÖ. The British Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan puts his name to the advert. There is some confusion as to whether the British Conservative Party has allied itself with the AES. I sincerely hope not.

Too Much To Ask

“We’re doing a survey. We’d like your views about …” It’s the oldest trick in the book. Stop someone with an apparently innocent request to ask if you might do some seemingly legitimate market research, and use it as a means to something else. It’s a trick that the scratch-cardists are using. They want to know if people are satisfied with things in Puerto Alcúdia. How dare they? Without wishing to sound like “disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”, it is an absolute disgrace – at different levels. It is the thing that the market research industry has fought against for years, and for the scratch-cardists to even vaguely suggest that they might be doing something that is a) market research or b) has Alcúdia’s interests at heart is little short of scandalous. They are not conducting market research and they care not one iota about Alcúdia. If they did, they would not be helping to harm the resort’s reputation.

Can Picafort and its frontline
Can Picafort’s hoteliers had a meeting with tourism minister Nadal the other day. Top of the agenda, as reported by “The Diario”, was the state of the frontline, a project for the improvement of which has been on the cards for five years, but which has yet to come to fruition. This project started to take on greater urgency last year when the German newspaper “Bild” laid into Can Picafort beach, the frontline included, and went so far as to recommend that tourists go to Playa de Muro beach instead. It was exaggerating the state of the frontline and the beach area, but the paper had a point, and some local politicos appeared to take the report’s sentiments to heart. Yet still no plans are concrete – so to speak.

Can Picafort, despite the over-abundance of hotels, is not an unpleasant place. Lacking in character perhaps but appealing in a let’s not pretend this is anything but a holiday resort way. The paseo marítimo (promenade) is one of its main drawbacks. There may be some gripes about parts of Puerto Pollensa’s frontline looking a tad tacky nowadays, but it is a thing of beauty compared with the in-parts ramshackle appearance of Can Picafort’s. One has to admire how Puerto Alcúdia transformed its main prom, in order to appreciate what some TLC can achieve.

The hoteliers were also interested in the minister creating a Nordic walking area. Oh, here we go. Alcúdia’s got one, so we’d better have one as well. That said, Can Picafort is holiday home to a large German contingent and so it may well make sense for there to indeed be a Nordic walking zone. No reason why not. However, this request does once again highlight the degree to which there is a “follow-the-leader” mentality; golf courses being the prime example. It also highlights the apparent lack of some, what one might call, lateral thought in terms of doing something different. In defence of Nordic walking, however, if a special “park” is established, it would in all likelihood reside in a natural environment – forest land, rather as it does in Alcúdia. It would be essentially environmentally neutral and healthy; it would not be something which should raise any great objection. They should do it.

Alcúdia Nordic walking event
And while on Nordic walking, this weekend will see something of a stick-in or pole-in, however you call it, of Nordic walkers in Alcúdia. On Saturday afternoon, a grand trek will start in the old town and then, from 18:00, one to Barcares. On Sunday, there will be a second go, with – from 11:15 – a walk from the old town to Sunwing via the beach. This is all part of the “Alcúdia Living Sport” summer programme of healthy activities.