The Cruise Tourism Myth (7 November)

By way of a coincidence, a couple of mentions of cruise tourism over the past few days had worked themselves into my consciousness. I referred to one of them yesterday; the other had simply lodged in my memory banks.

The reference I made was to Leo Hickman who has lumped cruise ships in with all-inclusive hotels in branding them one of the worst forms of tourism in that they generate little by way of benefit to local economies. The one I hadn’t referred to, but now do, was to Puerto Alcúdia and a question asked by the restaurant association as to why its new commercial port was not receiving cruise ships.

In Alcúdia there was talk of it becoming a port of call. It was one reason why so much was invested in developing the new terminal and in deepening the waters. To date, it has not become a port of call and it may never become so. The restaurant association would wish otherwise, as it would hope to reap the benefits from stopover passengers.

The benefits. Ah yes, the benefits of cruise tourism to local economies. These are the benefits that Palma (though not exclusively Palma) derives from cruise tourism and which the city anticipates more of as the volume of cruise traffic increases.

But, as we are reminded not infrequently, passengers disembark, wallets bulging, ready to spend wildly, only to find shops closed. At least, this is one of the sticks which are used to beat Palma shopowners into opening submission and which is used to criticise an inert local tourism-related industry that spurns the opportunities from cruise tourists.

Alcúdia’s restaurants presumably believe that they, along with other local businesses, would enjoy untold riches from passengers taking a bit of shore leave. Would they, though?

One of the most important pieces of research into the economic impact of cruise tourism was undertaken by the Policy Research Corporation on behalf of the European Commission. Based on data from October 2008 to September 2009, it looked at, among other things, expenditure by passengers. Of the top 15 ports in Europe, Palma was ranked sixth with around 53 million euros, a figure that rose to 70 million when crew and ship expenditures were added.

The report calculated specific expenditures dependent upon whether passengers disembarked during a stopover (and not all do) and whether they were joining or leaving the ship. The average spend was, respectively, 60 and 95 euros per passenger (the figure being the same whether joining or leaving).

In themselves, the figures seem healthy enough, but you need to dig down into them to understand what they represent. Mostly all the spend by a passenger joining or leaving a ship is on hotel accommodation; the spend of the passenger who disembarks for the day goes primarily towards an excursion of some sort.

The cruise ship functions in its own way. Because stopovers are short, it organises well in advance, as in booking excursions with a select few attractions/activities for which the cruise ship typically extracts a significant commission; and it is said that this can be as high as 50%, which immediately slashes that expenditure which gets into the local economy.

The ship has its arrangements with hotels, with a handful of chosen excursions and perhaps with certain shops or others, and a commission will operate in almost every instance. The benefit, in other words, tends to be spread very thinly. And where the passenger has some “free” time, what can he actually contribute over and above what has pretty much been pre-determined? P&O, for example, lists Pollensa and Formentor as one of its nine shore excursions. In Pollensa there are 30 minutes “to do as you choose … it is the perfect place to have a morning coffee”.

And so that’s about it. A coffee. Very little, and the restaurants of Alcúdia might bear this in mind, is actually spent on food. It’s the same issue as with all-inclusives, as the passenger has generally already paid for his food on the ship. At most he might buy a small snack and the odd drink while on shore, and that’s it.

There is plenty more that could be said about cruise ships and cruise tourism; about the environmental damage caused by ships, and which is greatly understated, or about the fact that little or no direct employment is generated. A benefit does come from cruises, but it is not as great as might be thought, a point made by Professor Paul Wilkinson of Canada’s York University, and a leading researcher into cruise tourism, who has said that “cruise visitors have little potential economic impact”.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

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.

Two Bellevues, There Are Only Two Bellevues

How do you make two hotels out of one? It’s not so difficult when the one hotel is not one hotel.

What is this riddle? It is a riddle that has been perplexing hoteliers for many years. It is what on earth you do with a problem like Bellevue.

If you don’t know Alcúdia’s Bellevue, then you should. There simply isn’t anywhere quite like it. It is an attraction in its own right. It is the single largest complex anywhere in Mallorca and probably in Spain and is testimony to an early-seventies philosophy of tourism that had seen huge complexes created elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

Unlike, say, the spaceship-style design of two of the main buildings at Cap d’Agde in the south of France, Bellevue is a series of individual apartment blocks (seventeen in all). But the thinking was similar. And this thinking conceived Bellevue as apartments, not as a hotel or hotels. Originally, they were meant to have been sold off as timeshares.

Like Cap d’Agde, the philosophy regarding the style of accommodation was one of packing as many apartments and people into an area as possible; 1400 apartments in the case of Bellevue. The accommodation was standardised into three types and was always fairly basic. The emphasis back then was straightforward; holidaymakers came for the sun alone, and the accommodation was somewhere for them to lay their heads.

Bellevue’s history has been dogged by ownership and financial wrangling, while the original idea of timeshare sales failed completely. In the eighties, it was finally, after years of being all but empty, conceived as a single “hotel”.

The history of ownership and financial troubles brings us up to today, to the former owners of the site, Grupo Marsans, and to a court administering the affairs of Marsans’ bankrupt hotel chain, Hotetur.

An agreement, seemingly now only requiring the judge’s approval, will see two hotel groups running Bellevue. BlueBay (Al Andalus Management Hotels), which currently operates the site, and Luabay, part of the Orizonia travel group, will share it, 50% each. What is really intriguing is the fact that documentation has apparently already been lodged with the Balearic Government tourism ministry which would permit the conversion of Bellevue into two hotels, or, strictly speaking, groups of hotels.

Luabay’s interest stems partly, one imagines, from the fact that Bellevue was the guarantee for a debt that Marsans owed to Orizonia. Also, until earlier this year, Luabay had no hotel interests in Mallorca. It took over a hotel in Arenal and has agreed to acquire three others, all in Cala Mayor. It would appear to be in an expansion mode.

Splitting Bellevue up has long seemed to be a sensible approach. Arguably, it is too big for any one operator, while it was never actually created with the intention of being a hotel as such, certainly not a single hotel. Splitting it up, though, brings with it potential headaches, and if the agreement is formalised, as seems likely, then the two hotel groups will have to get their heads around those headaches.

One of them is how you actually split the complex. To give an idea of the layout of Bellevue, the blocks are more or less evenly distributed to both sides of a road. The trouble is that mostly all the facilities – restaurants etc. – are on one side.

Another is how the separate hotels would be marketed. They couldn’t surely both be called Bellevue, could they? To do so would cause massive confusion. The name, though, is extremely well-known, albeit not necessarily for the right reasons. Bellevue may be loved by many, but there are many who hate it and give full vent to their feelings across the internet.

A further headache is tackling the age of the apartments. The size of Bellevue has always constrained redevelopment, mainly because of the sheer cost. The apartments don’t have air-conditioning, for example.

Creating two hotels sounds as though it should be an opportunity, one of pushing Bellevue into the tourist twenty-first century. It offers possibilities for different markets, different styles of hotel even. Whether, though, the development would be forthcoming, who can tell? One thing, though, is for sure. The peculiar story of one of the island’s most peculiar hotel complexes is set to have another chapter written.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet: Complaints

You would have thought that the complaints would have stopped. Having seen the back of the old mayor, the source of much of the discontent, the businesses of Puerto Pollensa still aren’t content. New town hall boss, same as the old town hall boss. Or something like that.

There is always something to complain about in Puerto Pollensa. Over the past few months we have had streets being dug up and the renewal of utilities in the square dragging on longer than they should have, the beach management fiasco and now we have overflowing litter bins, lack of parking and a twice-weekly mini-market.

To make matters worse, or so it is being said, the port is being allowed to go to the dogs (and usually to their output) and is coming in a poor second, third or fourth behind other resorts in the north of the island. While this jockeying for the minor places suggests that comparisons are being made with Muro and Can Picafort, it is really only a comparison with the immediate neighbour Alcúdia, for years looked down upon as though it were something unpleasant on the sole of a well-heeled Pollensan shoe. It’s a bit hard to continue to do so when you’ve just stepped in something unpleasant left under a pine tree on Puerto Pollensa’s walk of pines.

The comparison with Alcúdia is worth entertaining not because of what might be considered the neighbour having assumed the lofty position of number one in the northerly rankings but because of the nature of the complaining. Puerto Pollensa does this, complaining, very much better than anywhere else. It has more moaners per square metre than any place in Mallorca.

Complaint has perpetuated complaint to the point where the complaining has become almost institutionalised and complaining for the sake of complaining. This is not to let the town hall off the hook, especially not the previous administration, but the new one has yet to complete its first hundred days in office. The new administration should be given a break.

The latest bout of complaining needs some analysis. The lack of parking is an old chestnut. Notwithstanding some talk of an area on the edge of the resort being made available for parking, quite how the town hall is supposed to suddenly magic up whole parking lots is something of a mystery. The additional mini-markets were in fact requested by local restaurants as a way of creating some ambience, even if shops aren’t too enamoured of them. The overflowing litter bins? Well, maybe there is a point with this, but the mayor, somewhat mischievously avoiding the criticism, has said that these are evidence of a flourishing resort with hotels also overflowing.

The businesses to the fore in this current round of complaining have dragged in the president of Acotur, the tourist businesses’ association. He has been a busy chap, and his busyness needs to be considered by those who might feel that Alcúdia is a total paragon of tourism resort virtue and who might also overlook the fact that Alcúdia is two distinct resorts – the port and the Mile.

He met recently with Alcúdia’s lady mayor along with businesses around the Mile. The complaints here are of a different order to those in Puerto Pollensa: all-inclusives, the proliferation of lookies and illegal street selling, robberies and lack of maintenance. The main thing to come out of the meeting with the mayor was that the bridge along the Mile will be painted for the first time in a generation.

While the complaints were different to those in Puerto Pollensa, there is a further difference to the complaining: Alcúdia’s isn’t organised. It’s not as if there haven’t been things to complain about, but there is nothing like the well-oiled propaganda machine that exists in Pollensa and which regularly fills column inches in the local press.

The greatest single problem for businesses in Alcúdia, especially for those around the Mile, is that of all-inclusives; it is a far greater problem than any of those experienced in Puerto Pollensa. But even a proposed day of action in September when businesses would close in protest at the impact of all-inclusive probably won’t happen because of the absence of organisation and the presence of self-interest and indifference.

The latest complaining in Puerto Pollensa smacks more of casting around for something to blame on behalf of some businesses which might not be benefiting from the mayor’s overflowing hotels. It might also be better to keep the complaining powder dry. With the town halls in such dire financial situations, the complaining will be matched by the despairing and a general wailing and gnashing of businesses’ teeth. You ain’t heard nothing yet.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

For Sale: Hotel, Needs Work

The possibility that the Posibilitum investment group, the owners of Alcúdia’s Bellevue complex, might acquire the Hotasa hotels of the troubled Nueva Rumasa conglomerate should be viewed as welcome news by those running the hotels. I am told that the hotels are experiencing difficulties in providing services they should be. When the hotels opened for the season, and at one point it looked as some might not, suppliers made it clear that they would supply only on a cash-on-delivery basis.

The Hotasa hotels, which include three in Can Picafort, are an extreme case, but they are far from alone in having owners seeking buyers. Much of Mallorca’s hotel stock is up for sale. And there are very few buyers.

The accord between tourism minister Carlos Delgado and the hoteliers that should pave the way for reform of the tourism law and so facilitate hotel conversion and change of use has been sought by the hoteliers for some years. The antiquity of many hotels makes their redevelopment a pressing necessity, but even with agreement and legal reform, a question would remain. How would these conversions be funded?

Delgado has said that the days of expecting grants, especially from central government, have passed. The banks have all but turned the taps off. The markets are reassured by this summer’s rise in tourism numbers, but the leading hotel chains – and those which would be listed and more attractive to investors – have tended to look overseas for growth potential.

The hype of all the talk of hotel renovations and changes of use and the unions getting hot under the collar and threatening protests as a consequence may therefore be just that – hype. Some hotels and hotel chains are in good enough shape to effect changes, but many are not.

One reason why owners want to sell hotels and why it is proving difficult to do so and would also prove difficult to convert them is because they are that old that the cost of conversion would be nigh on prohibitive. Buyers are unlikely to take on hotels that demand significant investment in addition to what are sales tags which are too high. Like with many restaurants or bars that are for sale, the expectations of owners are unrealistic, based on past or expected performance and divorced from the circumstances that now obtain.

Bellevue, though taken on by Posibilitum, is a case in point when it comes to old stock. The complex, all 1400 apartments of it, is nearly 40 years old. Its sheer size is a constraint on renovation as is its age, but renovation is badly needed. Bellevue has acquired a more diverse market over the past few years – it isn’t the ultra-Brit complex it once was – but it tends to be hotels for the British market in the resorts of Alcúdia and Magalluf that are the oldest and which attract less profit because of the very nature of the particular market they cater for. Another reason, therefore, why prospective buyers might be wary.

A further reason is the complexity of financing arrangements and ownership issues. The travel and hotel group Orizonia had, still has as far as I am aware, a mortgage on Bellevue which was raised as a guarantee against a debt to the company run up by the previous owners, the now bust Grupo Marsans. And there is a similar story with Hotasa.

Bank funding requires security, and in the case of Hotasa, the house has well and truly been bet. The court bankruptcy proceedings relating to Nueva Rumasa have revealed the scale of the mortgages that hang over Hotasa. One hotel alone, Santa Fe in Can Picafort, has been used as a guarantee four times, to which can be added the embargo slapped on it by the Hacienda in respect of a debt of some 120,000 euros. In total, the seven Hotasa hotels in the Balearics have mortgages valued at just short of 138 million euros, three and a half times the size of the mortgage debt said to be owed to Orizonia.

The judge presiding over the proceedings has been obliged to appoint five administrators because of the sheer complexity of the hotels’ affairs. The labyrinth of different companies in addition to the various mortgages would surely make a purchaser riding to Hotasa’s aid, be it Posibilitum or any other, pause while the administrators try and unravel the affairs. Hotasa may be a specific case, but who’s to say what complexity might apply to other hotels or hotel groups and which might add to deterring prospective purchasers.

Outdated, unprofitable, underfunded, debt-ridden: the reasons why there are so few buyers for hotels and why the much-hoped-for conversions may yet never take place.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Henry The Seventh: Social media success

Do you “like”? Do you “tweet”? Do you tube? Does your business do any or all of these things and, if so, does it really know what it is doing with them?

Social media. Social networks. Once upon a time, social networks were just networks of people, doing what people do, i.e. being social, being friends, being business acquaintances. Whatever the type of network, the purpose is the same: to make contact and connections.

And that’s what it’s about. “Making connections.” The words of Seamus Cullen at No Frills Excursions when I told him I was going to be talking to his business partner, Toni Alenyar, about social media.

No Frills is a small business, but it is a successful one, and one reason why it is successful is that it goes about its business in a purposeful fashion. It plans. And among its plans is one for the use of social media. I have a copy: all fourteen pages of it.

Not every business can devote significant time and resources to social media, but most have come to appreciate that they are, as Toni says, “essential tools”. Many businesses have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and the like, but do they really appreciate what they are doing with them?

No Frills is guided by a seven-step strategy. It is one that is partly specific to it as an excursions’ operator, but most of the steps can be applied to or adapted by any business. How the company uses social media is geared to meeting one or more of these seven steps. Crucially, they are not the company’s, they are the customer’s.

From the customer’s seeking of holiday inspiration and information to his planning and decision-making, to his taking action (making a booking and travelling) and to his sharing of his experiences, social media accompany each step along the way.

No Frills tests out any social media going. With some it is a case of learning what they offer and which may assume greater importance in the future. But with all its social media activity, there is a wish for the business to be visible, to enhance its reputation and to be seen as innovative.

Of the different networks, the most important to the company are Facebook, You Tube and Trip Advisor. The glowing reviews that No Frills attracts on Trip Advisor come quite obviously as a result of good experiences and good service, but the company actively encourages customers to review what it does, whether good or not so good, and spends time in responding to reviews which are posted.

The sharing of experiences by customers on Trip Advisor is the seventh step in the company’s strategic approach, but it can just as easily be seen as the first step. As Toni points out, Trip Advisor is that significant now that a majority of travellers consult it as part of their initial planning.

The attention given to the traveller’s information-gathering process is one that has led No Frills to be highly proactive and innovative. For example, it now makes short videos about hotels and posts them on You Tube. Why? Because someone interested in coming on holiday searches for information about specific hotels. No Frills videos give a short tour of the hotel and other relevant information about the resort, and relevance is a keyword in Toni’s vocabulary.

But how does this benefit the business? It’s not about selling as such. Of course, selling is the outcome that is sought, but it comes back to making connections. Someone sees a video about a hotel, it comes from No Frills, there will be some means of connecting to more No Frills information and the result … There may be a sale either online or in-resort. Critically though, trust and credibility are being created.

Actually quantifying the benefits of the company’s social media activity is nigh on impossible. Toni freely admits this. But then much promotional activity is hard or impossible to quantify. It is hard to place a value on the benefits derived from visibility, reputation and innovation, but social media, used well and planned well, will bring such benefits, and the importance attached to social media by No Frills is reflected by the fact that there is now a full-time member of staff who concentrates on the company’s internet presence.

There is way more to the No Frills internet story. I’ve not mentioned how Google search enquiries have helped to create a whole separate website, I’ve not mentioned that each of the four No Frills offices (three in Puerto Alcúdia and one in Puerto Pollensa) has its own You Tube channel, and I’ve not mentioned Henry the elephant. You might guess though that Henry has his own Facebook page.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Where A Sardine Is A Sardine

An awful lot of sardines get eaten at fiesta time. They are the staple diet of Puerto Alcúdia’s Sant Pere and of Puerto Pollensa’s mini-me Sant Pere, that you might call the Sant Perito. The sardines are trawled and then hauled on to grills for the evening of the “sardinada”; yes, Catalan and Spanish have a word for a sardine nosh-in.

The humble sardine isn’t perhaps the first fish or seafood that springs to mind when it comes to Mallorcan fishy gastronomy. Rather, it is maybe the lobster, the sea bass or other more substantial creatures of the sea. But being humble is something of a virtue for fiesta and fair suppers. Like the rubber-ringed cuttlefish, the sardine is peasant food of the Med, if peasant isn’t a contradiction in this context, which of course it is. Unlike the cuttlefish, unless it is prepared in certain ways, the sardine is uniformly yummy and edible.

The sardine can, though, claim some sort of kudos. It is all down to perception. And marketing. Where the Brits are concerned, that is. Pilchards were once famously rebranded as Cornish sardines by a Cornish pilchard industry desperately seeking to improve sales, and it succeeded in doing so through the simply expedient of renaming the pilchard.

Pilchards are things that come in flat cans with oily tomato sauce and which certainly used to be an extraordinarily cheap source of student sustenance; they were when I was a student anyway. The sardine, albeit that it too can come in a tin and usually does, is altogether more haute cuisine, if by implication of name and nothing else. Sardines and pilchards differ only by size; the former are smaller.

And sardines have acquired haute cuisine status, thanks to Heston Blumenthal, but sardine sorbet is unlikely to be found on the quayside tables of the Mallorcan sardinada. Nor is there likely to be any pilchard-sardine debate. A sardine is a sardine, regardless of size.

It is the lot of the Mallorcans, however, that their sardine should be associated with another island. It is debated as to whether the sardine really does derive its name from Sardinia, but even if it doesn’t, there are certain ties between the islands. Once upon a time, one imagines, there was more physical proximity, but in more recent times, if you can call the sixth century AD recent, Mallorca came under Sardinian control. Mallorca’s Byzantine period found the island administered from across the Med. And more recently than this, Aragonese and later Spanish rule of Sardinia left a Catalan imprint on the language; a variant of Catalan is still spoken on the island.

If the sardine is more originally a native of Sardinian waters, then what about other aspects of the “sardinada”? One is the music. In Puerto Alcúdia at any rate. Each year the fiesta programmes betray an unfailing familiarity, and the musical accompaniment to the sardinada is evidence of this. A group called Sotavent always pitches up to serenade the sardine-munchers. What they play is “havanera”. And this is?

What it isn’t is traditionally Mallorcan. The clue lies in the word. The havanera is derived from Havana. The music is Cuban, and its origins date back to nineteenth century immigration. Why it has become a part of the sardinada, and not just in Alcúdia, is hard to say, other than perhaps a seafaring association between Spain and the Caribbean.

The havanera is an example of how fiestas have embraced elements that are nothing to do with Mallorca or Spain as such. Another is the batucada, the colossal drumming racket that takes place at many a fiesta. It is basically a samba beat, Afro-Brazilian in its roots.

So some of the traditions of the fiestas are not as traditional as they might seem. In the case of sardines, they are a traditional fish of the Med but not of course of Mallorca alone, but more importantly they are sardines, and not pilchards.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Square, Practical, Good: Germans and food

The Germans are a people of routine and convention, not least when it comes to food and drink. They are also a people who believe, not always wrongly, that if it’s made in Germany (it referring to anything), it’s better than from somewhere else. When it comes to cars, they are right. Food, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.

The German attitude to food has been no better encapsulated than in the ultra-snappy slogan for Ritter Sport chocolate. “Quadratisch. Praktisch. Gut.” Square, practical, good. It’s less a slogan and more a series of words that, in translation, form a lesson for German engineers to explain in English the shape and benefits of whatever they happen to be engineering. Even something as ostensibly pleasurable as eating chocolate needs to be explained according to a manual.

And so it is with other German food. Its functionality dominates over its genuine appeal. It is practical, square in the sense of providing a square (and usually large square) meal, but not necessarily any good.

The Germans engineer everything. And food and drink are no different. Mealtimes are precisely determined as though by real-time systems engineering. Twelve on the dot is lunch. Four on the dot is coffee and cake. Seven on the dot is the evening meal.

The routine and convention are such and the made-in-Germany tag so prevalent that it is hard to imagine any un-Germanic influences disturbing the pre-set equilibrium of German mealtimes and the German propensity to hoover up an entire beef herd in one sitting. However, this convention does skip cultures.

It must be all that engineering, but Germans approach the culture of Mallorcan food with a process of both scientific conformity and enquiry. Unlike the British, who are both predominantly an uncurious breed and one not inclined to be told how they should conduct themselves, the Germans take their convention of process control with them when they travel, along with their manuals. A guide book of some description is always to hand in informing them as to the convention as to what they should eat. They try tapas, for example, because the guide book says so. If it’s in the manual, it must be correct.

All this brings us to the impact of a substantial increase in the number of German tourists in Mallorca’s main resorts this summer. In Alcúdia, for example, there is a 20% increase in German tourism, one that has not been anything like matched by an increase in British tourism. This increase has had an effect on one area of the local restaurant business. The Indians.

Curry would not be something to be found in the German tourist’s manual for eating in Mallorca, but the Germans, as with the British, are still very much creatures of habit; witness, for example, all that coffee and cake being wolfed down at four on the dot every afternoon. And curry has a peculiarly German flavour and a peculiarly German application. The sausage.

Curry wurst is a German institution. While it is thought that the Germans don’t have the same taste for tandoori or balti as the Brits, they do like smothering their sausages with curry sauce. It might seem odd that one restaurant has suddenly re-branded itself as a German curry house, but not when you consider this tradition.

Checkpoint Charlie, for this is the new name, boasts that it offers “Berlin curry”. When I went past and saw this, I thought it was completely mad. I know I shouldn’t have, but it conjured up the thought of waiters from the sub-continent sporting lederhosen and their lady wives swapping their saris for a dirndl. There again, they don’t generally wear lederhosen in Berlin.

But it isn’t quite as mad as it first seemed. There’s something of a moral here. It is one of reacting swiftly to what is happening in the tourist market. If there are that many more Germans around, then adapt to try and attract the business. Berlin curry may not conform to the conformity of how the Germans approach their Mallorcan eating experiences, but it is at least in line with a German market that is nothing if not conventional. Whether there should be a slogan though, I’m not sure. Practical? Possibly. Good? With any luck. But how do you describe the shape of a sausage?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Intensive Uncared-for Units

“Look at all these places that are closed.” I had bumped into a mate in Puerto Alcúdia. There were a number of “locales” that were empty. The tell-tale signs of abandonment were clear – whitewashed glass, mail piling up on the floors inside, fraying posters for this and that fly-billed onto the exteriors. “Yea, but they’re units under the apartments. It’s no wonder. They stick these places up, and on the ground floor they always have ‘locales’. There’s just too much of this stuff.”

Too much. Too many bars or cafés, too many shops. There is too much of everything. Too little of what matters. Demand.

The economic crisis has served to highlight what should have been obvious – the over supply of bars and shops. Perversely, the crisis has not reduced the supply, it has seen it increase, thanks primarily to the units that sit, mainly empty, under residential buildings.

The reason for these units is the consequence of a land law in the Balearics, one that has not been adopted elsewhere in Spain. The law goes as follows. There has to be a limit to the number of apartments per building. Were the ground floor to also be used for residential purposes, the average size of all apartments would have to increase. A solution, that of making buildings lower, isn’t a solution when it comes to the owners of land who want to maximise their returns. Another would be to scrap the law on the maximum number of apartments, so long as their sizes do not go below a minimum.

One view in favour of ground floors being reserved for commercial use is that people simply don’t want to live on the ground floor. It’s an understandable view, but only up to a point. Not wishing to be on the ground floor may have more to do with where the buildings are constructed rather than with a reluctance per se to inhabit a street-level apartment: a thoroughfare in Puerto Alcúdia is probably a case in point. But even this ignores the fact that houses, of older stock, open out onto narrow pavements right next to busy roads all over the island.

The downside of the regulation, apart from adding to the unnecessary supply of units, is that the buildings end up creating an impression of reducing desirability rather than the one that you would hope they would – that of increasing desirability. And this applies not just to the building itself but also to the general environment. Empty units benefit no one, but the mystery is why anyone thought that they could keep being created and keep being filled. Where they have been occupied, and some have been in Puerto Alcúdia, they have then become unoccupied. The crisis is not solely to blame; there is just no point to most of them.

The surfeit of bars and cafés should be enough to make any prospective tenant of the under-apartment “locales” wary of handing over his traspaso or, if he has any sense, just the rent. Other types of commercial exploitation should be met with a far bigger “buyer, beware” sign. What, for the most part, have they been? Fashion shops, if Alcúdia is anything to go by. They might also have been gobbled up by the johnnies-come-lately of the estate agency world, but the carnage in this market has robbed the units, as it has the island’s high streets in general, of their absurdly excessive presence. For the fashionista chicas who take on a unit, there is something else to bear in mind, not just the fact that their shops are an irrelevance. This is the relaxation of rules on commercial centres. Out of town, in other words. The pointless units become even more pointless as consumers shift their own centres of operation.

The law needs to be changed, but any reform should be more fundamental in terms of more coherent appraisals as to the style of towns such as Puerto Alcúdia where residential and commercial building has created a functionalist mish-mash of architecture. Attention should be paid to greater harmony in terms of the look of buildings and also to the introduction of semi-pedestrianisation. This might, for example, enable the apartment blocks to be shielded by gardens at their entrance, enhancing their appearance and greening the dominant and characterless sense of concrete.

If a change means the government and town halls interfering with the market and telling owners that the ground-floor “locales” have to go, that they have to stick to reasonable prices and they lose the rents from the units, then so be it. They’re not gaining rents as it is, while everyone else is losing out.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Back For Good: Tributes and charity

Which band or act did you see before they were famous? Want to know mine? There are a few. Genesis at an early-afternoon, Christmas-time gig at the Lyceum in London when I was barely a teenager. Graham Parker, an acquaintance from the south-west Surrey scene of the mid-seventies, of whom other alumni were Paul Weller and The Jam, remembered as the “Woking” boys and slagged off as a result with the puerile changing and addition of a letter or two, despite the dynamism of their performances that led up to “In The City”.

Wind forward some years and to a different part of England, and it was Take That. Bradford, must have been 1990. It was at a club which, for the life of me, I can’t remember the name of, despite having gone there regularly. It was a barn of a place, getting home from which, at weekends, was advisable before a certain time when some other boys, the bovver variety from Keighley, would turn up in search of the ritual bundle.

I can’t say I remember much about them, Take That, that is. “Bunch of dancing boys” was probably my disparaging comment to my girlfriend who was rather more taken with them and rather more lustful than I was. Nevertheless, their appearance allowed me to adopt a sense of superiority when they made it big. “Oh yes, I saw them when …” I go back a long way with Take That.

The band were in Alcúdia on Saturday. Not the Take That, but a make-believe one. Could it be magic? No, just a tribute act. “Just”. Just a tribute act. It can sound as disparaging as I was in 1990. Another form of superiority can abound when it comes to tribs, a supercilious dismissal of the talent that many possess and pour out, as they did on the stage at Hidropark.

It had the atmosphere of an old Radio 1 roadshow. A fading sun and fading summer, down by the seaside with clouds scudding by, threatening rain. All that was missing was the Hairy Cornflake or ooh, Gary Davies. It had held a promise, I had hoped. Would Robbie perform with Take That? Forget all that reunion talk. It didn’t happen. Robbie, appropriately enough breathing beery fumes over me, said it couldn’t be worked out with the Gary. I couldn’t figure out which one was the Gary, much as, in the absence of a blond one, I couldn’t identify the Mark. But it didn’t matter. Robbie. Rob Idol. Did we let him entertain us? He did. Supremely. So did Take That.

What was all this?

Putting this piece together, I googled Bradford and clubs, trying to jolt the memory for the name of that club. It didn’t work, but by coincidence I found a reference to a party night at a club in Bradford’s neighbour, Leeds. “Movimiento.” A Latin night. Hidropark on Saturday was a benefit concert for the breast cancer charity, “Un Lazo en Movimiento”. Sometimes, very good ideas come along, together with very good people who will make them happen. A benefit gig with trib acts is one such. From the despondency or desolation of being diagnosed with breast cancer, as the charity’s founder was, to an afternoon in late September. Relighting fires that might otherwise have died in the ashes of this most shattering of diseases.

Abba, Elvis, The Beatles, Tom Jones; they were all there, along with Robbie and Take That. Tributes, a tribute to acts and others prepared to get off their backsides and do something. It could, of course, all sound a bit Radio 1-ish, as in the “charidee, mate” spoof of Smashie and Nicey. But no. Amidst the doom-laden self-pity of resorts in crisis, it is uplifting to know that humanity prevails. And fun. And that Take That and the charity’s founder are back for good.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.