Número Uno: Can Picafort and occupancy stats

“And at number one in August, it’s Can Picafort!”

The charts for August hotel occupancy in Spain have been topped by Santa Margalida. Can Picafort, in other words. How on earth has this happened?

Back in the middle of August, the Mallorcan hotel federation was indicating that, unlike some resorts which had enjoyed decent Julys, Can Picafort had been on the opposite scale. Rather than number one, it had bombed. What a difference a month makes, especially to a resort often seen as the poor relation within the trinity of conurbation it forms together with Puerto Alcúdia and Playa de Muro.

The Spanish national statistics office is the one that has elevated Can Pic to the lofty heights of suddenly being the country’s most successful resort. Does the town get a plaque or something? The town hall should put up a new sign. “Welcome to Can Picafort, number one in Spain”, with August 2010 in small type. 50,630 foreigners and 3,981 Spaniards can’t be wrong. 97.67% occupancy. God, how they love all this junk. And for many it is junk because they don’t believe it. Maybe the chaps at the stats office just stick a pin in a map and then roll some dice to see what numbers they can come up with.

To explain Can Picafort’s ascendancy may have to do with factors like discounts, Germans and the position of the planets. I had wondered if having a fiesta during August, and one with some hugely entertaining duck tossing, might have been a further factor, but under four thousand Spaniards suggests otherwise; foreign tourists are not normally attracted by fiestas per se. Nope, quite why it’s number one is a mystery to me, and will also be to many in a resort who are prone to wearing the long face of “cree-sis” and to letting anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot to know about it. They will also let you know about the devil’s work of the all-inclusive.

Getting to grips with quite how prevalent all-inclusive is in Can Picafort is difficult. Look at certain hotels’ websites and you will find no mention of it, but go off to an agency’s site and you will. There are hotels in the resort which everyone knows to be all-inclusive and which don’t mind telling the world that they are, but there are others which are a bit coy. Of the approximately 50 hotels (depending on your definition) in the resort, it’s not unreasonable to assume that at least a third of them offer AI; the number is probably higher.

August’s celebratory occupancy figures for Mallorca as a whole, partly attributed to the rain-soaked British who fortuitously found an under-used credit card stashed in the pocket of a hastily retrieved winter overcoat, disguise the real truth – what’s being spent. Despite the positive figures on spend, issued generally rather than per resort, the all-inclusive/spend relationship has been proven. The research at Palma university says it all: an average daily spend by an AI guest that is under half of that of a guest staying B&B. There are plenty who would probably disagree with this, putting it at more like a quarter, if that.

To compensate for this 50% lower spend, you need an awful lot higher than average spend by all the other tourists. With the greatest respect to Can Picafort, it has a reputation for tourism which, how can one put it, is not at the wallet-bulging end of the market. And this is not me saying this; it’s a view often expressed by business owners. Nigh on full occupancy for the peak month of August doesn’t mean a great deal when you place it in the context of the nature of the market.

The statistics which get pumped out may be questioned by many. I’m less inclined to; they aren’t always positive. But more fundamentally, the regularity of their production and the prominence granted to them can create an illusion, or indeed a delusion. They may be correct, but they enable politicians and others to boast of “records” and of tourist seasons being “good” ones (and this one has been, according to Spain’s minister for tourism) and thus fail to appreciate how tourism is working – less at the macro level but more at the micro levels of the individual resorts.

Well done though, Can Picafort, you could do with a break, but you will also know that having a number one can be deceiving. Milli Vanilli, anyone?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

True And Fair? The number of all-inclusives

A restaurant owner in Playa de Muro said to me the other day that he had read that 65% of hotels in Mallorca were now all-inclusive. Give it another three years, and that number will be 100%, so he reckoned.

Always believe what you read. What can you believe? If the trend towards all-inclusives was this strong, it would already have been clear two years or so ago. This particular restaurant opened two years ago, some time into the season, following months of expensive work on converting one premises and re-modelling another. Why do it if the trend was already observable and if it was likely to be as great as it is now being claimed? Why do it, if all you do is moan about what the hotels are up to?

I am afraid you do have to wonder as to some business decisions, given the changes in market conditions. You do also have to wonder as to what people are prepared to believe and as to what they should make of the figures which get bandied around by various bodies. Take a piece from yesterday’s “Ultima Hora”. Reporting statistics from the tourism ministry, this says that the total number of hotels in Mallorca which offer all-inclusive only – the “exclusive” all-inclusive – is 48, representing a mere 3% of the total number of establishments. The figure is highly misleading, as it takes no account of size of hotel. More relevant is the total number of places in these 48 hotels – a bit under 23,000. Which sounds a lot, and may indeed be a lot, but there is no figure given as to the total number of places in all hotels.

Even allowing for this 3% to be correct, there is another confusion, and this has to do with the so-called “partial” all-inclusive, i.e. hotels which offer all-inclusive as an option in addition to other forms of accommodation. The hotel federation in Mallorca says that 165 establishments have this offer. Not that this gets us very far.

We are regularly subjected to these statistics, but never do we get a true and fair picture. You do have to wonder if “they” would rather “we” didn’t get it. Or perhaps an accurate picture is not available. Can the ministry or the federation be sure about all those “upgrades” that take place when a holidaymaker is checking in at reception?

But it is only when and if a complete list of hotels and the precise number of all-inclusive places is published, and by resort, that we will ever really understand the extent of all-inclusive. And it is this which is lacking. The 3% figure, for example, is irrelevant as it takes no account of local conditions – by resort. As I have mentioned before, Puerto Pollensa cannot compare with Puerto Alcúdia, Can Picafort and Playa de Muro when it comes to all-inclusive offers, as they barely exist in Puerto Pollensa.

Until such information is made available and is truly transparent, which it is not at present, restaurant owners (and others) will continue to believe what they read, even if it is not accurate. And they will continue to bemoan their luck. But they should also take a look at themselves and at their decisions. In Playa de Muro, which does have a number of all-inclusive places, the bad-luck stories all centre on these places, except in the case of some businesses, such as Boulevard and its Dakotas. They have opened a second Dakota in the resort, and the boss has told me that all-inclusives have not affected them. And if this is true, then you do have to further wonder as to factors like marketing and trying that little bit harder, especially at a time of changed market conditions. Whither, therefore, one might ask, the traditional restaurant?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.