The BAFMAs: Awards for Mallorcan achievement

Yes, it’s that time of the year. Time for the BAFMAs, the Blog Awards For Mallorcan Achievement. In no particular order, the following are variously well-known and less well-known or were well-publicised and less well-publicised …

Politician Of The Year (Shared): Miquel Ensenyat and Carme Garcia
Ensenyat, the PSM Mallorcan socialist mayor of Esporles, stood as candidate for the PSM at the national elections. There was little remarkable about this, except that Ensenyat is an openly gay politician in a land where the Church can issue warnings of the danger of voting for politicians who support gay marriage.

Garcia, the “turncoat” of Alcúdia, was also a PSM politician. “Was” being the operative word. She sided with the Partido Popular after the regional elections, despite the wide gulf in political ideology, leading to her being expelled from the party and to her suffering recriminations led by the previous coalition of PSOE and the Convergència. Though her ex-party and the opposition had a legitimate point and though Garcia secured for herself a role as second-in-command to the new lady mayor, her decision could also be seen as a blow for the chumminess of the previous male-dominated coalition which did not have the moral authority to expect her to support it in denying the PP, which had gained eight out of nine seats required for a majority, the right to govern Alcúdia.

Celebrity Of The Year: Tom Hanks
They sought him here, they sought him there. Through their long lenses, they sought Tom everywhere. There he was, at long distance, speaking into an iPhone, or rather there was the back of Tom’s head speaking into an iPhone. There he also was just hanging around and doing very little, assuming you could make out it was Tom behind the security and beneath his headgear.

Business Of The Year: Lidl
Disproving the notion that Mallorca is not open to foreign companies, Lidl, exploiting a relaxation in commercial developments, expanded across Mallorca, bringing jobs as well as competition to the supermarket sector.

Event Of The Year: The Inca bullfight
If campaigners sought more encouragement in banning bullfighting in Mallorca, they got it during the Inca bullfight. The promoter caused outrage by taking to the ring to kill the bull after the bull had effectively excluded itself from the fight when it broke a horn. Rules don’t apparently permit non-combatants to enter the ring. The gruesome video of the killing of the bull went viral and the video also highlighted and criticised the fact that minors had been allowed into the arena.

Beach Of The Year: Playa de Muro
The extension of Puerto Alcúdia’s beach (which was voted Mallorca’s best beach on “Trip Advisor”), the beach in Playa de Muro was the target of efforts by the town hall to improve it even further. These included instituting a fine for urinating on the beach, which drew a response from some who wanted to know where else they were supposed to go to the toilet, and a similar fine for a similar act in the sea. It wasn’t entirely clear how Muro town hall proposed policing the latter, but with concerns about rising sea levels, the consequence of climate change, a ban on using the sea was probably a wise precaution.

Website Of The Year: Mallorca Daily Photo Blog
Just going to show that wit, informativeness, striking photography and personal dedication count for far more than huge budgets chucked at websites in promoting Mallorca. It deserves an award very much more prestigious than a BAFMA.

Musician Of The Year: Arnau Reynés
While more celebrated musicians took to stages in Mallorca this year, Reynés, the professor of music from the Universitat de les Illes Balears, who has performed in some of Europe’s finest cathedrals, brought a tradition of music in Mallorca that is often overlooked to the small church in Playa de Muro and gave a summer recital, as did other leading Mallorcan organists.

Historian Of The Year: Gabriel Verd Martorell
Thirty-five years is a long time for any one historian to have sought to have proved a point, but Verd was still at it, striving, once and for all, to establish that Christopher Columbus was born in Felanitx. In a “solemn” declaration in the town, he claimed that Columbus was the illegitimate nephew of King Ferdinand and that to have had the title of governor general bestowed on him, which he did, he had to have had royal blood. You can’t blame a historian for persistence.

So, these are the BAFMAs. No science behind them, no text voting, purely my own choice. But if you have your own nominations or suggestions, please feel free … .

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

No Hope: Private holiday lets

Justin in Paris has made 90,000 dollars. Daren in London has raked in 100 grand. In Mallorca, you can expect to coin in 2003 euros per month.

An advert on a Facebook page demanded a damn good clicking. Make money in Spain, it said. Rent out your place to travelers (all American travellers, therefore, as they are lacking an “l”) and make 75 euros+ per night. Interesting, I thought. Not because I want to rent out to travelers or even travellers, but because it is quite possible that anyone wishing to – in Mallorca – shouldn’t.

On the site, there was Daren, relaxing, sound in the knowledge of the 100 grand he had made. Novi from San Francisco was smiling, thanks to her 30,000 dollars. Justin looked suitably satisfied with his ninety thousand.

The 2003 euros was the calculation for a month to rent out an apartment in Palma or Pollensa. I went and had a look. Was anything actually available in Mallorca? Yes. Not much, but there were some places. By the night or longer. Some with photos, some without. Not having a photo doesn’t really “sell” a place, but there might be good reason for there not being a photo.

It’s kicking off again. The periodic wielding of the holiday-rental stick. The tourism ministry and friends at the tax authorities are spending their days in earnest perusal of websites, mainly British ones, seeking to identify properties for holiday rent. An announcement was made last year that web pages in particular would come under scrutiny, and a similar announcement has been made this year as well.

John Lance, in his letter to “The Bulletin” (Saturday, 2 July) made the point well enough, as he has in the past, about the lunatic situation in respect of holiday lets in Mallorca. The “grey area” he referred to isn’t really all that grey. Want to now license your property for holiday rental? You can’t.

There are plenty of properties which are licensed but they date back to and before the registration of, when was it, three, four years ago. Even then, however, there was massive confusion, and the dice were heavily loaded against apartment owners. The greyness of the situation is especially so with apartments, but it isn’t so grey if you accept the version which states that you cannot rent out private apartments as holiday lets at all.

The tourism ministry has wielded its stick. In February, there were reports relating to action taken against owners of apartments in Santa Ponsa, to what was being offered, and to the fact that the apartments were being advertised via a UK website. And then there were the fines. Up to 30,050 euros.

We know the arguments in favour of more relaxed rules on holiday rentals: not everyone wants to stay in a hotel; tourists in private apartments and villas tend to spend more; a mix of accommodation types reflects the diversity of the tourism market. We know the hoteliers’ arguments against: they have the hoops they have to go through; they invest heavily; they are a key source of employment. Like the endless all-inclusive debate, none of the arguments are new.

The hoteliers can, however, be somewhat disingenuous. When the Santa Ponsa reports were coming in, the head of the local hoteliers’ association said that the competition from private apartments was unfair. Yes, but turn it around. Owners could argue the case of restriction of trade and of unfair competition that denies them the chance to properly register and market their properties.

As John Lance remarked, this could all end up with Europe getting involved. But for property owners, the problem is the lack of any co-ordinated voice. The hoteliers know this, and so, as importantly, does the Balearic Government.

It might be remembered that the hoteliers, well before the elections, expressed concern as to the appointment of Carlos Delgado as tourism minister. Now they express contentment, and Delgado, who one might hope might be more willing to throw off the shackles of trade restriction, has announced his intention to collaborate with the hotel sector in making the tourism law more flexible. And one aspect of this is the residential use of tourist establishments. Owned by the hoteliers, I think we can assume this to mean.

Just as is the case with its dealings with the major tour operators, a government in the Balearics, be it PP or PSOE, cannot afford to alienate the hotel sector. If there was hope that the private rental market might be treated more favourably by the new government, then I’m afraid it was probably a forlorn hope. And it will remain one.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Town With No Mayor

One day he was still there, the next he was finally gone, whisked away and hurtled into the oblivion of cyberspace. But for eleven days longer than he should have been, Joan Cerdà had remained mayor of Pollensa. According to the town hall’s website anyway. The photo of the “batle” (Catalan for mayor) continued to be that of the smiling face of the departed Joan; a photo that had surely been taken before he had become mayor, as he didn’t do a great deal of smiling once he was. For over a week, Joan was stubbornly fixed to the website’s batle slot next to the lime-green banner declaring “Som Pollença Municipi Turístic”. The batle of the som.

It wasn’t only myself who, on not infrequent visits to the town hall’s website, found it slightly odd to discover that Joan was still lingering. The A party, A for Alternativa but which might better stand for Awkward, also found it strange, and so told the press who duly brought the matter to the world’s attention. No sooner made to look a bit silly, the town hall removed the photo.

But where once was Joan is now no batle to be seen. Has no one a photo of Tommy Cifre, not even an old one? He has after all been mayor before. The mayor’s spot is now a link to a street map. I clicked on it, just for something to do. I didn’t move the map, really I didn’t, but zoomed in, zoomed in and zoomed in. And there, in centre frame, once the map was truly legible was Joan Cerdà, the Plaça Joan Cerdà. Spooky.

The town with no mayor is now also, in its virtual internet world, minus any political representatives at all. The political organigram has disappeared as well. Organigram, I ask you. Jobs for the boys and girls. The A party has also made a fuss about it not having been changed. The new administration has been talking a good talk about transparency, but it hasn’t got round to posting info as to who now has their feet up on which town hall desk.

You could say that it was just a case of being a tad slow (and by the time you read this the site’s missing mayor and organists will probably have been found), but the town halls’ websites are intended to be a key means of communicating with towns’ citizens. Which is why when you go to them and don’t find what you are looking for, they can at best be a bit disappointing, always assuming you can make head or tail of Catalan, which you normally need to, and thereby confirm your disappointment.

Not updating the website is just one little local difficulty that the new administration has to contend with. With Joan no longer in the picture, except having his picture stay on the website, the hope for the good people of Pollensa was that all would suddenly become calm and orderly. They hadn’t counted on Tommy Cifre and his number two Malena Estrany being cast in the role of Laurel and Hardy. “That’s another fine mess you’ve got me into, ‘Strany.”

To be fair, it hasn’t been her fault or Cifre’s. They couldn’t have been expected to have known that Endesa would come along and remove the electricity meter from the public swimming pool in Puerto Pollensa and cut off the supply, even if the recent history of problems with paying Endesa’s bills would have made them know that not all was going swimmingly at the public baths.

It is not their fault that they have inherited the ongoing battle of the beaches in Puerto Pollensa and the new company that Cifre has told to get on with complying with its obligations. It is not their fault that if you go to the town hall’s website and expect to find information for the Pollensa Music Festival programme (which typically starts in early July), you won’t find it because the programme hasn’t been sorted out. And it is only the fiftieth anniversary of the festival this year. Its founder, Philip Newman, must be turning in his grave and playing a lament on his violin.

It is not their fault that only slightly less well-established than the music festival is the sailing school of Sail and Surf. Forty years it has been in Puerto Pollensa, and suddenly some jobsworth comes along and finds it has been there all this time. It must stop, said mayor Cifre, who then said it could continue. Something about licences. It always is.

It’s just like old times. Old times that are not even yet a fortnight old. Things will get better. Give them some time. Four years, for example. But meantime the A party will continue to make a nuisance of itself, it will continue to bombard my email inbox with photos and circulars to do with what the town hall’s not doing correctly, and so life will go on as normal. As normal as it can ever be in a town with no mayor.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Taking The Biscuit: The language of promotion

Fancy having a biccy when you’re in Palma? Seems like an odd thing to have a website to tell you about. It would indeed be odd, which is why bicipalma.es is of course nothing to do with biscuits. It is to do with bikes. Bikes you can use for free. Or can you? Can you in fact use them at all and how free are they?

The other day, in “The Guardian”, there was this thing about what’s new in the Balearics. “Life may be chilled in the Med’s coolest islands, but it doesn’t stand still.” Hey, hip, daddy-o. Do people really talk like this? Presumably they do at Guardian house. So chilled are they, that they don’t exactly pay a lot of attention.

One thing that isn’t standing still and that is now cool is, the paper informed us, the fact that Mallorca has “gone all Boris” with a “free bike scheme”. Just chill, and click onto Bicipalma. No HobNobs or Garibaldis, just a load of gibberish in Catalan; gibberish if you don’t happen to speak Catalan. Many Guardian readers do of course.

Ah, but there is always a Spanish version, which is rather more intelligible, but still not exactly English. A Guardian readership may dream of hours riding around on a bike and being abused by car drivers and driven off the roads of Palma, but dreams are what they will remain. You see, the Palma biscuit ride isn’t for tourists. The site says so. “It is not a public system for hiring bikes for tourist or recreational use.” It says so, but in Spanish and in Catalan.

The chilled journos of The Guardian have rather overlooked this slight drawback, as they have also overlooked the fact that the site adds, but not in English of course, that “in order to use Bicipalma, you only have to have a citizen’s card (and be over 16)”. Yes, only have to have a citizen’s card, for which read an identity card or a residency card, were one still available. I may be mistaken, but most British tourists would have neither; nor, indeed, would many a British resident of the Med’s coolest islands.

So, life may not be standing still in the oh-so-cool islands. It may be clambering aboard two wheels, finding the roads of Palma mercifully free of buses because they’re on strike, before being knocked over by a taxi, but life, for the cycling tourist, is well and truly stationary. Nice try, Guardian, better luck next time.

Oh, but there is also this free bit. Irrelevant the service being free or not may be to a tourist, its actual freeness is not all that it seems. There is a free period of use, but there is some confusion. Is this free period for 30 minutes or two hours? The site seems to suggest both, but to be fair I didn’t tarry long in trying to fathom it out. I shall not be availing myself of the service anyway. You have to be insane to want to drive a car in Palma, but as for riding a bike …

The absence of a language other than Catalan or Spanish on Bicipalma does rather give the game away. Or you would think that it does. That there may be no English doesn’t automatically mean that the tourist is being ignored. What it usually means is that no one can be bothered. As is the case with pretty much any fair or fiesta you may care to mention.

Someone remarked to me recently that the poster for the upcoming extravaganza in Alcúdia that is the annual rubber-ring gastronomy fair is only in Catalan. What on earth does he expect? Of course it’s only in Catalan. It’s always only in Catalan. And even were it in English, it would still insist on referring to “sepia”, which wouldn’t mean anything to an English reader. Even if it were translated as cuttlefish, it wouldn’t exactly have hordes of Brits rushing to the nearest restaurant, unless possibly they were Guardian readers of the cuttlefish-eating classes of middle Islington.

“Oh wow, amazing. Gideon, there’s a cuttlefish gastronomy fair in Mallorca. How chilled and cool is that. We simply must go.”

“Oh, yuh, amazing. Can you hire a bike as well?”

“I’m not sure, but there’s something here about biscuits. They’re free apparently.”

“Cool.”

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

We’ll Fight Them On The Beach Restaurants

So, here was an interesting little thing that caught my eye. In “The Bulletin” on Sunday. The headline was “Menorca fights all-inclusive tourist offer”. The short news item said that the “Council of Menorca” (was) fighting back against the all-inclusive offer by setting up an online scheme where(by) visitors planning to come to the island can survey local restaurants giving meals at a special price, and calculate their expenses in advance.”

What a very good idea, thought I. Visitors would also be able, the piece continued, to compare costs against that of an all-inclusive offer. Intrigued, I went in search of the website. I was intrigued not just by what seemed a good idea but also by the surprise of it. Why was I surprised? Well, would an island council, Menorca’s or any other, actually be presenting something that might be seen to undermine its hotels? Yes, it wants to boost its restaurants and other businesses, and no, the councils aren’t necessarily in cahoots with the hotels as such, but “fighting back” against AI? Was it really doing this?

Disappointingly, it isn’t doing this. On the “Menorca Full Experience” site, the introduction says that we (tourists) want to know in advance costs of various things and that we have a problem with budgeting for lunches and dinners. Nowhere is there any mention of all-inclusives. Might this be for a reason other than letting tourists make some cost comparison, as in all-inclusives will soon be a thing of the past?

The island’s tourism minister, Lázaro Criado, said, when the site was launched at the start of March, that “we understand that all-inclusive is not the agreed strategy for the long term in Menorca, although it can prove useful in the short term”. Just like Mallorca, then. If anyone can decipher what the minister means (and it is hard to believe what he appears to mean), answers on a postcard with a picture of one of the participating restaurants, assuming you can find one of them.

The idea behind the site is that restaurants are listed, along with their menus, and a discount price is offered on production of a voucher that can be printed out. Fair enough. But hardly new. A slight problem with what there is on the website at present is that there are very few restaurants participating. How many? Three. Yes, three. In the whole of Menorca. In certain sections of cuisine and in certain “urbanisations”, there are none listed. One presumes it’s all early days.

This website has nothing to do with all-inclusives, but everything to do with promoting local gastronomy, all three restaurants’ worth of it. There’s nothing wrong with such promotion, while it would indeed have been a surprise had there been some sort of cost-comparison measures being presented, which there aren’t. One can of course do one’s own cost comparison, by schlepping through all manner of websites to get to the comparison, but you won’t get it by “falling in love” with Menorca, the claim of the tourism board’s site.

Giving some advance information about what it might cost to eat out is not, in itself, a completely bad idea. It is one of the questions holidaymakers ask all the time, along with how much does a pint cost and what’s the weather like. The trouble is that the answers to them are of the string variety. How long is a piece of it? The weather you can be reasonably sure of, in July for example, but not in September. As for the costs of eating out, one man’s meat is another man’s pizza, as indeed one man’s Burger King is another man’s typical Mallorcan (or Menorcan) cuisine in a romantic, beach-side setting. It’s not comparing eggs with eggs, or a fried egg with a rasher of bacon with quail’s eggs and smoked salmon.

Calculating the holiday budget in advance, by sizing up less than a handful of restaurants’ menus, with or without discounts, does rather overlook the increasing trend for the holidaymaker to have pretty much a set budget to spend, regardless of advance price information or discounts. And while a discount here or there might be tempting, it won’t be if it means trekking across an entire island in search of it. To be of any real value, discounts have to be clustered in an area close to the holidaymaker, but if enough establishments offer them then the offer itself becomes standard and thus loses its capacity to incentivise.

As for a cost comparison between all-inclusives and a mix of accommodation and eating-out, it could well be that one can make a case for the latter working out cheaper. Again, it does all rather depend. But even this overlooks a crucial ingredient in the all-inclusive’s favour, which is its sheer convenience. Holidaymakers should be more adventurous, but many have lost the capacity for adventure-seeking because they are handed everything on a paper plate, together with the poolside, plastic knife and fork.

Menorca is not fighting back. It is not fighting the all-inclusive on the beaches, as only one of the three restaurants is indeed a beach restaurant. Criado also reckoned that “with this formula (that of the website, whatever this formula actually is) we wish to respond specifically to the demand for all-inclusive in Menorca”. If so, when why not say so. On the website. There again, all-inclusive is not for the long term, says Sr. Criado. Who’s he trying to kid?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Going Up! Newspapers and the internet

“The Times” is set to end its free online service. It’s a gamble, but for readers in places like Mallorca, who might otherwise pay an exorbitant price for the daily paper, two quid a week is extremely good value. Not that this is necessarily the point. Free should be free, say many, and a cover price for the online version will simply cause readers to go elsewhere. We’ll see. The new site is actually pretty good.

The “Diario de Mallorca” is not “The Times”, nothing like it of course. But there is something interesting about this paper. It has a good website – free – which has enjoyed increased traffic recently. At the same time, the printed version has also increased its circulation. Its main competitor, “Ultima Hora”, has experienced a decline in circulation, and its website is not as good but is improving. Of daily papers in Spain with a circulation over 10,000 (not huge admittedly), the “Diario” has registered the second greatest increase in physical circulation among the 39 papers with circulation over this number.

On the face of it, the two increases seem illogical. As the website beefs up its traffic, so, you would think, the circulation of printed version would decrease. So how to explain the apparent contradiction, as evidenced by the “Diario”? Maybe it’s all the free publicity I give it, but probably not. Perhaps it has something to do with its local nature. Despite the plans by “The Times” to create its own online “community”, it is, like all big papers, rather removed. A paper like the “Diario” isn’t. There is a far greater sense of reader “ownership” of the different formats; they are complementary, even if their content is basically the same.

I confess that I am casting around to find a reason. I don’t know the answer. But answer there must be, and if the experience of the “Diario” is echoed elsewhere, the doomsday predictions for newspapers and/or their websites would not hold up. What will be interesting is whether the circulation and the site traffic continue to increase. If they do, then someone should try and discover the paper’s secret. I should be at the paper’s offices today, so maybe I’ll ask.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Copy Cats: Internet and other rip-offs

Es Turó. It’s a restaurant near Santa Margalida. It is part of a famous old building – S’Alqueria. I like the place immensely. And I must declare an interest – the restaurant is a client.

I googled Es Turó and S’Alqueria yesterday because I wanted some background information on a feature about the old building. I stumbled across an entry for the restaurant. Clicked. Seemed familiar. Very familiar. I recognised the words. I had written them. I went further. Very, very familiar. Restaurants, bars, other places. Alcúdia, Pollensa. Very familiar. My words, my photos. Many of them were mine, except for the logos or photos that clients had provided.

I’m not naming the website for the simple reason that I have no desire to publicise it or to give it houseroom. Am I bothered? Up to a point, but more than anything I just felt it was pathetic.

It’s easy enough to lift from other websites. Often it goes unnoticed because the sites are unnoticed. I only found this particular one by chance and because Es Turó is rarely mentioned; it stuck out like a sore and copied thumb. I shall send the site an email, if I can be bothered. Depending on the response, I might let you know how I get on.

Lifting stuff from other sites, stuff that is proprietary in that it has been originated, is hardly unusual. It happens all the time. There isn’t a lot you can do about it, unless you’re a big or litigious organisation, of which there are some. But there is copying onto another site, and then there are other types of copying.

A while ago, I held back on doing a blog item, but I’m resurrecting the theme now, as it seems apposite to do so. It had to do with the excellent puertopollensa.com. The owner of the site, on its forum, mentioned an article from “The Sun”, which – in part – bore similarity to the blurb on the home page of the site. Not intimate with this blurb, I had a look, and I had a look at the article. The two were indeed similar. Too similar for the article’s reference to Puerto Pollensa not to have been based on it. In mitigation, it is just possible that this reference was found on another site, or indeed on more than one. So it may have seemed to have been somehow without origin. But this would not negate the similarity.

Plagiarism is something no journalist or writer ever wants to be accused of. It is also something that makes no sense. If you are a writer, you write – your own words. That’s why you are a writer, or a journalist. You want to use your words, paint your own pictures. Yet the journalist in this instance was well-known, well-respected. I could hardly believe what I was reading when comparing the article and the site’s home page.

I emailed the owner, Zelda, and told her that I was staggered by it. I can understand websites taking stuff (though I don’t approve of it, anything but), but I can’t understand a journalist doing the same. My impression was, and I apologise in advance if this was not the case, that the journalist had not even been to Puerto Pollensa. Had she, she surely would have penned her own words. Because Puerto Pollensa demands one’s own impressions, and because this is what writers do.

Or so I thought.

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.