Tourist numbers and the airport smokescreen

Shortly before the regional elections in May 2007, Matas reminded Zapatero of his promise. Matas and the PP lost the parliamentary election, and he was to soon become the focus of attention for anti-corruption judges and prosecutors. None of which had anything to do with the airport, the co-management of which was pushed onto the back burner until it was reignited in August 2008 at a meeting between Zapatero and Matas’s successor, Francesc Antich of PSOE.

There wasn’t a promise on this occasion, more a large hint. Son Sant Joan could well be involved in a future ‘liberalised’ co-management arrangement which would be related to the plan for the partial privatisation of the AENA airports authority. Antich had been annoyed by a Spanish Government suggestion that only airports with more than 30 million passengers a year - which meant Barcelona-El Prat and Madrid-Barajas - would be eligible for this sort of deal. In 2008, Son Sant Joan had 23 million passengers.

Antich had spent the preceding weeks raising demands for co-management. On the one hand the airport was “strategic” for the Balearic economy and residents’ mobility. On the other there were regional financing problems, the result of how Madrid redistributed tax revenue funds to the regions and - by August 2008 - of the penny having dropped that the Balearics weren’t immune from the financial crisis.

The Matas and Antich meetings form part of the history to a political demand in the Balearics for co-management of the airport. There are at least twenty years’ history, because nothing ever came of the promise or the hint. Whatever Zapatero may have envisaged as an arrangement under the privatisation, this was well and truly grounded when the government (by then the PP) finally sold off 49% of AENA.

Both right and left in the Balearics were eager to have co-management, the principal reason for which, notwithstanding the Antich strategic claim, was financial. Son Sant Joan has historically been one of AENA’s most profitable airports, if not the most profitable. Political parties on the islands have wanted their slice of the cake, the larger the better.

During the period of the Armengol PSOE coalition from 2015, co-management occasionally cropped up, the context having shifted to the mounting concern about tourist saturation that a Més tourism minister, Biel Barceló, first truly placed on the political centre-stage. Son Sant Joan was edging towards the 30 million passengers a year that had once been a Zapatero benchmark.

We now come to a PP government that has once more raised the subject. Spokesperson and vice-president, Antoni Costa, has said “it is not advisable to increase capacity in high season”. He was referring to airport capacity and also to the number of tourists; the tourist capacity had reached its “maximum limit”. The timing of Costa’s statement was surely not a coincidence, Més having announced that they would be presenting a parliamentary motion urging co-management of all three Balearic airports. The PP’s parliamentary spokesperson, Sebastià Sagreras, had in fact stated that the PP would be likely to support the Més motion.

So, Costa’s intervention can well be viewed as a desire to assert a PP political initiative in respect of the airport. But there was much about it that raised questions. Here was a minister speaking of a maximum limit of tourists when his government has consistently stressed a need for “objective data”. No such data for a maximum limit have been presented, at least not publicly. It may seem to mostly everyone that a maximum has been reached, but this is not how the government has been going about its tourism management policies. Data count, not perceptions.

More than this, however, is not a revisiting of the co-management theme an admission that, regardless of whatever other measures the government may care to deploy, a control of passenger numbers is one of only two genuine means of tackling overtourism? This control is what the regional government is seeking, it having at the same time failed to implement the other means, namely cutting the number of accommodation places. Is co-management therefore not a bit of a smokescreen, the feasibility having been ruled out by Spain’s transport minister in November 2022 because of the complication caused by 49% private shareholding?

History isn’t on the regional government’s side and nor is the AENA shareholding structure. The Balearics can’t control the airport, but the Balearics can control accommodation. There’s your answer.