Occasionally I crack and this short piece is one of those times, after reading the article in Sunday’s MDB on ‘Incomes from tourism have declined since the 1980s’.
Firstly, the Minister for Tourism Biel Barceló, who looks in appearance a nice man but expounds a somewhat naïve ideology, says that he does not like the notion of seasonality and prefers ‘deseasonalisation’. The fact that my English spell check can’t recognise this term is secondary proof of its nonsense. Most markets, especially tourism markets are seasonal. Good tourism providers know this and adapt their offering accordingly.
Further, our well-meaning, but rather misguided minister advocates a search for a ‘Global Economic Model …which cannot be seen at present’. What nonsense am I reading?
Then I read the statistical nonsense in the article, comparing 1980 with 2014 about the numbers of tourists and the reduced ‘per capita income’. The tourist industry is a global industry that historically has shown phenomenal year-on-year growth over the past forty years and industry analysts predict that this will continue for the foreseeable future regardless of global conflicts.
I was once at a conference where the keynote speaker was David Bellamy, who at the time was the highest profile environmentalist in media circles. He stated (I paraphrase his statement as) “… if the Chinese disposable income enables them to become global tourists, the world will need twice the number of airplanes to transport them”. That was some fifteen years ago. It is possible to find statistics that show that the number of airplanes globally has doubled and with it the MASS in global mass tourism has doubled in this time, and this is not because of the Chinese increases alone.
What is not recognised in the observation of increased tourist numbers is the service level, consumer expectation change factor. If Majorca has declined in ‘per capita income’ ranking in this time, it is almost entirely down to lack of investment. There is an established theoretical service quality maxim in which, ‘as service quality increases, expectations expect this as the norm’.
Consumers of Majorca’s tourism product have not been offered increased service quality over many years (albeit until the past few years of intensive investment, in Magalluf in particular), hence the slide ‘down market’ that Majorca has experienced in mass tourism. Simply put, constant investment and continuous improvement in quality carries the modern mass market with it. 21st century expectations are satisfied and expectations rise with ‘value for money’ mass tourism. Other regions are providing better service quality and accommodation, Majorca has still to catch-up.
Finally, I must make reference to the article’s comment that the Rector of the University was in support of the tourist tax. Non academics should know that a ‘rector’ of a university is not a champion of ‘academic freedom of thought founded upon sound research statistics and interpretation’, (although officially this is exactly his/her position). A ‘rector’ is a political animal who knows where his funding sources lie. For certain, his academic professors in tourism are ‘kicking the metaphorical cat’ in private frustration, or they should be.
How do we save ourselves from this self-destruct ideology? Majorca tourism needs better policy than this.
Professor Emeritus David Carson
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Sir, I thought I read somewhere that the number of tourists going through the Balearic airports increased last year and in the case of Menorca there were more aeroplanes from the UK and those would be increased again next year from new destinations. If the per capita spend is decreasing it must be that either the offerings are too downmarket or all inclusive has damaged the local economy and a tourist tax will only exacerbate this problem.