Join Our Club: Youth tourism market

Lloret de Mar is a Spanish resort synonymous with the growth of mass and packaged tourism. It occupies a place in tourism history alongside Torremolinos, Benidorm and Arenal (Playa de Palma) as being where it all really took off. In the late sixties, when my family swapped Hastings and Bournemouth for the newly exotic and cheap Spanish resorts, it was Arenal and Lloret that, probably through the pages of a Clarkson brochure, offered promises of a holiday experience alien to that of the south-coast end-of-the-pier variety.

Lloret has never shaken off its image. Try as it might have done, and like other resorts in Spain and Mallorca, it is still considered to be essentially naff. What it has also acquired is an image for trouble, one that it shares with resorts such as Magalluf.

This summer there has been disquiet among hoteliers, businesses and town hall representatives regarding the portrayal of Magalluf on Spanish national television channels, and specifically what goes on along the “strip”. The head of the tourist businesses association Acotur has voiced his concern that Magalluf has been depicted as a lawless town.

Magalluf has had its share of trouble this summer; even a US marine managed to get himself hauled in following a fight. It has not been alone. In Arenal a bunch of German skinheads engaged in a spot of what was quite clearly racially motivated bother.

But the trouble in both resorts has been nothing compared with that in Lloret.

Earlier this month there was a battle involving some 400 tourists, French and Italian. A couple of nights later there were further incidents and twenty arrests, none of them, by the way, of British people.

The indignation felt by businesses in Lloret has led them to go further than those in Magalluf. The federation representing businesses offering recreational musical activities (which, one assumes, partly or totally means clubs) is considering asking a judge to look at whether tour operator publicity has in some way contributed to the incidents. The federation considers that this publicity, and also that of “intermediary agencies”, has branded Lloret as a destination for drunken tourism.

It is not clear which tour operators or intermediary agencies the federation has in mind, as it is also not clear what charge might actually be levelled against them, but if it is the case that tour operators have in some way contributed, then what does this say about their responsibilities?

If you are going to pitch a resort to a youthful market, you are unlikely to portray it as tranquil and sedate. Which doesn’t mean to say you have to describe it as somewhere you can go out, get off your face and have a good old bundle.

The tour operators do, when it comes to the youth tourism market, tread a fine line. It would be a strange tour operator indeed who didn’t know what the priorities for a goodly part of this market would be, and these don’t include “doses of local culture and scenery that gives you that serene feeling”. Don’t take my word for it, as these are the words of First Choice on its 2wentys holidays to Magalluf page: “not that we’re really interested in that side of things”.

Further down the page is a list of what things cost. Four items. A full English but otherwise a pint of beer, spirit and mixer and a bottle of wine. The 2wentys section on the website is headed with the advice to “join 2wentys for some serious party antics, with bar crawls, booze cruises and more …”. No suggestions of any drinking there then. And none at all on its Facebook page; apologies, Magalluf, but Gumbet in Turkey is apparently the place to get totally off of it this summer.

But what does anyone expect? What indeed do the good people of Lloret expect? They might not expect pitched battles with 400 tourists, but if your resort has a clubbing and youthful reputation, then I’m sorry but you are going to get people who like the odd cold drink or a hundred.

Ever since Club 18-30 first burst on the scene – its initial destination in its old, very much less raucous Horizon days was in fact Lloret – there have been “issues” surrounding the youthful, clubbing market. Yes, the tour operators do have to assume some responsibility, but they have also been responsible for a growth in resort supply, such as the clubs. In Lloret, to which neither 2wentys nor Thomas Cook’s Club 18-30 go, why exactly is there a federation representing clubs? Who are these clubs for? Senior citizens?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Future Sound Of Mallorca

Twenty years ago an astonishing noise was released. It was one of the defining tracks of acid house, trip-hop, ambient – all of these things. In the same year as London’s Ministry Of Sound opened, the club’s name was partially echoed by the name of a group whose music was central to what was now an established dance scene. In 1991, The Future Sound Of London issued “Papua New Guinea”. It signalled, along with the music of acts such as KLF and The Orb, the arrival of club dance and rave into the mainstream.

In the same year, the American music impresario, Bill Graham, was killed in a helicopter crash. Twenty years before his death, Graham had closed his Fillmore venues in New York and San Francisco. His final introduction at the Fillmore West went: “What better way to end it, than with the sounds of the streets – Santana”. What followed was another astonishing noise: a frenetic and soulful combination of “Incident At Neshabur” and Joe Zawinul and Miles Davis’s “In A Silent Way”.

Bill Graham was something of a mentor to Carlos Santana, encouraging a collision between rock, blues and Latin rhythms that helped to place those rhythms into a music environment of the time in a far more contemporary and dynamic fashion than artists such as Sergio Mendes had achieved.

There is a continuum from 1971 and Santana’s appearance as the act which closed Fillmore West, through The Future Sound Of London in 1991 and up to today. It is one that came to forge and still does forge the amalgamation of Latin rhythm with club dance. In Mallorca, Latin, be it salsa, flamenco or other genres, joins with techno, ambient and other forms, to make its own astonishing noise.

Yet, for all that Mallorca has a club scene, one which musically ranges from conventional dance and retro nights (of the 80s and 90s) to harder-core techno and the Latin-oriented fusion, the island has never meant music. Certainly not in the way that Ibiza has and still does.

Balearic house originated in Ibiza in the mid-1980s and was the one of the main forces, arguably the main force, behind the dance and rave scene that emerged in Britain. It was picked up by clubs like Manchester’s Haçienda and by the club’s co-owners, New Order, and its various derivatives were formed by the likes of Jimmy Cauty of The Orb, later the KLF, and The Future Sound Of London.

Ibiza has, ever since, been synonymous with clubbing. While it does of course have its regular family tourism, and while it has also taken measures to try and eradicate more extreme aspects of its club scene, it has an image of dance and clubbing; an altogether more youthful image than Mallorca has.

The islands have their different images, and it is only right that they should. Ibiza, though, is dabbling with some danger if it tries too hard to dilute its club scene. The drugs and crime that inevitably go along with it (and from which Mallorca is also not immune) are understandable reasons for it wishing to do so, but the island should appreciate the business that is brought in and which, from the 1980s, has fallen into the laps of tourism officialdom which hasn’t had to lift a finger because the club scene happened organically without its direct involvement.

While Ibiza has sought to distance itself from one of its core brand attributes, Mallorca has never sought to embrace the club scene or music in general. There is a reluctance, a suspicion, a lack of appreciation within tourism circles when it comes to music that isn’t stuffy or strictly traditional. Because it tends to imply a youthful market, it doesn’t quite chime with the mainstream conservatism of the “family” market. And for Mallorca, the youthful market tends to mean Magalluf and the periodic bad publicity it attracts, and one, therefore, that the island’s tourism officials would prefer didn’t exist.

Music, however, as much as the sun and the beach is symbolic of holidays. Who doesn’t have their memories of certain songs and certain holidays? And be the music the holiday-camp campness of “Agadoo”, the karaoke, the live act at a fiesta or the dance club, it is part of the whole holiday experience. Rather than suspicion of the club and youth market, the mindset should be one of placing music, in all its varieties, at the centre of tourism thinking. Were this to be the case, you would hope that an altogether more relaxed and proactive attitude would take hold, one in which different types of music could co-exist in a way that might attract new business, as witnessed by what Mallorca Rocks is attempting.

A genuine music festival, for example; letting the parties go back to the beaches, rather than locking them away in sports arenas, as now happens in Can Picafort; more concert seasons and more international acts. The future sounds of Mallorca and the future sound of music as part of holidays. Over to you, Mr. Delgado.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.