Mallorca’s tourism resilience (and its data)

Anecdotal narrative of the current day is conditioned by people with banners and groups who have rediscovered the art of letter-writing. All expressing highly legitimate causes, they nonetheless offer a homegrown phenomenon that translates into conclusions from whatever so or so happens to be saying being along the lines of the death of mass tourism (as if!) or, at the very least, the emergence of ‘unhappy hours’ in a Magalluf deprived of a decades-long touristic birthright trampled over by governmental interference and a transformation into beach-club hedonism reserved solely for the A of an ABC tourist socio-economic classification. These ‘unhappy hours’, you will note, have virtually nothing to do with banner-waving, but let’s not ignore a propensity to conflate separate manifestations in the pursuit of a desired outcome. Down the pan. Allegedly. And anecdotally.

The anecdote largely worthless, we have to rely on the appliance of science. In data we trust, because the Balearic Government keeps on telling us we must while prevaricating over measures that might just lower the banners.

So, despite factors other than protesters - the traveller registration system that everyone seems to have forgotten about, Putin (as was the case last year), less than glowing economic circumstances in the two main foreign markets (also the case last year) - the data stubbornly refuse to prove the pan theory. In the short-term at any rate. Or do they?

Having dismissed the anecdote, I shall contradict myself but only because said anecdote did rather surprise me. It concerns a friend (German) whose brother had to stay at her place for one night because the hotel of his desire and that of his partner was full up. They weren’t able to get in until the next day. Full up? At the end of March? This was for a four-star in Playa de Muro. There again, Playa de Muro is awash with cyclists and not all hotels have yet opened. Does this anecdote prove anything? No, but it arose at the same time as it was being reported that bookings for the Balearics over Easter have increased by 30%.

A full thirty per cent? Apparently so, but then one isn’t comparing like with like. Remember last Easter and headlines about a fall in the number of flights. Interpreted by those inclined to interpret the headlines thus, this fall was unsurprising because of, e.g., prices. Had they gone beyond the headlines, however, they would have realised that the fall, by comparison with Easter 2023, had everything to do with the timing of Easter in 2024. End of March, and airlines’ summer schedules had yet to kick in, which was the sole reason for there having been fewer flights and which helps to thoroughly distort this year’s 30% increase in bookings.

This Easter season is closer to “the prelude to this year’s peak season in Mallorca”, hence the increase in airline seats (and hotel prices), observes the director of operations at analysts Mabrian, Álex Villeyra. Well, who would have thought that? “Late Easter is always much better than if it falls in late March,” adds the president of the Playa de Palma hoteliers. No kidding?

Obvious though this all is, do the Easter prospects in any way provide an indication as to the main season? Not really, as they just point to a 30% increase in bookings for two situations that defy satisfactory comparison. But what they do also indicate is the inexorable growth in the supply of data and therefore in its reporting. Mabrian, Travelgate are just two whose regular bombardments supply an abundance of copy fodder and a not infrequent debunking of the isolated anecdotal evidence. Tourism has always needed its data, but it can seem as if tourism now exists for the purposes of producing data, such is the depth of the well from which numbers can be extracted.

The science is objective, though, or seemingly so. And irrespective of factors that anecdotally might suggest something to the contrary, the resilience of tourism is at present failing to be undermined. Which isn’t to say that it won’t be, but the island’s tourism history tends to a view that it takes an uncontrollable shock to shake the tourism foundations. We’ll see.