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.

Mapping Mallorca’s Imagination

Cartographic precociousness has left its impression on me. When a child, I drew a map of our village. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time – it wouldn’t have, as I wasn’t cognizant of such politico-arcanum – that I had created a socio-geographic representation. The higher land of the village, to its southerly side, was more than just topographically elevated. It was the domain of the grand, the villa, the church, the upper-class landowning caste.

This affluent scarp on the Surrey landscape towered over the commercial centre of the village, the High Street in other words, and the modern estate of engineers and teachers, an agglomeration of the aspirational lower to middle class with its pretensions to the acquisitiveness of late 1950s and early 1960s new consumerism.

To the northerly end, and on the wrong side of the tracks, thanks to the Aldershot to Waterloo line that sliced through the village, was the council estate, a post-war south London spillover and a place of cars jacked up on bricks and the occasional gypsy encampment.

My map showed all this. Importantly, it wasn’t simply a representation, it was a social document, one that was the basis for stories, most of them outrageous fibs of course, that I invented for the people of my village.

Maps, as maps used to be, were acts of faith. You trusted in their accuracy, as you had no way of verifying them. You could see a map, but you couldn’t see the truth of it for yourself. Maps were virtual reality before the term was invented. More than this, because maps were shorn of intimacy, they were templates for invention and imagination. They hid stories and histories.

The map, therefore, has served a dual purpose, that of practicality and that of interpretation. The imagination that was released by maps has, however, become dulled. A trend towards three-dimensionalism hastened the emergence of technologies such as exist today, the most extreme removal of imagination being the obscenity of Google Street View.

Such intimacy, such real reality makes archaic some of the most fabulous creations of the cartographer. It would be impossible for Beck to diagrammatically show the London Underground nowadays. He would be considered an idiot. Yet he achieved what should have been an impossibility – functionalism made from the abstract. And in so doing, his map added power to one of London’s most enduring stories, that of the mystery of its old tube stations and lines.

Technology has not, however, replaced the map. It has digitalised it, put it onto mobile phones, zoomed into it and out of it, but the map remains, even in its basic, non-intimate state.

The tourist coming to Mallorca is confronted with map after map after map. It is the single most useful piece of information the tourist can have. Some may indeed app a map, but most don’t. They seek the utility of something that never folds properly and that flaps in a breeze. Utility is the key, so much so that a tour operator rep once told me that he and colleagues used to have to clean up transfer coaches on which adverts that had surrounded maps handed out to the newly arrived had been discarded. The tourists would tear the ads off and keep the map. Why? Who knows.

For tourists who don’t vandalise their maps, utility is served by being able to locate Bar Brit and its steak and chips and Sky TV on the corner of Calle Ikis and Calle E-griega. An advert without a means of locating an establishment for the unknowledgeable tourist isn’t a great deal of use, yet many businesses persist in using media that fail to impart such knowledge.

The local maps, of the resorts and towns, and the maps of Mallorca are almost exclusively only used in a functional way. The other purpose of the map, the interpretation, is rarely deployed you would think. Yet take a look at a map of Mallorca and you see all manner of strangeness. The name places themselves are strange. They should conjure up enquiry, but how many do actually enquire? What is it with, say, Biniali or Bunyola or the innuendo of Búger? What are their stories?

Maps should map the imagination. A map of Mallorca should be a map of Mallorca’s imagination.

You may remember a time when maps would be put up on walls and pins would be placed on them to denote this or that. You can still stick a pin in a map. Shut your eyes, and when you’ve stuck the pin in, off you go. To wherever it might be and to whatever story the place on your map is hiding.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Twenty-Twenty: Mallorca’s innovation boundary

A contactless bank card that is just waved over a terminal. A fixed solar heating system that will warm water to up to 200 degrees. Mini wind turbines for generating electricity.

None of these are revolutionary, but they are all innovative. La Caixa has introduced, with the help of Visa, a card that doesn’t require swiping; it is said to be the first of its type in a European region. Engineers and scientists from the Universitat de les Illes Balears in Palma have developed a solar energy system, ideal for hotels and being trialled at one in Montuïri, that remains fixed and doesn’t require movable machinery to incline panels towards the sun. The wind turbines of Vent Illes in Inca, specifically designed with limited land resource and also limited wind in mind, are in production.

These are examples of innovation that are coming out of Mallorca. They are examples of what you all too rarely hear about; the tapping of local engineering, scientific and technological wherewithal that will, it should be hoped, lead the island towards a more diverse industrial economy.

At the start of his administration, President Antich made much of two plans going forward to 2020. One was the “Plan Turismo”, under which were envisaged fewer tourists but greater revenues. The other was for innovation and development (I&D). The two go hand in hand. As the island becomes less dependent upon tourism, so it increases its reliance upon new technologies.

This, at least, is the theory. We still hear murmurs about I&D, but very little, if anything, about the tourism plan.

While there are examples of technological innovation, and tangible benefits being produced, the actual investment in I&D paints a rather different picture. In 2009, the amount invested in the Balearics fell to around 55 million euros. In 2005, before the Antich administration, the figure had been 183 million. The slump may well be attributable to economic circumstances, but a fall in investment to the tune of a third between 2008 and 2009 alone was not mirrored in many other regions of Spain where there were in fact healthy increases: 25% in Madrid, 12% in Aragon as examples.

The total level of I&D investment has thus fallen to under 1% of total GDP in the Balearics; the highest level in Spain is in fact in Navarre at 2.13%. The difference may not sound great, but it is troubling, nonetheless. What is also troubling is the fact that even the poorest regions of the Spain, the two African autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, have managed a major increase in I&D intensity.

Most of the innovation spend is coming from smaller businesses, those with fewer than 250 employees. This may indicate an entrepreneurial spirit, so is to be welcomed, but larger businesses have all but stopped their investments.

If one contrasts the percentage of local GDP devoted to I&D with that derived from tourism (80%, give or take the odd percentage point), one gets some perspective as to the gap which exists between the present of tourism and the future of greater technology. The contrast doesn’t give an exact picture of the relative sizes of particular industrial sectors, but it does give an indication as to the difference between the hope for technology and the reality. As Mallorca is, effectively, a one-product island, the need for more intense development is pressing, and 2020 is now an awful lot closer than it was when Antich came into government in 2007.

The political agenda, overshadowed as it is by issues not central to the economic future of Mallorca, needs to sharpen up. The discourse ahead of coming local elections will doubtless be dragged down by discussions of corruption, language and other such side-shows when it should be one in which the parties engage in clear visions of the future. A party that is willing to establish the right framework, in terms of incentives and funding, that can facilitate a more diverse economy would be one well worth listening to.

Mallorca has shown that it has the skills, the people and the appetite for innovation. All it needs is a real political will and not just the spin that was spun in 2007. If it gets it, then 2020 may yet become a reality.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

A Christmas Carol: Mallorca’s tourism funding

Father Christmas, in the form of the national tourism secretary, Joan Mesquida, has filled the stocking of the Tiny Tim, impoverished tourism coffers of Mallorca and the islands. The Scrooges of central government have been visited by the ghost of tourism past and been reminded as to how things once were and by the ghost of tourism future to show how things might be, were they not to mend their miserly ways.

Well, something like this anyway. The new compassion will see President Cratchit and his starving regional family tucking into a turkey of 54 million euros of tourism money in 2011. For now, they can eat well on the plump bird, but will it turn out to be a turkey of a different variety? What’s the money to be spent on?

The breast will go towards the Playa de Palma and Palacio de Congresos projects and towards something called the “Plataforma Digital Turística”; the legs (around 20 million euros) will go on promoting “alternative” tourism, i.e. that designed to cope with the problems caused by seasonality. One gets an awful sinking feeling and an awful vision of Marley’s ghost taunting President Cratchit that this might not be the tourism future he would hope for.

Playa de Palma and its failings we know about. The Palacio de Congresos, notwithstanding Mesquida’s Christmas bonus, is short of at least 30 million euros to enable the project to advance. The money will be welcome, but will it guarantee that the project is completed any time soon?

Then there is this “Plataforma”. This was heralded with much fanfare during the ITB fair in Berlin in March. The trumpets were blown, but the marching band was nowhere to be seen or heard. Where was the money to pay for it? Microsoft had agreed to write the score, but Bill Gates’ largesse and philanthropy do not extend to governmental projects being undertaken for nothing. There is no such thing as a free launch of a new technology initiative.

What is the “Plataforma” exactly? Peio Oiz of Microsoft has said that it isn’t a website so much as a “unique store” or interconnected digital warehouse if you like, the main advantage of which will be to bring together technology systems of tour operators, travel agencies, hotels, the complementary sector (restaurants and so on) and others. It will bring pretty much everything to do with tourism together in one place, but as a system for business efficiency as opposed to one that actively promotes to the wider tourism world.

What it really means in practice, however, remains to be seen. We should find out by April next year. Thereafter, we might also discover what sort of benefits it brings. It is, though, further evidence of the type of thing Mallorca does well, which is the development of technologies for tourism purposes. The investment seems sound enough.

Finally, there is the 20 million for “alternative tourism”. Not for the first time, you do have to wonder as to where responsibilities lie. Only a couple of days before the announcement of the 54 million euros windfall, the Council of Mallorca was saying that the Mallorca Tourism Foundation would be spending 3.6 million euros next year on its promotion.

You lose track of who does what and indeed of what promotional bodies there are. The Foundation will, though, be concentrating on what it calls “product clubs” – film, conventions, golf, hiking, cycling, yachting, culture and emerging markets. This does at least seem to chime with the 20 million euros that are being earmarked from central government’s funds. But, as has been asked before, why are there different agencies doing essentially the same things?

The best you can say is that they do at least sing from the same hymn sheet, but perhaps this is also indicative of a problem that besets tourism decision-making. It is group thought, predicated on these “product clubs”, some of which seem tenuous in terms of benefits they might actually deliver. But it is unchallenged groupthink. It is taken as gospel, and the choirs sing the same hymn over and over to little effect.

The Christmas present is not one to be rejected and placed on eBay, but before we start mistaking it too much as the cheer of the ghost of Christmas present, it should be noted that nowhere is there any mention of the bread and butter of mainstream summer tourism and its promotion. The money from central government will come in handy, but let’s not forget that the tourism ministry is in debt. What the funding for promotion in 2011 is to be is not clear.

Sadly, one also has to be sceptical about many of the announcements that are made about tourism. Go back to the fair in Berlin in March and the tourism minister, Joana Barceló, was adding to the news about the “Plataforma” by saying that there was to be a “total union” of all those in the tourist sector, a kind of grand meeting to address competitiveness. It was going to take place in September. So where the Dickens was it?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

White Heat Of Technology: Mallorca’s future

There are thirteen new commercial projects in Mallorca, the consequence of the raising of the moratorium on their building. Let’s all celebrate. Evidence of recovery, evidence of confidence in Mallorca as a place to invest. If only.

What are these projects? They are ones being undertaken by Mercadona and Lidl. Ever more supermarkets. The others are a commercial centre and a Chinese-bazar hypermarket. Why not add a few more? All McDonald’s, and then the picture would be complete and appropriate. “McJob”, low-paid employment and short-term construction work on commercial buildings that rise up quickly. The new projects are not evidence of a suddenly reinvigorated economy. They are the opposite: a response to the economic crisis-led demand for lower prices.

The director-general of trade at the Balearic Government’s trade and industry ministry believes that these projects represent a “good rhythm” of investment. They are not unwelcome, but equally they are not diversification or wealth-generation. Their arrival has more to do with the ending of the moratorium than with real investment. Moreover, they can be seen in the context of what has been happening to the island’s industrial estates. New ones come along, and are under-utilised, while old ones are abandoned by smaller businesses because of high rents or are given over to car showrooms and entertainment centres. Mallorca’s industrial, manufacturing and skills base is marginalised in favour of the unnecessary and frivolous.

The trade and industry ministry should be looking for investments beating to an entirely different rhythm to those of groceries and the fish and meat counter. The need for diversification away from the unsustainable tourism-centred economic model of Mallorca is, to be fair to the ministry and to the government, understood. A strategy for innovation and development is reaping some benefit, as evidenced by the number of businesses that have sprung up on Palma’s ParcBit technology park. Taken as a whole, they offer new employment opportunities and the prospect of business growth. Mallorca’s hopes of becoming a Silicon Valley or a silicon beach are fanciful, but this is not a reason not to follow a technological future.

The quest for an economy in Mallorca not so dangerously dependent upon tourism has been too long in the starting. The seduction of tourism has been understandable, but it has been proven to be built on the sands of shifting tourist demand and international competition. Its dominance has also reinforced the hugely unsatisfactory six-months-on, six-months-off work culture, itself unsustainable. The service model, based on tourism, supermarkets, the plethora of lawyers and architects and any number of unproductive public-sector pen-pushers, is not a solution for the long-term. A far greater mix with technology and industry founded on new technologies has to be the way forward for Mallorca.

To this end, there is some good news. In Inca, a company called Vent Illes is due to start production of wind turbines for the generation of electricity. It will create thirty jobs. Not a huge number, but it’s something. It is also indicative of the development of technology founded on local resources and know-how. Wind is very much a resource, but the Vent Illes turbines require very little wind. They are designed with the constraints caused by a limited resource – land – in mind. They are practical for locations where colossal wind farms would be untenable: other islands, for instance. It is the one eye on export possibilities that makes the Vent Illes scheme particularly interesting.

The home market, that in Mallorca, is too limited to offer local technology companies the scope for expansion and for creating significant employment opportunities. They need to be export-driven, just like Mallorca’s most successful businesses, its world-class hotel chains, have, irony of ironies, exported tourism know-how to competitor destinations.

The hope is that the incubation of new-technology businesses in ParcBit, together with the likes of Vent Illes, creates a momentum towards the clustering of further businesses, thus establishing a dynamic which, while it will not completely transform the economy, will at least send it down the road to a more diverse future. It will be one predicated on what Mallorca can do well, such as marine technology and its export, and it will mean far more than the few months of tourism employment or being a shelf-stacker at a new commercial project.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.