Feels Like Team Spirit

Easter is here and tourists are flocking in. They come expecting sun and what do they find? Oh well, never mind. What they also find is an abasement of language. While some words – gay, pants, sad – acquire additional meanings, some do not move on, but become un-words. There is no word that is as un-wordly as “team”. Yet, the poor tourist will find him and herself surrounded by, confronted by, greeted by, wished by, served by teams. Tour operators have teams, hotels have teams, even some bars have teams.

“Your so-and-so team.” We will be here to attend to your every need, we will be as one. One for all and all for one. We will all adhere to principles of the highest standards of customer service and will work to the greater good of the company we represent with shoulders-back, chest-out pride.

That’s what you are meant to believe. That’s what “team” is meant to mythically convey. It is of course managerialist doublespeak. The word means nothing of the sort, because it hardly ever means any of the above. It is an un-word.

Put two people together and you have a team. Put more than two people together and you also have a team. Actually, you don’t. What you have are more than one person as part of a pair or a group. You do not have a team. But by saying that you do, you seek to convince customers – tourists – and probably also yourself, that you are somehow guided by some light of righteousness that will indeed attend to the every need. Team is an un-word and it is usually complete drivel.

There didn’t used to be teams, except on a sports field. When management consultants realised that there were some new wads to be made, they delved into the world of sport and found that there were teams. They then highlighted examples of great teams. Liverpool FC of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the New Zealand rugby team under David Kirk in 1987, and others. They divined the factors that made for teams.

Shared objectives and goals, clearly defined responsibilities but also flexibility, clear lines of communication, total support from a leadership figure, the right systems, the right training, the right mix of abilities and skills. These were some of the factors, and some organisations set about putting them in place. They were not wrong to do so, and nor had the consultants been wrong to invent these factors. Away from the sports fields, some teams did emerge, but for the most part they were teams by name alone. Puffery, gloss, delusion and misrepresentation. Un-teams.

“You will be a team-player,” usually in a fast-moving and dynamic environment. Thus chants the recruitment ritual, and so the tourist, in the hotel, at the airport or wherever will be in the hands of just such a team-player, even if he or she isn’t and hasn’t the faintest idea what it means. But they will have said they are, because what else are they supposed to say. “No, I am a socially-inadequate loser with psychotic tendencies.”

Teams, team-players. They are lost in lexicography. But are found in teams because someone has said that they are teams and probably have the t-shirt or the uniform to prove it. And like sports teams, they will even have their names to add to the impression. Your reception team, your entertainment team, your kiddies-club team, your kitchen team, your toilet-cleaning team. They will smile from display units and will be teams.

Why do they do it? Partly because team is an un-word, one used by default and one now demanded by convention. But used properly, as in the concept of the team is applied correctly, then it can be powerful in delivering true service. Some businesses locally do deliver this, sometimes systematically perhaps and sometimes by luck or instinct. They do actually employ people who are genuinely team-players. They themselves have good team leaders. And more often than not, they are the ones which don’t puff themselves up behind the “team” facade. They do it anyway.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Love And Hate: Tourism sustainability

Back in 1992, I was forced to wade through innumerable conference papers that were devoted to sustainability. It was the year of the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Everything was being sustained, including an entire sector of the publishing industry that was getting in on the act along with all manner of consultants and advisors, as well as those on the tree-hugging, extreme-beard wing.

Business, which had already been cajoled into social responsibility, environmental audits and the like, was now shouting its sustainable credentials from whatever roof top, with its own solar panels and organic garden, that it could find. Sustainable development had arrived.

Nearly 20 years on, and sustainability has undergone a process of niching. As a consequence, we have sustainable tourism. And the Balearics are claiming its leadership, one that has been boldly stated at the second national conference on social responsibility of tourism businesses in Palma.

The year before Rio, I was on a plane to Madrid, having been on the Costa Almeria in southern Spain as part of a collaboration with a tour operator. The young Spanish girl next to me on the plane, on hearing the words “tour” and “operator”, pricked up her ears and proceeded to give me an ear-bashing back to Barajas airport.

The relationship with the tourist in Mallorca and in other parts of Spain has long been one of ambivalence. Of love and hate. Mallorca can’t live with or without tourists and tourism. A hatred of tourists has been misguided. The irresponsibility for environmental damage was not that of tourists, but of local planning that sought to exploit them and got into bed with tour operators to ensure this exploitation.

Nevertheless, tourists, as the girl on the plane was keen to point out, several times, have shown scant regard for or interest in the environmental impact of their occupation forces. Or, at least, this was the case in 1991. To what extent the tourist perception has changed remains questionable, but change it has.

This is what tour operators, the previously socially irresponsible ogres of unsustainability, now say. Thomson say so, as an example. They may not be wrong in saying so, but the mere fact of this say-so is intended also as a demonstration of their own newly-found responsibilities. It is one that plays well in PR terms and in audits of corporate governance that have made mandatory companies’ environmental righteousness.

In the Balearics, there are, it would appear, 167 companies that can call themselves socially responsible, amongst them the leading tourism businesses, i.e. the hotels. Sustainability has a business benefit, or so it is said. A commitment to environmental quality is key to competitiveness. This is the message that has come from the conference.

Though environmental responsibility may now be proven by tourism businesses, this is only one aspect of sustainable tourism. Tourists, who seemingly crave hotels that can boast of their environmental soundness, may well be smugly tucked up on the sun-lounger in full knowledge of playing a more benign role in the local ecology, but what of the rest of sustainable tourism? The environment is the big-ticket part of sustainability. It is not the same when it comes to local economies.

Sustainable tourism, responsible tourism, call it what you will, deals also in the integrity of local cultures and businesses, in the involvement of local people in decision-making, in minimising economic impacts. Not maximising, minimising.

The market, so the tour operators and other tourism businesses would wish to persuade us, is driving environmental correctness. The market is also, however, driving in a different direction. How, for example, do local decision-making involvement and the minimisation of economic impacts square with all-inclusives? I suspect that the answer is that they don’t.

One needs to ask on whose terms tourism is sustainable. Ultimately, it isn’t the local economy’s. It is the market’s. What has occurred is that the environmental harm of 1991 and that airborne ear-bashing and the 1992 prescriptions of Rio have indeed been addressed, but replaced by a different harm. Pre-Rio, it was the market. Today, it is still the market. Just that the symptoms are different.

Sustainable. For whom?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Trying It On: Compensation claims

The armies of non-working British society spend their time glued to the box, waiting for ads that will promise huge payouts for suing cigarette companies which they claim have made them stub out their fags on their faces. They do so, in between watching Jeremy Kyle and some half-wits who look as though they have stubbed fags out on their faces. Repeatedly.

Compensation culture, blame culture, money-for-old-rope culture. Holidaymakers are some of the worst when it comes to pressing, shall we call them, “ambitious” claims. Give holidaymakers enough rope and you’d think they might hang themselves, but no, they all too often get away with it. And were they to hang themselves, rest assured it would be someone else’s fault.

You can well imagine that, rather than the normal pre-holiday routine of making a packing list and ensuring the passport’s valid, there are those drawing up other lists – ways of seeking compensation which pays for the holiday plus some extra to cover the cost of the fags that they then stub out on their faces.

Brits will try anything on in order to extract some recompense, be it for tripping over a stone on a beach or claiming they got food poisoning in the local bar when in fact they had failed to properly defrost some chicken they had bought from a supermarket and ended up with salmonella. Or perhaps they sue the supermarket.

There are any number of absurd complaints that tourists make. Thomas Cook once produced a list. It included such gems as: “There are too many Spanish people. The receptionist speaks Spanish. The food is Spanish. Too many foreigners.” Or, “we had to queue outside with no air-conditioning”. There was also, famously, the chap who was awarded compensation because there were too many Germans in his hotel.

These sorts of complaint are what the local tourism industry refers to as the “sport” that Brit tourists engage in. Trying anything on. It’s a whole different type of sport to the one that tourism officialdom might hope that holidaymakers would be engaging in.

There are genuine and reasonable claims for compensation; some which are genuine and reasonable enough for them to drag on for years, as with the claims against Thomson by holidaymakers who contracted cryptosporidium at Can Picafort’s Son Bauló hotel in June 2003 and which were finally ruled on in January this year. But there are claims which are anything but reasonable; this is the “sport” of the holiday compensation claim.

Thomson may have dragged its heels, unreasonably so, you might think, but it, or rather TUI as a whole, has been plagued by serial compensation seekers. The group now has a black list which can be used to refuse bookings by any of its component companies. There are also websites which share information about the serial complainer.

However, the complaint coming from hoteliers in Mallorca is that tour operators tend to be all too quick to accede to compensation claims, and that the operators then claw back settlements from outstanding invoices to be paid to hoteliers. For the Mallorcan hotel, or it could be any other type of business, there is a dilemma. The judgement on the claim is not made locally but in the UK, under UK law and with the full force of aggressive ambulance-chasing firms of lawyers.

Claims can of course be challenged, but to do so would require lawyers and the defendant going to the expense of appearing in court. It is rarely worth the aggravation or the cost, even if settlements run into several thousand pounds for minor accidents. A difference between the UK and Spain is that the level of compensation in the UK is not set, which can result in high settlements, ones that are pursued vigorously by the ambulance-chasers who are not unknown to vigorously seek out potential claimants at airports and who make their services well-known via the internet and daytime TV.

There is negligence and then there are accidents and downright irresponsibility on behalf of the holidaymaker. If you are lagered up, dance on a table, fall off and break a limb, can this really be the fault of the hotel or bar? It isn’t, but there will probably be a compensation-seeking lawyer in the UK who will make out that it is, and the hotel or bar will, more often than not, be left to foot the bill for a broken foot.

It’s not clear how much spurious or unreasonable claims for compensation are costing Mallorca’s hotels, but costing them they are. Black lists may stop some serial complainers turning up, but there are others who will take their place, looking for some pretext with which to try and extract damages that might pay for the holiday. The hoteliers might wish that the situation were different to that of the clauses which cover package holidaymakers, such as that which obtains for those who book privately in Mallorca. For them, the boot is firmly on the other foot, broken or not. Trying to get compensation from a Spanish court.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

All That Noise And All That Sound: Playa de Palma

“The noise that is made does not correspond with the reality.”

This could be a maxim for much of what occurs – or rather doesn’t – in Mallorca, especially when it comes to major projects. Never a truer word spoken, and it took a German to speak them. A couple of weeks ago TUI’s Volker Böttcher expressed his frustration with plans for the regeneration of Playa de Palma. “We hear many things but don’t know what they will be.” All that noise and all that sound.

Playa de Palma, where TUI are concerned, is important. It represents a stable, staple even, element of the tour operator’s portfolio. Böttcher said that in twenty years time it will still be important, but this future importance doesn’t overlook present deterioration and a future which includes new and exclusive hotels. This is meant to be the future. Or was. The plan for Playa de Palma is in disarray.

The noise surrounding the regeneration has emanated from far and wide, even from higher echelons of national government. The iconic significance that has been attached to the project makes the wailing because of its collapse, partial or total, that much louder amidst the sounds of false icons and ambitions crashing into the bay of Palma.

The project has always been highly ambitious, which is not a reason for its deserving to fail. It has envisaged a transformation of the extended resort, one designed to establish long-term competitiveness for what is the most emblematic of Mallorca’s tourist areas. The scale of the ambition has, though, been its downfall.

The regeneration has been proposed for what are currently productive hotels and for residences. It is this that distinguishes it from urban renewal programmes, some of them aimed at creating tourism which doesn’t already exist, and from altogether smaller, essentially one-off projects to upgrade coastal towns, such as have been the case in the UK. Add to this the need for wholesale expropriation of hotels and dwellings, and what you have with Playa de Palma is something of a leap into the unknown, the remodelling of a tourist area in people’s lifetimes. As far as I know, it is unique.

Talk of expropriation raises its own issues. Apart from a psychological dimension, there is that of agreeing valuation and all the likely legal wrangles that would arise, the swiftness with which compensation might be forthcoming (and it hasn’t always been swift in the past with other infrastructure schemes) and precisely where the money would come from, not just for compulsory purchase but also for the whole project. There is the mere matter of some four billion euros to be found, roughly a third of it from the public purse. We now have the Balearics president calling on the European Union to cough up for tourist-resort modernisation. For Playa de Palma in other words.

The consortium that is overseeing the plan accepts that it has made mistakes, mainly of a presentational nature. It believes though that regeneration cannot be effected without expropriation and re-building. It’s right. It can’t be. When its director of planning, Joseba Dañobeitia, speaks of hotels built from the ’60s into the ’90s being incapable of competing with other, newer destinations, he should also be adding that whole resorts can’t compete. Playa de Palma, and the same applies elsewhere, is hamstrung by its past, by having been a first-mover in mass tourism and having been left behind both by greater modernity and by tourist expectations.

But what is now left of the regeneration plan is some tarting-up and a piecemeal approach whereby individual owners can seek to enter into agreements with the consortium for their property or land to be purchased. Rather than an integrated, root-and-branch approach, you end up with the worst of all solutions; something which is neither here not there.

The consortium insists that what has been envisaged is not a “revolution” or “luxury” but simply an improvement to tourism quality. The trouble is, as TUI’s boss has alluded to, that no one has been clear as to what has been really envisaged. Hoteliers insist that what is needed is a maintenance of three-star accommodation, that which satisfies the sort of market that has been meat and drink to Playa de Palma for years. Perhaps so, but going forward would this be acceptable to the likes of TUI which has called for hotel upgrades? The plan, in basic terms, is not complicated. Aesthetic improvements and better hotels, and if this means fewer hotels, then so be it; there is over-supply as it is.

Playa de Palma will remain important to TUI, but twenty years is a long time. It has been long enough to see Playa de Palma and much of Mallorca engulfed by what maybe should have been foreseen but wasn’t, namely the emergence of quality rivals. I have no wish to make light of the proposals for expropriation and of the impact this would have, but they should send in the bulldozers tomorrow. And not just in Playa de Palma.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Empire Of The Sun: German and British tourism

The sunbeds’ battle has been won. The question is how long the war will drag on. Some hoteliers are preparing for the withdrawal of the vanquished, accepting the dominant hotel occupancy force. Sunbedsraum. Peace in our time. The resorts quietening to the sound of retreating Tommies now whistling in the distance and drowning in the horizon where the sun goes down on a modern empire.

From the mid-70s to the mid-80s, at the height of imperial might, the British represented 40% of the foreign tourism market on Mallorca’s beaches. It was a tourism army that, in its numbers, eclipsed that of Germany. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century the percentages have been more than just reversed. German tourism, at around 50% of the total, is double that from Britain.

It is indeed the case that some hotels are adapting to a weaker British market or are contemplating the previously unthinkable – a post-British market. This may all be in response to the short-term shock of the past couple of years and the collapse of the pound, but as alternative tourism markets emerge for the hotels and tour operators to sink their teeth into, could it be we that we are witnessing the end of Mallorca’s Britannic tourism industry?

Chances are that we are not. Talk of the apocalyptic demise of British tourism – not now, but some time – is an absurd exaggeration. These things have a habit of going in cycles. German tourism itself has not always enjoyed a completely harmonious relationship with Mallorca, despite a love affair between Germany and the island that goes back half a century. Not so long ago, Mallorca had to repair a rupture caused by a perception that German tourists were somehow unwelcome. Repaired it was, and the relationship has been given new life.

But the relationship with Germany has always seemed, even during the period of British dominance, to be stronger. And the relationship goes deeper than just tourism. It can be seen on the high streets, such as they are – Lidl, Schlecker, Müller and, at some point, Media Markt. Two of the best-known estate agencies are of German origin – Kühn & Partner and Engel & Völkers. TUI is bigger than its rival Thomas Cook, a company which has reclaimed its “Britishness” since the MyTravel merger, but which retains a strong German flavour. Air Berlin is more than simply an airline shuttling German tourists to and from the island; its local boss has headed the Mallorca Tourism Board.

It is a relationship, therefore, which has appeared to be altogether more “serious”. “Real” business rather than just the bar. Not that there aren’t of course German-run bars. There are. But it’s an oddity that even in a place like Alcúdia, which is not as “British” as some might have you believe, the German bar is thin on the ground, almost to the point of non-existence.

This “seriousness” may all have to do with the nature of the relationship and a competing historical perception of Mallorca. For years, many a Brit would look down his or her nose at Mallorca, the consequence of an image problem that was only partly accurate. Notwithstanding the emergence of a beer, sausage and oompah German tourism culture in the likes of Arenal, Mallorca did not suffer to anything like the same degree from being viewed negatively in Germany.

The Germans have bought into the whole “paradise island” deal in a way that the British have never done. Clichéd it is, but the Germans use the expression quite unashamedly. For Mallorca and its tourism at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is just as well that they do. TUI says that its winter tourism to Mallorca from Germany has started with “much dynamism” and that next summer there will be a growth in the numbers of German tourists.

The Germans are still very much in love with Mallorca, but even with the Germans, the signs are there. More tourists next year, but more in all-inclusives. Hotel prices have been lowered while those in other destinations have increased. And the Germans are being tempted into a different affair, that with Turkey. TUI in Germany now takes more tourists to Turkey than it does to Mallorca.

The battle in Mallorca may have been won, but the eastern front has been well and truly breached. And that is a war Mallorca is in danger of losing, if indeed it hasn’t already lost it.

“We lived an adventure. Love in the summer.”
“Lie in the sand and visualise. Like it’s ’75 again.”

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

New For Old: The all-inclusive mixed message

“Mallorca has worked as an example of tourism development except in the case of all-inclusive.”

So says Michael Tenzer, a senior director of Thomas Cook. A different company director had suggested that the “battle for the all-inclusive” had ended. It would appear not to have; next year will witness a 10% increase in the number of places Thomas Cook offers which are all-inclusive. In the name of tourism development, one takes it, comes more all-inclusive.

When Herr Tenzer suggests all-inclusive underperformance, he is not talking solely about the volume of AI. There is also the issue of its quality. Never fear. There is always Joana Barceló and her tourism ministry quality inspectorate which has stepped up its scrutiny of the low-grade lager.

Whether the all-inclusive “battle” is over or still being waged, at the same time as Thomas Cook is announcing an increase in its AI offer, the research organisation, the Gadeso Foundation, is reporting that the so-called complementary offer (bars, restaurants etc.) appears “mortally wounded”. Every battle has its victims.

It befits a victor to be magnanimous. Thomas Cook is due to roll out a project in Santa Ponsa in 2011 which is designed to take all-inclusive out of the confines of the hotel and onto the terraces of neighbouring bars and restaurants. It sounds a good idea, but how on earth is it supposed to work?

The notion of a sort of mixed all-inclusive whereby guests could go to nearby establishments and still benefit from brandishing their wristbands was flagged up back in March this year. A “nuevo concepto” of all-inclusive was how it was being branded. I understand that such a system already operates in a limited way in Playa de Palma, but there it involves hotels and outside restaurants within the same group of ownership. In March, the reaction to the new concept from the hotel federations, the association of small- to medium-sized businesses and restaurant associations was underwhelming. They couldn’t see how it could be viable, given the complexity of administration.

Why is such a system being contemplated? The altruistic interpretation is that tour operators wish to help the mortally wounded bars and restaurants. I can break thee, but I can re-make thee. For all the lambasting of hotels that subscribe to the AI doctrine, it might be considered who have been driving it – the tour operators. One can also interpret the mixed AI as an admission of responsibility for problems that have arisen within the bar and restaurant sector.

A second interpretation is that the tour operators are acting as economic engineers, assuming leadership for establishing arrangements which benefit more than simply themselves and the hotels. Sound social responsibility perhaps, but one based on countering the endless moans of a complementary sector that has done precious little for itself in trying to combat the onward march of AI. If they, the bars and restaurants, can’t do it for themselves, i.e. forge relationships with hotels and/or new products, then someone has to do it for them.

Then, however, there is the issue of quality. Anecdotes in resorts such as the AI-abundant Alcúdia or Can Picafort are legion when it comes to holidaymakers seeking out better food and drink than that served up in many an all-inclusive hotel. Notwithstanding Sra. Barceló’s army of inspectors, perhaps there is a recognition that some hotels are simply incapable of providing good service. And this isn’t totally their fault. They have to work within the constraints of their own economics.

And then there are the guests themselves. True, there are those who are totally disinclined to shift themselves from the poolside. It’s the mentality that “Benidorm” captured so perfectly. “Why go outside, when it’s all free?” It might remain “free” under the mixed AI arrangement, but it creates an impulse to step outside the hotel walls, even if it would be to just go across the street. There are though many AI guests who don’t want to remain confined, and it is the recognition of this fact that speaks volumes for why Mallorca has not developed in terms of AI as Thomas Cook might have liked it to.

All-inclusive in Mallorca both works and doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work for the very simple reason that there is so much outside the hotel. Neither the island’s resorts nor many of its hotels are designed with AI in mind. The symbiosis between the hotels and the outside bars and restaurants and their shared living space are fundamental to the ongoing success of Mallorca. Disrupt this relationship, wound it so badly, and you cease to have resorts. The new concept of AI is something of the old concept of mutual benefit that worked well for so many years dressed up in newspeak.

How this new concept could work, whether it could work is yet to be answered. The practicalities are not insignificant, and quite what benefits the bars and restaurants would derive, and which bars and restaurants would derive them, are open to question. But the concept deserves to be given a go. The experiences in Santa Ponsa in 2011 could be very important.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

It Gets Knocked Down

Then it gets up again. Eventually. Maybe.

The re-development of Playa de Palma in the south of the island has been talked about for years. It has taken on a mythical dimension in that it is meant to hold the key to a prosperous Mallorcan tourist second life. A thing of beauty, unlike what grew up in the sixties and has been more the stuff of nightmares ever since.

Playa de Palma means not just Palma but also Can Pastilla (which is in Palma) and Arenal (which isn’t). When I first came to Mallorca – in 1969 – it was to Arenal, in the days before it was colonised by Stein und Sauerkraut. Much of the area is a dump. It was then, but holidaymakers lacked the sophistication to realise it. They were in awe of the notion of the cheap and available “foreign” holiday. From the room in the hotel I could see a shanty town. It isn’t there now, but as a young and idealistic teenager, it left a lasting impression – one of the obscene dichotomy between wealth and poverty that were the early years of island tourism, and one that has been, and is being repeated in other countries.

When mass tourism arrived on the back of the package deal, Clarkson and BEA, Playa de Palma was the Mallorcan Red Barrel to the Spanish mainland’s Lloret, Benidorm and Torremolinos Luton Airport. It’s where it all started. There is a mitigating factor to the grossness of what emerged. The Costas and Mallorca were first movers in mass tourism. Like any initiators of an “industrial” revolution, as with Britain and its industrialisation, there were no manuals to go by, no mistakes to learn from. Thus, the errors were made, and one has today’s rotting corpse of the tourism progenitor.

They want to knock a lot of it down – residences and hotels – and erect what might be more a palace of Palma, one to compete with the oriental pleasure domes of Turkey or the pyramidal extravagance of Egyptian accommodation. Understandably, not everyone is too keen on the idea. The protests have caused them, the politicians, to backtrack. A new “definitive” plan is promised later this year, one that will replace the previous definitive plan. Even this may be delayed. There are elections next spring.

Without the re-development, so it is being said, Playa de Palma has no economic future. The architects are among those saying this, to which one might suggest that they would, wouldn’t they. Wrapped up in all of this is the notion that the beautification of what is a generally unlovely stretch of coastline will bring benefits for out-of-season tourism – to Palma itself. This might be true, but as with any pronouncement regarding non-sun and beach tourism, there is more than a hint of the ill-defined blue sky, or blue waters if you prefer in the Playa’s case. No one knows of course. Which isn’t to say that it shouldn’t be done. It should be. But lurking in the background are two things. One, as ever with Mallorca, is the suspicion that someone (or more than just someone) stands to “benefit”. No project on the island can be viewed in any other way; history, much of it recent, is too littered with examples to suggest otherwise. Two, there is the what-about-me question. If there is seriousness as to the overall improvement to the coastal resorts, then Playa de Palma is, or should be, merely the first port of call. You can add on others – Magalluf, Can Picafort, parts of Alcúdia, for example.

Yet amidst all the debate and the argument, there is another factor, and that is, as has been pointed out by one architect asked to voice an opinion about Playa de Palma, the influence of tour operators. TUI, for example, wants four-star hotels. Good for TUI. But what will they fill them with? Do you dismantle resorts and establish new, bright and shiny, all-inclusive hotels instead? Because this is what is likely to happen. And so a different type of obscenity, one for the twenty-first century’s mass tourism, emerges. The result may be palatial, it may be architecturally more wonderful, it may fill new hotels, but it may also simply create division through what become little more than gated-community ghettoes lining the beaches.

Knock it down by all means, but be very aware that the Phoenix that rises from the burnt ashes of the old hotels may be a monster.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

It Just Gets Worse: All-inclusive comes to Puerto Pollensa

There was a report in “The Diario” yesterday that should, despite the heat, send shivers through many in Puerto Pollensa. Hotels in the resort are admitting defeat. They have resisted all-inclusive, but can no longer do so. To not offer it could mean having to close.

The hotels don’t necessarily want AI, but the tour operators do. The report makes clear, as should be clear to those in other resorts, that AI has largely been driven by tour operator pressure. The good news may be that only a few hotels in the port will go down this route next year. That’s one view. The less good news is an alternative view that it will be more widespread and will be a necessity.

One can guess at which hotels might move to AI: those not on the “front line”. But one can also imagine certain establishments on the front that might embrace AI. Currently, as far as one is aware, only one hotel in Puerto Pollensa has some form of AI, and that is Club Sol, where it might be argued that it is appropriate, given the location. (Club Pollentia doesn’t count as it’s more Alcúdia than Puerto Pollensa, while Duva, on its website at any rate, says nothing about AI.) Whatever the current situation is, from next year, all-inclusive will, in all likelihood, not be out of town.

There is no point in revisiting the arguments for and against all-inclusive; they are well enough known. While these arguments focus on the market that AI creates and on the impact on local businesses, they don’t necessarily deal with the character of a resort. In Puerto Pollensa, the chances are that this – the character – will change, though this might merely be a continuation of a change that has been occurring for some years.

Where Puerto Pollensa is different to resorts such as Puerto Alcúdia and Can Picafort is that it has a high level of residential tourism (holiday lets in other words) relative to hotel accommodation, so all-inclusive might have less of an impact, but impact it will most certainly have. When the protest against the sorry state of affairs in the Moll took place in early June, calls for either more hotels or improvements to hotels would surely not have had AI in mind. The protesters are likely to see their wishes met. More tourists could be on their way, but not ones they might have hoped for. The target of protests may well shift, and while the town hall has it within its gift to do something about the state of the streets and rubbish collection, it has no power to prevent all-inclusives; they are for the tour operators, the hotels and the tourism ministry (now presumably the Council of Mallorca as well) to determine. And as ever, what the tour operators want, the tour operators get.

Although some hoteliers take the view that all-inclusive is just a case of good business and that they have no responsibility for what happens to local bars, restaurants and the rest, not all agree. In Puerto Alcúdia, the director of a hotel that has stood against AI and who doesn’t like AI precisely because of its effect on businesses, has become almost resigned to the fact that his hotel will have to accept the inevitable. And the inevitable can bring advantages to hotels, other than just guests. What is sometimes overlooked is that tour operators, granted longish-term contracts with certain hotels, will help financially with improvements. So long as they get something in return. And that, increasingly, means all-inclusive. Pollensa’s mayor recently suggested that hotels in Puerto Pollensa may not all be “adequate”. Those which are not may well become so. Adequate enough to stop guests patronising the local eateries.

This should not happen. But it’s going to. A bad day.

* Those of you who do the native may want to read the full article. Here’s the link: http://www.diariodemallorca.es/part-forana/2010/08/02/hoteles-port-ceden-presiones-operadores-ofertar-incluido/591491.html

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Clutching At Straws: Concerts and tourism responsibilities

Straw, clutch. Clutch, straw. Elton, Andrea. Andrea, Elton.

On 4 September, Elton John and Andrea Bocelli will be playing Real Mallorca’s stadium. Not at football, but at their day jobs – in the evening. At the risk of offending fans, excuse me if I stifle an unenthusiastic yawn. I may well be out of tune with my audience, some of whom – you, in other words – may be in the audience. At up to a mere 169 euros a pop. Pop music meets the classics at classic prices – they’ve got to be kidding.

Whenever, which isn’t very often, a major name in the music world – or two, as the case may be – pitches up in Mallorca, excitement goes into overdrive, among some. And where Reg and Bocelli are concerned, the government’s tourism ministry is getting excited. Together with the concert’s promoters, it is eyeing the gig up as a means of attracting tourists. Straw, clutch.

The stadium will be able to hold 34,000 for the concert. Not exactly Wembley, but still a fair number of people, but not so many for an island with an 800,000 or so population plus all the others who are knocking about. Two major artists. The tickets went on sale on 21 June. It is now the end of July. Hmm.

The ministry reckons that tour operators will be able to offer packages to come to Mallorca and take in the event. It will “prove a vital adjunct to the success of marketing the Balearic Islands this season” (quote from “The Bulletin”).

Let’s just consider this. Tour operators may indeed be able to offer packages, but isn’t this all a little late? How many tourists would actually come? However many might will make barely a dent in the overall tourism intake over a whole season. A season that, by implication from that quote, has already been something of a success. Has it really? The belated marketing of Reg sounds less like an enhancement of the tourist season and more one of desperation to sell tickets.

Elsewhere in tourism ministry-land, a previous bonkers suggestion that its responsibilities should be handed to the Council of Mallorca has not been taken up fully, but it has been taken up in part. Some of the ministry’s duties, those related to the regulation and administration of tourism businesses, are to go to the council, which presumably will allow the ministry to concentrate on more glamorous tasks, such as trying like hell to fill Mallorca’s stadium when Elton comes to town. It doesn’t really matter where the responsibilities reside, except for the fact that it will have the effect of beefing up the council when the reverse should be happening. If they want to save money, then they should slim it down not fatten it.

The ministry is also to create yet another damn body, this one a “mesa” (table) around which will sit government institutions and the private sector and have a chinwag about boosting some “alternative” tourism, such as trekking and bird-watching. Fair enough perhaps, but not if it merely creates a further link in the not always joined up chain of tourism promotion and not if, as one fears, this “alternative” tourism is largely illusory. Straw, clutch.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Smoke And Mirrors: Why friendliness is spurious

Alcúdia friendly, so it was said on 16 June. It’s not the only resort in Mallorca that is friendly and not the only resort where tourists can expect excellent hospitality. “The Diario”, as it did when interviewing tourists in Alcúdia, following tour operators’ arguments that greater friendliness needed to be shown to visitors, has gone on another walkabout – to different places across the island. Again the impetus was what tour operators were saying about service and that all-important friendliness, or the lack of them. And what they have again discovered is a situation quite removed from what the tour operators have been alleging.

While one has to get into perspective a few sources being cited in a couple of articles, the paper’s findings – including the fact that tourists come back year after year – does make one wonder quite what has been behind the tour operators’ suggestions as to a lack of friendliness or poor service. Maybe, just maybe, they’re using them as a smoke-screen.

There was an interesting letter in “The Bulletin” yesterday. The points it raised were well-made, and it came from someone who was behind a movement in Calvia to correct the problems faced by bars and others. Among the points was the fact that tour operators are saying that were bars and restaurants to stay open – in winter – and support hotels that get their prices right, then they would arrange packages. Yet they also say that Mallorca needs more all-inclusive, as the market wants it.

Forget the winter tourism element, the point about all-inclusive says it all. Bars and restaurants staying open while all-inclusive gets cranked up are mutually exclusive. The tour operators’ line of thinking is thoroughly illogical – and they surely know it to be so. Which is why they may be raising that smoke-screen of friendliness and service; it’s a red herring.

It is the tour operators that have caused the problems with Mallorca’s tourism, just as – for the most part – they also brought about the success. True though it may be that bars and restaurants had it easy, thanks to the benevolence of hotels and yes the tour operators, but as the letter-writer points out these bars and restaurants were needed, encouraged. Not now they aren’t. Saying that bars and restaurants should stay open, while simultaneously taking away their business because of a growth in all-inclusive is a fatuous and idiotic argument.

England’s humiliation
It was embarrassing. It was quieter than Slovenia. Of course it was. And now the bars will be lamenting the defeat. No great troupes of Rooneys and Gerrards. No great sales of foamy. Sadly I feel I may have been prescient when I said on 17 June that “England will prove to be rubbish, and Germany will win it.”

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.