It’ll Be Lonely This Christmas Without Andy Murray

Sports commentators have developed a style of expressiveness which, at moments of triumph, combines a knowing tone of we-knew-it-would-happen-didn’t-we with a precision of stating each word as though followed by an imaginary full stop. We might describe this inflection as “doing a Motson”, after its earliest known exponent. Dan Maskell would never have intoned thus. The only way we knew Dan was still with us was when he would stir from his slumberous drone with a suddenly animated “ooh, I say” with which to startle awake his television audience. Sports commentary of the current day has, by contrast and thanks to Sky, Five Live and talkSPORT, added hypomania to the Motsonic glottal stop. And so it was the other day. On a whooping Five Live. “Rafael. Nadal. From. Manacor. In. Mallorca.”

The words had a strange effect on me, one of a sense of territorial superiority. It was the specific mention of Manacor that emphasised it. I know that place, thought I, even if my acquaintance with the town is limited to sitting in a rush-hour traffic-jam. Nadal has gone from being from Spain, to being from Mallorca, to being from Manacor. It is no longer sufficient for commentators to refer just to the island. Nadal’s celebrity has made him über-Mallorcan. The detail of his Mallorcan-ness grows with his every Open championship; at the Australian we can expect to learn the names of all his neighbours. Dan would never have stood for this. He wouldn’t, for example, have let on that Roy Emerson came from Blackbutt, which was probably just as well.

Nadal is famous not just for coming from Mallorca but also for being the only famous Mallorcan ever. There are others who have had fame thrust upon them, but they are famous for not being famous, like the Catalan author and polymath Ramon Llull. No, Nadal is that famous that he has become Mallorca, or is it the other way round. And he is one of us. Which of course he isn’t, if you happen to be British. But Nadal has been adopted because of the alternative – the Scottish Player, one forever cursed by monotonic moroseness and by slipping up in the third round, so it is best not to mention his name in order to avoid the bad luck that doing so would bring.

One of Nadal’s virtues lies with his being perceived as “a nice boy”, something to which the Scottish Player would find it hard to aspire. It is this, together with the fact that he is the only Mallorcan anyone has ever heard of, that secures him gigs as the face and chest of Mallorcan (Balearic) promotion. And Nadal has just won his first US Open. Now might be the time for a bit of Mallorcan marketing stateside. The only problem is that tourism chiefs are spending their time either about to go into prison or in China, enticing a breed of Chinese tourist with promises of cheap bazars on every Mallorcan high street. That’s not the only problem.

Sadly, despite Nadal’s celebrity, tourism promotion involving him has been a complete disaster. Admittedly, it doesn’t help having an uncle/trainer who slags off Parisians as being “really stupid” when you’ve forked out 400 grands worth of promotional budget to target the French market – as was the case during last year’s French Open. And it also doesn’t help when the director of Spanish tourism in Paris agrees with Uncle Toni. A tourettic momentary lapse of diplomacy perhaps, but it was symptomatic of the Nadal nadir of Mallorcan tourism marketing.

What else, with hindsight though, could you have expected? We now know, courtesy of testimonies before the judge in the corruption case involving the tourism promotion agency (IBATUR), that there was such uncontrolled and unmanaged profligacy at the agency that it doubled the money for the French campaign in providing for a museum of tourism that never came about, while it is alleged that the agency was never subject to proper financial governance. If the agency was capable of playing fast and loose with public money, which it was, it was equally capable of being incompetent when it came to doing what it was meant to do – marketing. Nadal should seek to distance himself from any association, however indirect, with the agency’s cowboys and their legacy.

But Bon Nadal, good old Mr. Christmas, will probably find himself still featuring in ads on some obscure channel at two in the morning, just after an equally obscure sports commentator has finished his Motson at the end of an under-19 handball event from the Ukraine. And come Christmas, as the holiday ads start to kick in, he’ll still be there, floating somewhere in satellite land. But at least he will be there, unlike the Scottish Player; you wouldn’t even get him as the face of a wet week in the Highlands and Islands. It’ll be lonely this Christmas without … Don’t say it, just don’t say it.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Oh Well (Or Not): Bienestar Activo and Ironman

Three months are a long time in tourism promotion. 20 June – “All Being Well”. Now – all’s not so well. Strategies are meant to be long-term, but not if they don’t even get off the ground.

“Bienestar Activo” is – was – the brand name for a four-year strategic plan unveiled back in June. The plan was for the municipalities of Alcúdia, Muro and Santa Margalida, together with the local hotel associations and the tourism ministries at both central and local government levels, to promote various sporting activities in the resorts as a means of bolstering off-season tourism. The plan envisaged the spending of a tad under 4.5 million euros over the next four years. Annually, the central ministry would have provided 371,000 euros, a sum matched by the local ministry and also by the three town halls between them. The scheme has collapsed.

Soon after the plan was announced, I contacted the Alcúdia-Can Picafort hotel association, looking for an interview. There was an email exchange, Alcúdia’s tourism councillor was also contacted, a date provisionally established, and then nothing. At the time I found this slightly strange. As it turns out, maybe it wasn’t.

What I wanted to know was the exact nature of the plan, given that the activities – cycling, Nordic walking, hiking, canoeing – were already established. What was the 4.5 million meant to be spent on? I guess that I – we – will never find out. There are no funds to be forthcoming from the ministries.

There was some inkling as to how the money would have been doled out – in general. There were four, vague elements – organisation, specialisation of the destination (whatever that meant), improvement of competitiveness and marketing. But at the presentation which “launched” the project, amongst those attending – mayors, councillors and those as ever hoping for some benefit without actually putting their hands in their pockets, i.e. hoteliers and restaurant owners – there were no representatives of the ministries. The absence of government may tell a story. Had the ministries actually signed up to the whole thing? Or maybe they were going to, and then thought, as I had done, well, what is this all about? Those four aims seemed ill-defined; they may well also have been ill-conceived.

Of course, another explanation is more straightforward, namely government cuts, both nationally and local. Three months in tourism promotion isn’t a long time when it is already known that money is tight, so much so that the tourism ministries at regional and central levels have been merged with others as a way of saving money. Was this plan ever a goer or was it just some sort of PR stunt, and a poor one at that, given that it was unclear what it actually entailed?

The mayors, explaining the plan’s abandonment, say that they will look at it differently in the hope of bringing it back, which is probably a euphemism for saying that it will be quietly forgotten about. Maybe it should be. And maybe it would have been better had they never gone public, because this is a further embarrassment, certainly where Alcúdia is concerned, in terms of grandish tourism promotional schemes. The estación náutica concept has been quietly forgotten about, despite the fanfare that was blown when it surfaced a year and a half ago.

Fortunately for Alcúdia, something rather more concrete has emerged. Some good news with which to hopefully bury the less good news of the bienestar debacle. Thomas Cook and the regional tourism ministry have announced that an Ironman 70.3 triathlon is to be staged in Alcúdia on 14 May next year and also in 2012. Apart from some 2,500 anticipated competitors, the tour operator reckons the event will attract 20,000 visitors. I’m sceptical, but I’ll bow to the company’s knowledge. Nevertheless, the triathlon could well prove to be positive, and perhaps its potential does have something to do with the bienestar falling by the wayside. If you want to attract sports tourism, then better to go with a flagship-style event, rather than the vagueness of what was on offer. Relief for Alcúdia then, but what Muro and Santa Margalida make of it, who knows.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Battlefield: Hotels go on the all-inclusive offensive

There we were thinking that some new model of all-inclusive might be on the horizon, one that embraces bars and restaurants into the system. We might have been thinking this; the tour operators might have been suggesting it. The hotels don’t seem in any mood to go along with it. This is the impression formed by statements from heads of hotel associations in Menorca and Ibiza; there has not been a similar statement from Mallorca, only ones that are more veiled in their sympathy with views in other Balearic islands.

The other impression is that the hotels are going on the offensive in defending the all-inclusive offer. Or perhaps this does all tie in with the tour operators’ mixed-offer all-inclusive (discussed on 12 March) in that positions are being adopted, with the hotels taking an assertive high ground from which they might be seen as the good guys in admitting outside bars and restaurants into their all-inclusive “club”. The tour operators are demanding an increase in all-inclusive while at the same time wanting the so-called “complementary offer” to be a part of it. The hotels, seen as the villain in the all-inclusive piece, seem to want to play hardball.

The picture of bars and restaurants being painted by the hotels is one of complaining and of a failure to do anything to attract tourists. It is the hotels, so the argument goes, that assume all the risk and that make the effort; the complementary offer is being challenged to step up to the plate in attracting tourists. Moreover, the hotels’ line is that they have every right to challenge incentives such as happy hours and “menus” (presumably they mean menus del día) offered by bars and restaurants. This challenge comes and has come in the form of all-inclusive.

We seem to be heading to a state of all-out war between the hotels and the complementary sector. The hotels, in addition to all-inclusive, have been moving ever more into the territory once secured by the outside businesses – more entertainment, TV (Sky and football), even Sunday roasts. Entertainment may actually be cut back this summer as a way of reducing costs, but in mostly all other ways the hotels are attacking the complementary offer. This war could be a precursor to some truce or negotiated settlement, e.g. the mixed-offer all-inclusive, but what the hotels are angling at is that it should not be they alone who assume the costs and risks of marketing to get tourists to come in the first place.

The hotels are overstating the case; they are but one aspect of promotion. Nevertheless, they have a point when accusing bars and restaurants of only complaining and apparent inaction. And ever more, the complementary sector is seen as leeching off of the efforts made by the hotels. But this growing antagonism can also be seen as the result of shifting circumstances: economic conditions, stronger competition from other destinations and so on. For years, there was a symbiotic relationship between the two. This has gone or is going. It might only return if the tour operators are genuine in wishing to establish the mixed-offer.

One could accuse the hotels of being disingenuous. They are, together with government, town halls and tour operators, the frontline assault forces in tourism promotion. Clearly they are, and they know it, hence the possible disingenuousness. They are also, generally speaking, far better resourced than businesses in the complementary sector. (It might also be noted that some hotel groups run their own outside restaurants.) Their self-interests are served by co-operation, such as in being parts of local hotel associations which conduct their own marketing, but at least they do engage in co-operation. Does the complementary sector act in a similar way? Self-interest is even more extreme here. Do bars and restaurants band together to push a resort? Well, do they? I’m unaware of this happening. Where co-operation does exist, it tends to be as a means to kick against something – all-inclusives, the latest regulation. Negative rather than positive. And when something comes along which might require some co-operation, such as with the estación náutica concept in Alcúdia, self-interest comes to the fore; what has ever happened to this idea?

The hotels have thrown down the gauntlet. To quote, in translation, from yesterday’s “Diario”, the president of the Menorcan hoteliers says: “we do not see any effort at any time by the restaurant sector to bring tourists to the Balearics.” There is, in all of this, a horrible sense of bitching and bickering as the great edifice of tourism threatens to collapse around the hotels and as all the supply that has risen around them also tumbles and falls. Yet for the hotels to attack the complementary sector is – though they wouldn’t admit this – the consequence of their being beholden to the muscle of the tour operators; the reverse of the situation that once used to exist, a situation that used to allow for mutually beneficial co-existence with the complementary sector. The hotels are, therefore, going on a bullying offensive while simultaneously they are being rendered less potent by the masters of the industry – the tour operators. They are hitting out at the weakest link in the whole tourism supply chain, because it suits them to be able to try and cling to a power that is diminishing in a market that has changed fundamentally; they are less the victims of the all-inclusive war initiated by the tour operators than the complementary sector, but they are victims nonetheless, clutching at the spoils of war and abandoning their one-time compatriots in the bars and restaurants. Lines drawn for the battlefield.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Make A Difference: Tourism and business promotion

The Balearic Government is to spend 12 million euros on a new “digital platform” which, so it says, will be a pioneering approach to internet tourism marketing. It is not entirely clear what this will entail, but President Antich was going large on this announcement at the Berlin ITB travel fair a couple of days ago. Whatever it is, the message is certainly getting through, that it is the internet which holds much of the key to tourism promotion and selling.

At the same time as the president was basking in the glory of this mooted, new technological shiny beast and was also saying that agreements with Air Berlin will see an increase in flights to the islands, a professor of marketing from ESADE was talking to “The Diario” about the advantages of “low-cost” businesses and also of the internet. (ESADE is not only one of Spain’s most prestigious business and law schools, it is also one of the world’s leading institutions.)

In this interview, Josep Valls said that there needs to be an almost wholesale shift in the direction of online activity and an end to investment in promoting the likes of fairs (and he probably means fiestas as well) and in massive publicity. There is something of an irony in this. The new tourism minister Barceló has been spending the past few days apologising for the fact that the Rafael Nadal ads had not been scheduled, shifting the blame onto her predecessor Miquel Ferrer, who seemingly wanted to cut costs at the ministry, and saying that there were negotiations with the Spanish tourism promotion unit, Turespaña, to actually pay for the adverts to be aired. Perhaps Ferrer took the view that celebrity advertising was of questionable benefit. Whatever his motivation, the point made by the good professor chimes well with what you will have read on this blog – that the internet can be both cheaper and more effective than older media, especially when it comes to tourism promotion. It just depends on how well it’s done.

You can sum this up in terms of innovation, professionalism and in doing things differently. Much of what goes on in Mallorca’s tourism industry adheres to these principles, but there is much which does not. While some of the island’s hotel groups are paragons of professional virtue, the supply to the industry from elsewhere can leave something to be desired. There is much of the “old school” about great chunks of this supply (be it in the form of bars, restaurants, entertainment, whatever), mired in the past and forgetful of what actually constitutes holiday.

In the past couple of days, I have spoken to the heads of the main franchise operation for Burger King in the north of the island and of Grupo Boulevard (the dreaded Dakotas etc.). These are both hard-nosed businesses, varying in terms of innovation but with strong streaks of professionalism. They are not to everyone’s taste, but it was illuminating to hear the Boulevard response to the impact of all-inclusives in Playa de Muro where it is headquartered and is expanding further this season. There has not been an effect. Talk to the old school and you will get a totally different answer. People dislike Boulevard because it’s brash and because it’s successful, and because it conforms to notions of being a business rather than the cottage industry of so many establishments. But in its product development Boulevard is representative of what the director at the Bellevue hotel in Puerto Alcúdia had to say about how businesses need to respond to market changes; it does things differently.

There is a bar in Puerto Alcúdia which this summer will be doing things very differently. Different types of event, parties. Anything to get people talking and coming. There are bars which are successfully using Facebook as a complement to, almost a replacement for, the more traditional PR in-front-of-bar approach. Rather than blame all-inclusives or the “crisis”, here are examples of confronting the problems, changing how things are done and therefore winning business. In the case of the first bar, there is also a recognition that there needs to be a return to the idea that holiday is an event, or it should be. Regulatory forces, combined with complacency and a lack of vision, have taken away much of the “event” nature of holiday. There is no going back to days of parties and barbecues on beaches  – the regulations have seen to this – but this does not mean formulaic, uninspiring and largely unthinking offers.

Holiday means different things to different people. Of course it does. And of course there is and always will be a call for and provision of the traditional; of the quaint family restaurant or the generally unsophisticated bar. But perhaps more than anything, there has to be a collective generation of a certain buzz, the notion of something happening. In Alcúdia at any rate, there are people and businesses looking to do just this; create a buzz. Doing things differently, use of technology, innovation; these can all lead in the right direction, and it should all be aimed at the tourist, of whatever style, and at giving the tourist an experience; an experience of something different. This is what holiday is, or should be, about. And not just the same old, same old.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Director’s Cut: Film festival and Nadal ads

How ironic. While photos of ecstatic Oscar winners are being splashed buoyantly across the pages of websites and newspapers, elsewhere the film industry is floundering and possibly also drowning – the Mallorcan film industry, that is, and specifically the Mallorca International Film Festival.

Go back a few months, to the World Travel Market in London for example. A stand, a logo, a microphone. A laughing actor, Colin Meaney; a glamorous Italian actress, Maria Grazia Cucinotta; a beaming director, David Carreras. The film festival was in the spotlight. One of the partners in the film festival, and the reason for the promotion at the travel market, was the tourism ministry. Go back a few months, and in the photo album from London there was someone else. Stage left of Carreras. Smiling. Miquel Nadal, the then tourism minister. Many takes have been made since that photo, and Nadal, together with his reputation, has been left in tatters on the cutting-room floor.

It wasn’t just the local press that joined in the celebrations and the announcements. “The Daily Mail” got in on the act, quoting Carreras in his best brochure talk: “the island is stunning, we have beautiful scenery and it would be perfect to hold an international event like this.” The prospect of ever more celebrities, the prospect of some A-list promotion for Mallorca and the prospect of a film festival that might even compete with Cannes. It had it all. A showcase for the island, the lovely people of an up-market image Mallorca so craves, the diversification of the tourism industry in a different cultural direction – the cinema. It had it all. So where did it go wrong?

Carreras got the first inkling of trouble when he presented initial invoices to the tourism ministry, which was in for some 650 grand’s worth of the lights, camera and action, around a third of the financing. Nadal’s replacement, Miquel Ferrer, said that there was a problem with the agreement and that there was something to do with a grant. Something to do with a grant. Hmm.

The tourism ministry, and therefore the Balearic Government, has stated that the agreement is in the process of being annulled. The legal chaps have been giving it the once over, but there has been no clear statement as to precisely what the issue is with the agreement. Carreras, along with other private investors, has pumped money into the project and is, you might guess, incandescent. He has every right to be.

This may not be the end for the film festival. A resolution with the government may be sought and even found. More private investment might be forthcoming. But were it to be and the government got away without handing over a centimo and yet could wallow in the publicity of the festival, a rotten stench would be left. And unfortunately, in the absence of a clear statement, one is left to imagine another odour. I leave that to you to figure out.

The shambles that has been the tourism ministry has also left Rafael Nadal tied up at the moorings of television advertising. Rather than bouncing over the waves and sailing into the living-rooms of mainland Spain, Germany and the UK, the promotional adverts with the Manacor Muscle have been becalmed by a paralysis of inactivity at tourism, the consequence of all the comings and goings. New minister Barceló recognises the problem and has said that the promotional campaign will be reactivated as swiftly as possible. She seems to be saying that a lot of things will be done swiftly, such as seeking a resolution as to another paralysis – that of the golf course in Muro. The Nadal adverts are due to be shown for periods of two months in the three main tourism markets. Eventually.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Mallorca Take-Away

From the early-70s to the late-80s I spent a considerable amount of holiday time in Greece. It was a period of transition for the country – from rule over a backward nation by a military junta to something resembling a progressive economy. What did not change, appreciably, was the Greeks’ utter distaste of anything German. The unlovely and unloved legacy left by the Nazis became, for the British, the puerile bordering on the supposedly comedic, the stuff of “Achtung! Surrender” and Gazza and Psycho wearing tin helmets. For the Dutch, it begat a fierce line in anti-German sentiment. But being a pragmatic and accommodating race (well until Geert Wilders loomed into view), they pretended to be friendly and even spoke the language. For the Greeks, however, it was the real loathe thing.

In the 70s a form of apartheid was practised in Greece. The Germans had to queue separately. A long-blond-haired student type, i.e. myself, might at first have been mistaken for being German, but when the truth emerged – English – I became like a long-lost son. Honestly, tears were shed by an aged Athenian on having some liberating English in his bar. A group of us once went for an evening at some shack of a taverna on an island the name of which I can’t even remember: os, iki, ini, they all seemed to merge into one after a while. We’d been told you could eat the entire farmyard in return for a handful of drachmas. As we approached – in force – the owner was clearly unnerved. One half expected him to barricade himself in and produce an air rifle. “English?” he ventured hesitantly. “Bobby Charlton? Bee Gees?” Yes. The retsina flowed from the barrel. It was disgusting, but then retsina is.

Things do of course change. The English have turned Crete and Zante into battlegrounds of industrial alcohol. The German Mark and now Euro have filled the pockets of the tourism industry; that taverna is probably now a Biergarten. So when the suggestion was made that, in recognition of some German largesse in bailing out the Greek economy, the Greeks might hand over an island or several, it didn’t sound like a complete April Fool, even if the small matter of the repayment of the war “loan” had been overlooked: out of gratitude for starving to death a significant number of its people and for occupying its territory, the Greeks handed over much of the content of the vaults of the Bank of Greece to the Nazis.

Germany does have form when it comes to wanting to buy islands. Or so the myth goes. Mallorca was once meant to have been on the shopping list of some German businessmen. As Spain is in similarly economic dire straits to Greece, it should perhaps consider putting the island on the market. But whether Germany could now afford it is another matter. President Antich is due to meet Angela Merkel during the Berlin tourism fair this week and so might pop the question. Doubtful that he’ll get very far.

So if not the Germans, then who? Apparently the Chinese rate Greece as their favourite tourist destination. In a bidding war for Corfu, I think I know where my money would be, or rather whose money it would be. In building up a nice portfolio of Mediterranean holiday hotspots, Beijing might be inclined to eye up some reasonable real estate in the Balearics. As Mallorca seeks out new tourism markets and as it has also been over-run with Chinese bazars and restaurants, then an acquisition might offer – in the management lexicon – some “synergy”. Who else might fancy Mallorca? Russia? Abu Dhabi? Or how about Venezuela? If the rumours about all that oil are true and Venezuela were to become the South American Saudi Arabia, then the lovable and whacky Hugo Chavez would doubtless jump at the chance of installing himself in the royal palace. It would certainly add a new dimension to the chav reputation that some parts of the island are said to have.

Meanwhile, Mallorca and Spain, in looking to ward off the acquisitive tendencies of other nations, have embarked on a new promotional campaign. “Necesito España.” “I Need Spain.” Very curious. Why does one need Spain? Is this some sort of competition? Fill in the missing words. “I need Spain like I need an enormous budget deficit.” Shouldn’t it be in a different order? “Spain Needs You.” Yes it does, every last one of you, and Lord Bean is calling you all to arms. Fail to heed the call and the Albufera ducks get it; served crispy and in a Peking style.

(The photo of President Zapatero has appeared on different blogs unattributed.)

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Never Mind The Quality – Ever more on so-called quality tourism

There was a very good letter in “The Bulletin” yesterday. It came from Ian Morrison, a name some of you will be familiar with. You might also be familiar with some of the sentiments. They are ones you have heard many times on this blog. Mr. Morrison and I appear to share a similar past-time: banging our heads against the brick-walled numbskulls that populate the tourism authorities in Mallorca.

Here was an “open” letter to the new tourism minister. Another day, another tourism minister. Another tourism minister, another set of statements of the pointless and even the insulting. Here were references to “quality tourists”, the hackneyed, pejorative but ultimately meaningless term used to describe, one supposes, bulging-pocketed tourists who eschew karaoke and lager unlike the poor sods at the “bottom end” of the market. The minister’s bottom end, not mine. This is a massive and not infrequent affront. Here too were references to the promotional spend directed at this quality market and to the irrelevance of it. References to spending some of this promotional money on incentives to tour operators, on promotion via the big online agencies. References to things you will have read here before. References to things that are, if you like, common sense.

Times change, of course they do, but it remains the case that what made Mallorca in the first place still holds true. And that is the sun and beach holiday, one for families, not all of whom are necessarily loaded. This is the Mallorca brand, as I have said so often, one that they try to diminish by alternative marketing and the pursuit of this mythical “quality tourist”. And what is this person anyway? Who knows? The tourism people certainly don’t. It’s just a term, an utterly meaningless and insulting one which has the effect merely of potentially alienating the thousands, nay millions who made and continue to make Mallorca what it is. It is the regular tourist who makes Mallorca. Not some niched ones who might prefer cultural experiences. Who the hell would fill all the hotels otherwise?

The new tourism minister, Sra. Barceló, is simply singing the same old song, as has been sung so many times over the past several years. There must be a script somewhere in the tourism ministry with certain stock phrases and words that must be trotted out at all times, even if the one uttering them hasn’t a clue what he or she is talking about. The revolving door at the ministry may have raised some eyebrows among tour operators, but it doesn’t really matter who’s occupying the ministerial swivel-chair. It is the tour operator who decides what type of tourist comes and when. Elsewhere in the paper, the tame tour operator “inside tourism”, he from the Monarch group, says that discussions are taking place with the same Sra. Barceló to offer more by way of winter tourism. On the face of it, this sounds quite encouraging and is evidence, if more is needed, that it is in the tour operators’ gift to make winter tourism work. Encouraging, except that is when you read the list of the same old stuff that comprises this winter tourism. You don’t need me to tell you again what this is. The tourism ministry is not irrelevant in all this, because it would be the ministry that is charged with much of the promotion that might persuade hotels to bother opening and thereby make winter tourism work – for the tour operators. And so you come back to that promotion and that spend and, in all likelihood, to the so-called quality tourist. And chances are the money would be wasted, if it’s no longer being siphoned off into a political party’s coffers – allegedly.

A different type of encouragement comes from the fact that the Spanish tourism ministry has a Facebook campaign. It’s something. All the resorts should do the same. Using social networks would be an inexpensive alternative and arguably as effective if not more than the Nadalist corporate advertising. I spoke about this back in November (8 November: Same Old Story). Rather than increasing promotional budgets, they should be cut as a way of exercising minds gone flabby with the default thinking of celebrity marketing.

But to come back to winter tourism, you might recall an exchange about cultural (winter) tourism (27 November: The Coffee Culture Club). In this, the points were made that there are high costs associated with its marketing and selling and with the hire of coaches etc, as well as there being the need for volume to make it work for an island with a culture and history which aren’t actually that remarkable, certainly when set against the fact that so many other places offer “culture” which is often more interesting. The point was also made that none of the big tour operators would think it worthwhile and for a very good reason. The ratio between the high costs of marketing and the actual returns would be poor. Here lies the rub. The business rub. Marketing spend for summer, for regular sun and beach holidays may well also be high, but so also are the returns. The ratio is highly favourable. Is Monarch, therefore, willing to lavish money on the marketing? Or would it be the tourism ministry, whose efforts might be better devoted to ensuring that the bread and butter of summer continues to feed Mallorca?

And finally … The guy from Monarch also said the following: “Forget the sun, the Balearics has to give up going down that road.” I’m struggling. Did a representative of Monarch, Cosmos and Co-Op really say this?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Personal Service – Tourism, information and banks

Our friend Pedro Iriondo, the head of the Mallorca tourist board (Fomento del Turismo) and a chap who looks variously like Nixon (the film version) or “Knuckles” Norman, an East End associate of the Krays, is back in the press pages singing a familiar song. In an interview with “The Diario”, he says basically the same as he has said elsewhere, including snatches in “The Bulletin”. While lengthy enough, the interview really doesn’t add to the sum of our existing knowledge. What is slightly new is that he has a chance to speak about the effects of corruption at the tourism ministry. It doesn’t give a very good image to tour operators – I think we could have guessed that, and indeed I have said this very thing – but it also has meant that money intended for tourism promotion (in short enough supply) has of course been allegedly filtered off in different directions. The only other thing, amidst the normal stuff about all-inclusives (bad but what can you do), seasonality (there has been lots of promotion – but how effective?) and what the coming season holds (hard to say), that was new – to me at any rate – was the idea that images of people wearing masks in Playa de Palma last summer was somehow a set up by other tourist destinations. This was all to do with swine flu, and Iriondo reckons that this, and the mask-wearing, had a negative impact on tourism numbers, more so than ETA and its bombs. Apart from stupid sensationalism by the German paper “Bild”, I don’t know that it did. As for suggesting that perhaps the Turks and Croats and Bulgarians had ganged together to get some bad publicity, well this does seem somewhat far-fetched.

Back in Bulletin-land, I am somewhat baffled by the paper’s email what’s on thing. Its website gives a daily running total of the numbers who have sent in their email address together with dates of when they plan to visit Mallorca, and for which they then get an email giving them a list of things that are going on. The daily total announcement, all a tad self-congratulatory one can’t help feeling, is a bit like the Blue Peter Christmas appeal. “We’ve now raised 296 Fairy Liquid bottles that will be turned into a Jeep to help the starving of (add as applicable).” The reason for bafflement is why they’re doing it. Seems like work for someone, when putting the information onto the website would, one might have thought, be less hassle and might also have the benefit of generating additional site traffic. There again, maybe this is all part of a more personal touch that the internet has dispensed with. Like banks. Touching on the news about the Halifax branch in Puerto Pollensa closing, what it, and indeed other Mallorcan banks, have going for them is that the customer isn’t simply left to the de-personalised cyberworld of internet banking as the means of communication. Personal contact. With the bank manager. How very quaint. However, I do wonder if there isn’t a drawback with this. Is the relationship with the bank manager or with the bank? When the manager leaves, might the customer also leave if there is a strong recommendation for another bank, or rather another manager? In fact this isn’t a “might”, it’s a yes. I’ve done it myself.

Still, at least a relationship with a bank can endure for some years. Unlike that between tour operators and Mallorcan tourism ministers. Unless the former intend to get themselves banged up in the next cell.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Birdland – Cycling and bird-watching in Mallorca

Come on, ‘fess up. Cyclists behaving badly or even behaving well, and do you lose your rag, shout and scream? Does Matthew Parris’s piano wire cross your mind? What if maybe I just give a little nudge with the bumper? No, no, don’t do that. Whatever you do, don’t do that.

Me? I move from ultra polite to ultra pissed off. I will gladly observe the rules, gladly let a line of cyclists enter a roundabout, the only time you are meant to stop on a roundabout. I will even let a lone cyclist come onto a roundabout in front of me, so long as there isn’t a truck about to demolish my boot. I will happily give a wide berth, slow at the central islands where there isn’t sufficient space for car and two-abreast cyclists, even if they are meant to be in single file. I will do all these things. I don’t suffer from road territorialism. It isn’t that. What it is, is when the rules are broken, when the cyclists do what no car driver could get away with – running a red, coming out of an exit that they shouldn’t be, cutting up, or just going the wrong way. But why get so peed off? Does it really matter? Well actually it does, given that the car driver is invariably always at fault if there’s an accident.

The recreational cyclist is not the issue. He or she usually pedals at a sedate speed. He or she can stop easily. It is the pros, the semi-pros, the pretend-pros who get the driver’s goat. The ones who act as they own the roads. Ah yes, own. It’s that territorialism again. And it’s also the provocation, the one that comes from the attire, the dress-code, the lycra. They dress deliberately to antagonise.

But it’s not just on the roads of Alcúdia, Pollensa or Muro that the great cyclist-driver divide occurs. In Dublin, according to a piece in yesterday’s “Sunday Times”, “cyclists are facing a backlash from motorists and pedestrians who claim they are a menace”. The paper reveals police figures for transgressions – 1,847 motorists done for going through a red, 28 cyclists for doing the same. Strangely enough, given the lunatic nature of the Mallorcan driver, I have rarely actually witnessed a driver running a red. I couldn’t tell you how many cyclists I’ve seen doing the same. What I can tell you is how often I’ve seen Trafico dealing with an errant cyclist. Once. A girl went through a red right in front of the patrol vehicle. They could hardly not stop her. But whereas a driver can be easily identified, a cyclist cannot be. They all look the same, all stretched into blue outfits. There may be sponsors’ logos, different colour helmets and so on, but you can’t really pick a cyclist out. And that’s it, the cyclist knows damn well that he or she can get away with it. It’s this that hacks the drivers off.

Bird-watching in Mallorca
“The Bulletin” ran a piece yesterday about a book that has been published, in English, which highlights the rich bird life to be found on the island. It is called the “Birding Tourist’s Guide to Majorca”. Three lucky readers may well have emailed the paper to win a copy in response to the question “which red-breasted bird from northern Europe is starting to breed in Mallorca?” Hmm, let me think, bird, red breast. Is it a blackbird?

The robin is just one bird that is now laying down roots in Mallorca. So also is the little egret and the hoopoe. The Albufera nature park is home to them, as it is to many other birds, migrant or relatively full-time. Bird-watching is something of a growth tourism market and a not unlucrative one. As one of the book’s authors points out, bird-watchers spend a fair amount of dosh on twitching kit and they are “relatively big spenders”, like other tourists who splash out on specialist equipment and clothing, such as golfers or –  dare one say it – cyclists.

The book is all part of an initiative to grow this tourism market further. It’s a good idea. Now all that’s needed is a tourism minister and someone in charge of tourism promotion.

Happiness – Mallorca tourism promotion

How to win tourists and influence people. Smiling, happy people having fun. It starts at the top of the tourism trade and filters down, reminiscent of days when there was so much more of a personal touch, barbecues on beaches and even the local Guardia coming along and joining in. So recalls … . So recalls someone who needs to win tourists and influence people. Smiling, happy person. There, on the front page of yesterday’s “Bulletin”. A sullen Frank Langella as Nixon? No, this is the head of the Mallorca tourist board. Smiling, happy person, winning tourists and influencing people. Why oh why use a photo of someone who looks so terminally hacked off?

Pedro Iriondo, president of the Balearics travel agents association and founder of the agency Viajes Kontiki in 1974, became head of the tourism board at the end of last year. He has been a member of the board’s ruling committee for several years and had been its vice-president since 2005. Here he was, granting an interview, which unfortunately says little that we don’t already know: why don’t the shops open in Palma on a Sunday; the competition that is Turkey and Egypt; the reliance upon tourism in Mallorca; the need to exploit golf and other niches, such as nautical tourism; and the need to work closely with tour operators. I’m sure that Sr. Iriondo has some fine ideas, but the interview was thoroughly depressing; a re-hash of what we know to be the case and a distinct sense of the impotent. Take all-inclusives. He doesn’t approve, but accepts that there has been a market change. What we already know, and what we already know cannot be put back into the bottle. What we already know, that it is the tour operators who hold the whip-hand.

Iriondo has taken over from Alvaro Middelmann as president of what is known as the Fomento del Turismo. While referred to as the Mallorca Tourist Board, it is a private, non-governmental body. The promotion of Mallorca and the Balearics, via the government, is handled by the tourism institute IBATUR. The board is thus, as it says on its website, “a forum where everyone in tourism on the island can come and debate important issues, policies and decide on a future tourism strategy”. It continues by referring to the need for “forward thinking, consensual solutions for our future”, and by “our” one takes this to mean the island’s whole tourism industry. The Fomento can lay claim to being the oldest tourist board in Europe. It is, therefore, a body of some not inconsiderable significance and influence. But in its, if you like, mission statement, one comes back to an issue regarding who or which bodies actually drive “future tourism strategy”. Is it the government or the private sector? And if it is the latter, then which parts of it?

At the conclusion of the interview, Iriondo says that “we’ve go to sort out our prices, provide better quality and revive the personal touch”. Fine. But where does the impulse come from to do so and how can these things be done? In the interview, he refers to the fact that it is difficult to provide good product at low cost, unlike some competitor countries, to the fact that the personal touch has been lost because of the expansion in size of hotels, and to the know-how of Mallorca’s hotel groups – several of which can be credited with having high quality, yet which are also, through the export of know-how and their own international ambitions, contributing to the development of competitor destinations. Take a look, for instance, at the Iberostar site and its five-star Bellis complex in Turkey. But to come back to where that impulse might come from, it is worth taking account of the composition of the tourism board’s ruling body – three major hotel chains as well as the association of hotel chains, the associations for yacht clubs, golf courses and restaurants, a bank, a car-hire firm … one could go on. If that lot can’t sort something out, then who can.

Mallorca, and the Balearics, have experienced difficult times in the past, and the Fomento has acted in the past to revive the island’s tourism at times of recession. So it has something of a track record, but Sr. Iriondo believes that the current recession is “different” to previous ones, impacting hard on employment and the tourism industry as a whole and highlighting the economic reliance on tourism. He sees the need for more and more promotion, yet the promotional budget – the government’s – has been reduced.

It all, I’m afraid, does add to that rather depressing image. Forward thinking, consensual strategies. Indeed. But rather than an appraisal of what we know, it might be nice to learn what we don’t – those strategies in other words, and who exactly is going to implement them.

“The Bulletin” also reported on the launch of ABC Menorca (Association of British Companies Menorca). This really does look like something potentially quite impressive and of significance, certainly given the array of organisations and individuals who were present at the launch. Despite the scepticism referred to the other day, this body does seem, within terms of its British-market remit, to have broad support from other business groups and indeed at governmental level. It is a very different beast to the association that sprang out of Calvia at the end of 2008. But it has one important similarity, in that it is evidence of people taking an interest, becoming involved and looking to do their best for businesses. It should be applauded, and if it crosses into Mallorca, then it could also prove to be a force for good.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.