A Certain Cachet? Puerto Alcúdia

Puerto Alcúdia has lost some of its cachet. Discuss.

The loss of cachet suggestion is not mine. It is that of the president of the recently formed Alcúdia Bay restaurant association. Before we delve too far into the suggestion, we do need to ask ourselves what is meant by cachet. Prestige is a reasonable alternative. Well, the Oxford English Dictionary (Concise version) says so, and I’m not about to disagree.

If Puerto Alcúdia has lost cachet, then when did it ever actually have it? And as much as the definition of cachet can be rather loose, so also can be a definition of Puerto Alcúdia. It is not one place.

Cachet that attaches itself historically to Puerto Alcúdia might be said to date back to the 1930s, to the original Golf hotel (and golf course) and to the seaplanes that dropped French tourists into the bay. It was shortlived, thanks to a somewhat unpleasant member of the military who was wedded to notions of arch-Spanishness and arch-Catholicism.

Of tourism-age cachet, there has been relatively little. Puerto Alcúdia is and has long been a resort for the mass, and it created for itself the environment in which this mass could enjoy the prestige that the resort has always enjoyed: a fabulous beach most obviously.

Cachet might also, in tourism terms, imply chic. But has Puerto Alcúdia ever been chic? Not really. Its near neighbour, Puerto Pollensa, might well claim this; at least in its past, along with a somewhat Bohemian reputation. It was Puerto Pollensa that acquired the cachet of celebrity visitor and party-goer (in the seventies and into the eighties) that Puerto Alcúdia didn’t.

Puerto Alcúdia’s cachet applies not to its purpose-built, anti-cachet tourism centre, some three kilometres out of the port area, but to the port area itself and also to the fact that, as a whole, it is a leading tourism resort. The prestige has been earned over decades, not because the resort is phenomenally attractive, but because it is highly functional; it serves a purpose, and does this rather well.

However, attractiveness and a fellow-travelling concept of ambience can distort this prestige/cachet estimation. And it’s one of cachet found rather than cachet lost: there is many a current-day visitor who would argue that Puerto Alcúdia’s port area is greatly more attractive/vibrant than its haughty neighbour, i.e. Puerto Pollensa. Perhaps so, but the argument is irrelevant. Difference is what counts, and point-scoring for relative chicness, cachet, prestige is completely pointless.

The Alcúdia Bay restaurant association does, though, wish to win back this cachet, whatever it might once have been. It wishes to make more dynamic Puerto Alcúdia’s frontline and to bring quality tourism. It wishes this without the slightest hint as to what it means by more dynamic, without the slightest embarrassment that it might actually be offending tourists who are, by implication, not “quality” and by alluding to a past that is all but illusory.

To be fair, the association might be said to be responding to the criticisms that have emanated from the hotels, and not just in Puerto Alcúdia, which have accused the “complementary offer” of restaurants etc. of doing nothing to promote tourism and of leaving it to others to do so.

To this end, what has the association come up with? A guide. It appeared late into the season this year and it was, as is all too often the case with such guides, an exercise in amorphous repetition in that restaurants, side-by-side, proclaim the same “typical Mallorcan cuisine” or “speciality in meat” that leave the punter none the wiser and in no way incentivised by any sense of differentiation, and an exercise also in self-regarding delusion as to the importance of gastronomy to the tourism punter who perceives restaurants not as the be all and end all but as a necessary sub-text to the tourism experience.

The association will be establishing a “junta”, a board which will drive its cachet-creating initiatives. The heart sinks. Another talking-shop of vested interests, ultimately inward-looking, believing that gastronomy is the way to the tourism stomach, when it should be part of a greater whole that promotes the resort. As should be the case with all resorts.

The association is right in one regard: that promotion should be local, local to resorts. Too much has been generic, for Mallorca, when resorts do mean different things – as between Puerto Alcúdia and Puerto Pollensa. But if it were serious about greater dynamism, it would not be ghettoising itself into a gastronomic corner, but engaging with, and promoting with, all other sectors of the local tourism economy.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Image Rights? The right image of Mallorca

Gabriel Escarrer is the president and founder of the Mallorca-based hotel group Sol Meliá, now renamed Meliá Hotels International. An interview with him appeared in “Ultima Hora” at the weekend. When someone of Sr. Escarrer’s eminence speaks, it is worth taking note.

A newspaper interview can only go into so much depth, which is unfortunate as it would have been instructive to have had more detail, such as that to do with the improvement of Mallorca’s image.

This, in a way, was one of the more surprising parts of the interview; surprising because the image has improved, certainly when compared with one that the island had not so long ago when Mallorca was looked down upon and when it was very much Madge-orca, a place lumped in with Eric Idle’s Watney’s Red Barrel Torremolinos of so many years ago.

In part, it still is, but the image has shifted and the shift has been ongoing for quite some while. So a question I would like to ask is, what image do you believe Mallorca has? Your answers are likely to be diverse, which is what might be expected, as Mallorca is a place of huge diversity.

Recently I was asked to write about some of Mallorca’s towns and villages. I was given a list of those to be covered. The piece ended up as a sort of tour. It started in Sóller, cut down to Banyalfabur, went across to Campos and Colonia Sant Jordi, up to Porto Cristo and then Artá and ventured inland via Santa Margalida, Campanet and Santa Maria until it came to an end in Lloret de Vista Alegre and Sineu, the geographical and arguably spiritual centre of Mallorca.

With the exception of touching on Can Picafort (as part of Santa Margalida), there was little by way of vast tourist resort in this tour (I would exclude Colonia Sant Jordi and Porto Cristo from such a description). Instead it was a route that embraced orange and lemon groves, an old railway, mountains, the terraces of Banyalfabur, Es Trenc, the view to Sa Cabrera, the caves of Drach and Hams, Talayotic Bronze Age settlements, the fiesta of La Beata, peculiar water phenomena, ancient hermitages, old markets, a baroque church with a blue bell, rural culture and the palace of the kings of Mallorca.

Want diversity? You’ve got it. The problem is that diversity does not mean image. Or not as the island’s image is largely perceived. Sr. Escarrer said in the interview that the image needed to be cleaned up, that there needed to be a repositioning of Mallorca and one at an international level.

He was not wrong in saying this, but there is something distinctly not right about it. Because all this diversity, this different image is meant to have been part of a repositioning, one at an international level. Is Sr. Escarrer saying that the efforts of all that promotion that has gone on, or is supposed to have gone on, has been ineffective? One suspects he may have been being diplomatic.

I shan’t be. It has been ineffective. Partly it has been ineffective for the right reasons, those of sun and beach, which remain Mallorca’s most enduring attractions and reasons for being. Despite promotion of alternatives, sun and beach constitute the island’s number one product and the most important of the elements of the island’s promotional mix. And rightly so.

But sun and beach bring with them attendant problems. They are ones we are only too aware of and may well be to what Sr. Escarrer was alluding when he spoke of cleaning up the image.

In another newspaper at the weekend (the “Diario de Mallorca”) there was an article which delved into crime in one of the main tourist centres of the island, Playa de Palma: pickpocketing, prostitution, drug dealing. To this can be added the periodic reports of violence. The need for an image clean-up has moved on from the days when Mallorca and some of its resorts were simply considered as being naff.

Despite media negativity and reporting of crime and violence, Mallorca’s image has changed. But the change in image has a way to go, a long way to go. The question is how this image change is truly effected, how the diversity of the island is truly conveyed, and in such a way that the harmful consequences of seasonality, to which Sr. Escarrer also referred, are mitigated.

It’s the sixty-four million euro question. And it has been ever since the euro was introduced. Prior to this, it was the the ten billion plus peseta question. It’s a question, the answer to which no one has found. Sadly, one fancies it will never be discovered. Yet it should be. Start in Sóller, cut down to Banyalfabur … .

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The World’s Most Popular Breakfast

The bacon must be lean; crispy but certainly not incinerated. The egg yolk should be runny but white sealed and without pools of what comes from a docker’s nose. The tomato should, on no account, be from a tin and therefore not be a tomato. The sausage should, like the bacon, be reasonably well done and not be pink inside. The beans’ sauce should not have acquired a glutenous state.

I am, you might realise, somewhat fastidious when it comes to the full English. I don’t mind confessing both that I demand high standards and that I actually eat full Englishes. They are a guilty pleasure. Firstly, because it is claimed that they aren’t necessarily good for you (I’d dispute this). Secondly, because consuming the full English is being oh so British. I should eschew the bacon ‘n’ eggs in favour of going-native breakfasting, which means the ensaïmada. Sorry, but if I’m going to have any lard, I want it with sausage and not in the form of a twirly thing with a sugar coating. The ensaïmada is rubbish. Over sweet, over hyped and over here.

It is a short pastry step from the execrable ensaïmada to the puffed-up contortion of the croissant. The two are dough to the pretentious fellow travellers of anything but the full English. And neither is any good.

The croissant is not originally French, but French it has become. Because it is French, as with anything else that can be noshed or imbibed that has a French label, the French would claim it to be superior to anything from anywhere else. Such culinary jingoism makes it the more surprising, therefore, that the French themselves have placed the full anglais in the number-one position on the breakfast chart.

A poll by Hotels.com has revealed that 19% of French people rate the full English as being number one. The survey of 2,400 travellers from more than 20 countries in all finds that the F.E. is the most popular first meal of the day.

The breakfasting habits of different nationalities can be hard to comprehend. The Dutch are arguably the maddest of all. Whatever made them think that putting little bits of chocolate onto bread and butter was a good thing? Probably the same thought process that has led them to eating raw herrings. They simply have no idea. Yet the Dutch, giants that they are, should thoroughly enjoy getting stuck into a full English. As should the Germans and the Scandinavians, and most obviously the Danes who, rather than eating Danish bacon, export most of it to the UK.

The discovery that the full English is in fact the world’s number one breakfast should come as no surprise, as it quite obviously is the best, and should cause Bar Brits across Mallorca to stop and think for a moment.

The much-spoken-of gastronomy of Mallorca is naturally enough Mallorcan, but some of it, the ensaïmada clearly, is lousy. Both the lousy and the not lousy gets itself a fair amount of the spotlight, but what of the gastronomy that isn’t Mallorcan?

One of the most bizarre reasons I have heard as to why a restaurant should not advertise was one offered by an Italian restaurant. People don’t come to Mallorca to eat Italian food was the argument. If this is so, then it begs a pretty fundamental question as to why the restaurant exists.

The argument was rubbish, because “Italian” has its own power to promote and to attract. So why not, therefore, “British” or “English”? Because of the association with Bar Brit and consequently with tattoos, bellies, white-turning-pink skin and Sky, this gastronomy is ignored. Yet, it can boast the best breakfast in the world, one that can come in different varieties. It could be, for instance, the grand full English, that which might be served at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand (nearly twenty quid for the real thing or “the ten deadly sins” to include also kidneys and bubble and squeak). It could come with accompanying Guinness – in a bottle and not out of some peculiar can with a syrup. It could be promoted as the “world’s most popular breakfast”.

Bar Brits could co-operate in pushing a gastronomy fair of their own, directed at the nationalities who come to Mallorca (and who also live here) and who are unaware of the great British fry-up. They could educate as to quite why a bean has been covered in a tomatoey sauce; advance the cause of the black pudding which isn’t, after all, that far removed from local sausages about which a song and dance is made.

The world’s most popular breakfast. Now get frying.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Getting It Wrong: Tourism promotion

At the same time as various agencies are criticising the regional government’s tourism ministry for pulling the plug on promotion to the Spanish market, the same government is turning out its largely empty pockets to scrape together 50 grand for some different promotion; more of this below.

The failure to promote to the Spanish market for the lower months of the main season is due to a lack of funds. Does this matter?

It is easy to overlook mainland tourism, yet it forms, along with the British and the German markets, one of the three most important markets for Mallorca. It has its own characteristics. It is one that is accused of being the most miserly when it comes to spend and it is, obviously, not a foreign market. For the Spanish, a holiday in Mallorca is a “holistay”.

Though Spanish tourists might be more aware, regardless of promotion, of what is available to them in their own country, it doesn’t mean they should be ignored. They are also, like their British and German counterparts, subject to what happens in the world, i.e. they go to places like Egypt; or don’t, as the case may currently be.

You wonder if behind this lack of promotion (other than the fact that the tourism ministry is all but bust) is the hope that the overseas (and potentially higher-spending) markets are going to be that strong this season that promotion to the home market doesn’t indeed matter. But it may matter for different parts of Mallorca.

The distribution of Spanish tourists is heavily loaded towards the south of the island, with Palma a particular attraction. By contrast, in the northern resort of Alcúdia, the volume of Spanish tourism typically accounts for only 8% of total tourism. It’s still 8%, nonetheless.

But there is a more fundamental issue, and it is one that gets back to just how effective, or not, any of this promotion and marketing really is. And that’s where the 50 grand spend on something else comes in.

The national tourism ministry is putting together a promotion package, to be directed to both the home and foreign market, that will amount to nearly 500,000 euros in total, one tenth of which will come from the Balearics. It’s a small amount, but the size is not what matters. It’s what this plan is.

It is for the promotion of the estaciones náuticas. In Mallorca, there is one of them. In Alcúdia. Not that you would really know. At the risk of repeating myself, because I have spoken about this before, an estación náutica is not a physical entity, it is a marketing concept. One that is meant to promote a resort’s water sports and related activities; water sports and related activities which already exist.

Are you aware of any marketing of this marketing concept? Well, there is some. There is a website, not for Alcúdia’s estación náutica specifically, but for the estaciones in general. I didn’t know about it until I spoke to a business which is one of the so-called related activities. It is not a big concern, without a huge amount to spend on promoting itself. It is nervous that the 500 euros it has paid to feature on this site is a complete waste of money.

I would be nervous, too. But then I wouldn’t have spent 500 euros on a website for a questionable concept that is just an umbrella for all the various estaciones náuticas and which also, at present, does not provide a version in any of the languages its flag icons suggest – English, for instance.

I guess you can say that the marketing concept has been successful insofar as it has persuaded a business, which can ill afford to do so, to part with 500 euros. But what is any of it going to achieve?

The Balearics have five other estaciones – three in Menorca. I have a question. Where is the evidence that they have benefited Menorca? The island has been suffering a decline for some time. Has this marketing concept helped? I would seriously doubt it.

And this is the real point. It doesn’t matter in the slightest what is spent. If it’s spent badly, if the concept’s lousy, then no amount of money makes any difference. I hope that I am proven wrong where the estación náutica idea is concerned, but I fear I might not be.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Desperation: Promotion to the British market

The Balearic Government and the Spanish tourism promotion agency, Turespaña, are combining to spend one and a half million euros on a campaign to attract last-minute British tourists. This comes in the context of an 11% decline in British tourism this season. The campaign will be a pure selling one, rather than one with “image” in mind.

The fact that this campaign is being launched now raises questions. Why wasn’t something done earlier when it was clear that the British market was down? Why does it take the admission of poor numbers from the UK to convince the government and others that concentrating on “image” promotion is largely irrelevant? What will these poor numbers mean in more general terms?

The answers to the first two questions can be explained, in part, by the turmoil at the tourism ministry and the lack of cohesion in respect of marketing this year and by an erroneous belief that spending considerable amounts of money on celebrities, i.e. Rafa Nadal, to appear in adverts that get shunted to obscure outer reaches of television will have any impact. The third question is more complex.

There was a decline in British tourism last year as well, and we know why. It may be a short-term decline, but hoteliers and tour operators cannot afford to wait for the short term to end. In other words, they cannot afford for 2011 to be as Brit bad. They cannot afford for occupancy figures to be the same, or worse, than those which have been admitted to in certain instances: occupancy rates as low as 25% or little better than 50% in specific hotels in both Puerto Alcúdia and Puerto Pollensa, hotels with a high reliance on the British market.

What is becoming clear is that some hotels are looking to lessen this reliance or get rid of the British altogether. It isn’t only the stronger of the established markets, German and Scandinavian, to which they are turning; the new markets of eastern Europe are being eyed up with ever-increasing desire. What one may well find is a distinct shift in terms of tourism demographics, both geographically and socially. Take, for example, the experience of Cala San Vicente. It has seen the influx of an economy-class Polish market. If the Don Pedro does finally get knocked down, or even if it doesn’t, there’s plenty of space over in Puerto Pollensa, space that could just as easily be made all-inclusive, as with the relatively small Don Pedro (fewer than 150 rooms), space that could be taken up by non-British markets.

Whether this latest promotional campaign will have any effect, who knows. Whether any of these campaigns have much effect, who knows. This one sounds like a case of desperation promotion.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.