Never Mind The Quantity

They do it in Bali, they do it in Thailand, they do it in Turkey, they even do it in Oman. What do they do? They talk about quality tourists. And of course they talk about them in Mallorca.

Quality. The word used to have meaning. It used also to be something that could be measured. It still can be, but the term has become so widely used and abused that it can mean whatever you like and it can be applied to whatever you like, as can its absence.

In Mallorca, there is a distinction. Tourism quality is not the same as tourist quality. The former refers to services, standards of hotels, resorts and infrastructure. Theoretically, tourism quality begets tourist quality, or doesn’t if the tourism quality is low.

The problem with all of this is terminology and precise meaning. While systems exist which can measure quality in tourism destinations, such as “Qualitest”, developed under the auspices of the European Commission, similar systems are not applied to people – tourists themselves and their perceived quality or lack of. How would you? Get tourists to fill out a questionnaire to determine their socioeconomic grouping or means test them? It’s a nonsense of vagueness and one that leads to accusations of the pejorative and the insult, as has been the case with Pedro Iriondo and his taunt of low-quality tourists coming from the UK.

Nevertheless, and despite the umbrage that has been taken, Iriondo was not totally wrong. He was wrong in his choice of words, but not in his sentiments. Yet, the quality descriptor is used by default and has been for years in Mallorca. Just as it is now used in Thailand, where the prime minister has urged the tourism industry to focus on the quality of tourists. Same concept, same insult.

Iriondo’s outburst has been met differently in the UK (and among some Britons in Mallorca) and in Mallorca by both local people and the local media. This difference is far from unimportant. While the quality insult and the attack on low-cost airlines caused the headlines for the British, it was his criticism of foreign workers in Mallorcan hotels and bars that caused the most fuss locally. The tourist quality argument is one that few would quibble with, including many a British business owner in Mallorca.

Unpalatable though it may be, vague though the word quality may also be, we still know what Iriondo was getting at. Money. And you can probably throw in behaviour as well. Mallorca is not alone. In Bali, they are thinking of introducing standard pricing policies to prevent tourism being too cheap. “In order to obtain quality tourists, one step we must take is to avoid selling Bali too cheaply,” has said the assistant governor. A Dutch restaurateur in Istanbul has criticised governmental policy of placing quantity before quality. “Turkey should get rid of its image (for) cheap vacations with all-inclusive travel packages.”

The Thai prime minister went on to say that the tourism industry should not aim for high numbers, thus placing quality first. The same argument as in Turkey, therefore, and one that has been broached in Mallorca before now, not least by the current regional government president.

Regardless of background, people are entitled to a holiday. It is the seeking to deny this that grates as much as the distasteful term “quality tourist” and its opposite. However, a destination surely has the right to determine what type of tourism it wants. Mallorca, in part, as is the case with other destinations, operates a type of social service. It is one, and the point was proved as long ago as the early 90s by researchers at the university, that leads to a net loss among a percentage of tourists. Then, it was 10%; it would be higher now.

The solution, if this is the right word, lies not just with the quality of the tourism offer but also with a reduction in tourism numbers. This has been spoken about. President Antich once said as much himself. But it would be a minefield of implementation. Mallorca’s tourism is based on volume, as are strategies of airlines, tour operators, hotel chains, the airport, transport providers and the government itself, sensitive to the need to constantly report high tourism numbers and to the creation of employment.

Volume means tourism of all types, of all backgrounds. Iriondo’s insult remains an insult insomuch as Mallorca’s tourism has always been all things to all men. But if Mallorca wants something different, then so be it. If it does, though, it should be aware of what it would mean. Quality, assuming it can be adequately defined, does not always mean quantity.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

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.