Taking The Pi: Mallorca’s capital (18 November)

You really would think there were more important things to worry about, like making sure the bus drivers get paid or having enough spare cash lying around to meet repayments to banks. But no, Palma town hall has found something infinitely more pressing with which to concern itself. It wants the city to be officially called Palma de Mallorca (and, by the way, this would be Mallorca and not Madge-orca).

The town hall says that the name was shortened by the last government which didn’t follow the right procedures in doing so. It also believes that the previous town hall admin should have engaged in a spot of denouncing as a result. It hopes to be able to negotiate and thus avoid taking the whole matter to a tribunal.

The naming of Palma is by no means an isolated case. And it is certainly not unknown for high legal authorities to have to adjudicate. The Balearics Supreme Court, no less, once came down on the side of Porto Cristo as opposed to Portocristo and other contenders for the name of the resort. And over in Menorca there is another carry-on.

The lady mayor of the capital there wants it known officially by its Castilian name of Mahón but also wants to reactivate a Catalan spelling of Mahó, rather than the current Maó. Why? No idea. She might just end looking a bit foolish and with egg mayonnaise all over her face. Perhaps she should go further and insist on Mahón or Mahó de Menorca. There are currently no noises emanating from Ibiza that Ibiza Town will become Ibiza de Ibiza or, just to confuse the tourists, Eivissa de Eivissa.

But to come back to Palma. Why is the town hall in such a flap over whether there is officially a “de Mallorca” or not, especially as there is disagreement among the scholarly fraternity and those of a more pedantic bent as to whether it ever officially had been “de Mallorca” in the past?

It wouldn’t be an argument over a city’s name or indeed anything in Mallorca if there wasn’t some political colour to it. The “de Mallorca” bit, or so it is said, is all a tad “foreign”, as in Palma de Mallorca is how the city is known abroad. We’ll have to take the word of those who say it is, but I’m not sure that in Britain, for instance, it is. However, it is fair to say that, in addition to the local post office, “de Mallorca” is used by the likes of airlines in their drop-down menus for airport departures and arrivals. It’s designed to eliminate confusion.

More than this, though, the argument appears to be based on little more than a desire among the left (anti-“de Mallorca”) and the right (pro-“de Mallorca”) to have a bit of a barney. And because the last government, and Palma town hall administration, was of the left and because the last government didn’t follow the correct procedures, the current administration, of the right, wants to do something about it.

One line of argument against the adoption, or is it re-adoption, of “de Mallorca” that might just have some credibility is that, by doing so, everywhere else on the island is made out to be merely satellites of the sun that is the capital city. It’s a reasonable point, but only up to a point. There is unquestionably a Palma-centricity and a Palma civic arrogance, but this is pretty normal for a capital, and in Mallorca everything does revolve around the sun that is Palma, whether people in other towns like it or not.

Though the anti-“de Mallorca” camp seems to equate the town hall’s wishes with some form of imperialism through nomenclature, Palma de Mallorca does have a fair bit going for it; a greater gravitas that Palma on its own doesn’t. When all said and done, it is a capital city named after a tree.

But as tree it is, then Palma faces a potential crisis. The palm-­consuming beetle that is on the rampage could leave Palma minus any palms. Where would it be then? Not so arrogant, I would suggest.

The town hall should be thinking longer-term. When the last palm in Palma succumbs to the beetle and has its head chopped off and is left as a grotesque and impotent phallic symbol, a completely new name will be needed. And there would be one prime alternative. The pine. The city already has Portopí, so why not go the whole arboreal hog now. The new capital of Mallorca. Pi.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Travelling Blackberries

One of the things you would probably expect at an ABTA convention is a lot of travel agents. ABTA is, after all, the Association of British Travel Agents. Going by the list of delegates at the Palma thrash (around 800 or so), I would guess that only around an eighth were in fact from travel agencies. ABTA isn’t just about travel agents as it is “The Travel Association” and so includes tour operators as well, and the line between a travel agent and a tour operator can blur, but the attendees seemed to overwhelmingly come from other parts of the travel world. Many of them were those, like me, who talk about travel and tourism. The convention is a great occasion for talking shop among those who do a lot of talking anyway.

Given the uneven distribution in terms of those who do and those who don’t do – arranging holidays or travel, that is – what is the point of it all? There is of course the “networking” defence, sometimes known as getting to know people, and this getting to know tends to involve excruciating conversations littered with business newspeak. “We can envision synergetic windows of opportunity going forward” or some such tosh.

There is the chance to learn new jargon in this newspeak world. I noted down the term “disintermediating”. I haven’t a clue what it means, but I intend to use it regularly in future; you’ve been warned.

But a more important point of it all is, as has been the case ever since the conference or convention (call it as you wish) was hit upon as being a “good idea”, that it’s a bit of a jolly. Even in economically-straitened times, and by God, didn’t we hear about how straitened these times have become and will become, there has to be an opportunity for the travel community to let its hair down and to fire off images of it doing so thanks to the latest gadgetry.

I well remember the jolly and the times when conferences were two a penny. One week New Orleans, the next Milan. New Orleans, in between Henry Kissinger asking me what I was doing having come from England to attend a management conference in Louisiana, was a fine excuse for hitting the blues and jazz bars of Bourbon Street. Milan involved a do at Armani’s gaffe. Not his house as such, but the Armani HQ emporium. And there was the great man himself, who wasn’t so great as he is a shorthouse, who insisted on making a gift to all attendees at his special dinner of a bottle of the Armani house liqueur, a truly revolting and undrinkable concoction made out of rose petals.

But those were in the days before we we had ever heard of carbon footprints and before the technology arrived that was meant to put an end to all the need to jump on BA and hack across the Atlantic or to climb aboard the O’Leary Express and hop off to Palma. Despite the technology, it still happens, and can be put down to one thing – the industry that is MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions). If it weren’t to exist, then Palma’s brand new (if and when it’s completed) Palacio de Congresos would be an even greater waste of money than it will prove to be anyway.

Though ABTA’s convention seemed primarily to be a junket for members of the media and for the new-age travel service providers of the internet (and of course smartphones), it would be a curious thing were there not to be a convention that involved some travel. This is what ABTA does, or at least what its members facilitate. A travel association that didn’t actually travel anywhere would be setting a bad example to all those who really need to, as in holidaymakers.

You have to conclude, therefore, that this, over and above the jolly, is the main point of it all. The travel itself. We are a travel association, therefore we travel. All aboard the ABTA Airbus and off we go, a band not of Traveling Wilburys but of Travelling Blackberries; have smartphone, will travel.

All the technology, Google’s “Goggles”, social networking (that word again) with crazed movements of thumbs and fingers on a small phone keyboard, uploading and sharing every waking moment; it makes you wonder if the day of the virtual tourist is nearly upon us. You will never need to leave the house in order to experience the holiday experience; all that’s missing is something like Aldous Huxley’s “feelies”. They’ll be here, though. One day. And then we really wouldn’t need to go on holiday and never need to travel. But I tell you something, there would still be a convention in order that we can all talk about it.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

All That Gas – And Google: ABTA Convention

Come on, how many of you remember “Space Patrol”? It was a sixties puppet series in which the hero was Captain Larry Dart, a long-haired, bearded explorer-style spaceman who had more than a touch of the Shakespearean about him, in looks if nothing else. When the crew of his gyroscopic craft would land on a distant planet, it tackled the problem of communication by using a translation device that was strapped to the chest. Set appropriately, the translator would simultaneously turn Martian into perfect mid-Atlantic English.

Google’s ambitions for space travel or for the need for intergalactic translation machines are unknown. But it is fast putting together a number of aids for the earthly traveller. One of them is Google Translate in voice form, along with a voice search facility.

The appearance of Google at this year’s ABTA convention was anticipated with both interest and trepidation. Just what will Google Travel involve? If its convention demo is anything to go by, it still needs a bit of fine-tuning.

As with the regular Google Translate, the results are often far from accurate. Put a simple enough question into the voice version and there’s an additional problem – does the system recognise individual words correctly? The demo, in true Larry Dart mode, might have involved asking “wherefore art thou, Romeo?”. Instead, the question was “where is the beach?” Unfortunately, this was misheard. Is life a beach or a bitch? A bitch, according to Google Translate, which, on the screen presentation, was sensitive enough to asterisk out the four letters following the “b”.

The voice search thing wasn’t much better. “How much is two hundred pounds in euros?” No matches were found, a reflection perhaps of two basket-case currencies. It might have worked better the other way round. Indeed, for the visitor to Mallorca, who may well come to rely on such a service via his smartphone, it could be essential when Tráfico pulls him over and issues an on-the-spot fine.

We could all do, though, with a spot of Larry Dart and heading off into outer space. Life on earth is to become ever more intolerable, especially in Britain and Mallorca. Or this is how one might interpret the thoughts of Douglas McWilliams who had predicted the arrival of the economic crisis and to whom is therefore assigned the mantle of economic-forecasting guru, otherwise known as doom merchant.

Everyone will have less money, the days of super-cheap flights are drawing to a close, the pound will remain weak. The only bright spot is that Spain might drop out of the Euro, and we can all get back to things being dirt cheap and to tossing small peseta coins into the rubbish bin because they are more trouble than they are worth. And to make matters worse, there are some who are going to get richer, such as the Australians. All that gas. Australia has it in abundance.

Commodity-rich nations are going to be the winners in the future, which includes the gaseous Russians, arriving in ever greater numbers and converting Brit bars into beetroot and vodka emporia.

If commodity wealth is so important, and it is, then I’m very sorry but some oil platforms off the shores of the Balearics should be put up with immediate effect. Something will have to compensate for no one coming on holiday any longer, other than the Russians. At least with their arrival, we will be able to count on one thing. And that’s Google. “Where is the beach?” will be swiftly translated into Russian, along with a further translation for “that beach with the oil slick washing up on it.”

Have a happy future, everyone, I’m off on Space Patrol.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Apps And ABTA

The ABTA convention. Having decided to give Tunisia a miss this year, the ABTA delegates relocated to Palma, thus making Mallorca even more of a beneficiary of the Arab spring. I say delegates. Looking down their number, there seemed to be more people from the media and consultants than there were actual travel people, but maybe it was a false impression.

Behind the stage, the screen which relayed the speakers and their presentations made constant reminders as to the addresses for the conference Twitter, text and Mobile App. Everyone seemed to be following this instruction religiously. Nowhere has there ever been such a collection of smartphones or notepads being tapped or scrolled away on, or maybe they were all just booking their holidays.

Alastair Stewart, ’twas he, “News At Ten”, boing! Ah, I remember the days. The mid-70s. Alastair never made it to the presidency of the National Union of Students, despite his having been bookies’ favourite at one point. Instead, he was agitator-in-chief behind the then bearded and still bearded Charles Clarke, “Two Pizzas”, who ate fewer pizzas back then. Alastair has not been as animated since. Until now. He was a thoroughly impressive moderator.

There was gloom from some chap from the “Telegraph” to set the tone. Might as well all pack up and go home now. Let’s get this convention off to a really uplifting start. Or maybe not. Then there was all sorts of stuff about social media, the internet, mobile apps and what have you. The delegates were all studiously examining their smartphones and downloading the latest app to be given a speaker’s mention. Whether anyone was really listening, who can tell? There were plenty of images of apps on phones for everyone to look at instead.

A showpiece presentation wasn’t a presentation as such. It was a conversation between Peter Long of TUI Travel and Miguel Fluxá who founded the Iberostar hotels. Despite an explanation as to who Sr. Fluxá was, it was still felt necessary to give him a rock-star musical accompaniment as he took to the stage, The Who’s “Who Are You?”. It seemed rather discourteous, but I doubt that Sr. Fluxá was aware of it or if he is a Who fan. Or perhaps he is. He has ageing rock-star hair, a lush silver mane over a face that reminds one somewhat of a tanned Tom Baker, as in Doctor Who. So, The Who was right after all.

There was stuff on the environment. Oh calamity. Hopefully, the loonies who disapprove of the climate-change theory were thin on the conference ground or were too busy charging their smartphones to have heard. Businesses, though, are setting targets for renewable energy and the like, and it’s going to change everyone’s lives. Something like that. One business has embarked on a wider sustainability assessment, that of an economic impact analysis that considers the value it as a business brings to areas in which it operates. I wondered if the chap from TUI was listening. Value to areas in it operates. All-inclusives. You get the picture.

And finally, as they say on “News At Ten”, or used to, there was Willie Walsh, boss of IAG, the British Airways-Iberia merged outfit (he was accompanied by ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky”; still, could have been cheesier, “Up, Up And Away” for example). He slagged off the British Government and the transport minister in particular and criticised the Air Passenger Duty, which you would expect him to. But he has good reason. There’s the UK trying to be all righteous and the Chinese are building 90 airports with up to eight runways each.

A fascinating day indeed, made more fascinating by meeting the British Consul who I asked if he might fancy heading off to Alcúdia for a trip down the Mile to see the effects of all-inclusives. If he were to be invited … . Maybe he should be. Decent chap, though, and he seems to know a lot about cricket, while nowhere about his person was there any evidence of a smartphone, let alone the use of an app.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.