Maria Frontera, the president of the Mallorca Hoteliers Federation, probably doesn’t need me to point this out, but if by any chance she missed this week’s release of the latest airport figures, then she needs to know that Palma Son Sant Joan counted 4,378,210 passengers in July, an increase of 5.9% compared with last year.
These were, it needs noting, the total of arriving and departing passengers and they weren’t of course all tourists. But the overwhelming majority of them were - a rule of thumb is around 80%. And so tourist numbers in Mallorca were therefore up; not hugely, but up nevertheless. We won’t know the exact numbers for another couple of weeks yet.
I mention Sra. Frontera because she referred to airport passenger numbers the other day. This was when the hoteliers held their first formal chinwag with newly installed tourism politicians, those of the Balearic government and the Council of Mallorca. At this meeting, she insisted that “we should not be playing with prices” and therefore competing with lower-priced destinations. To be playing with prices would mean adopting a stance contrary to the quality offered by Mallorca. The island “does not need to seek volume”, and so it is time “to forget about airport passenger indicators”.
I don’t think she meant that we should forget about these indicators entirely, but an implication of what she was saying was we shouldn’t be hung up on whether the airport has a 5.9% increase in passenger numbers in July and that we shouldn’t in fact be concerned if there were to be a 5.9% decrease. As the island doesn’t need to seek volume, then a decrease would be as acceptable, if not more so, than an increase. Is this correct, Sra. Frontera? “We have to provide quality. Quality is worth the money. And we have to commit to it in a more sustainable way. We still have to become more sophisticated and stop thinking about volume.” Make of this what you will.
She also stated that there needs to be improved coexistence between residents and visitors, the gathering of hotelier and politician great and good having expressed its concerns about illegal holiday lets, overcrowding and the workings of the tourism of excesses law. And this gathering over, one was left confused. What actually do the hoteliers want? What actually do the government and the Council of Mallorca want?
They will all be working in perfect harmony, according to the tourism minister, Jaume Bauzá, in developing a new tourism law. And with what purpose in mind? Bauzá said following this meeting that the PP have come “to add, to reform what doesn’t work”. “We haven’t come to take away everything that has been done.”
It is as if they are casting around in order to find things they can reform, while not being prepared to admit that things weren’t that bad. They do of course say, as in President Prohens has said, that the tourism of excesses law hasn’t worked, but then you have Marcial Rodríguez, who’s the new bloke in charge of tourism at the Council, admitting that Calvia town hall, under ex-mayor Alfonso Rodríguez, was applying the law pretty well. In Playa de Palma, by contrast, it isn’t working, another hotelier, Carolina Quetglas of the Association of Hotel Chains, suggesting that people who violate the law should be “fined immediately, so that this will have a deterrent effect on the rest of tourists of excess”. Very good. And who will be doing the fining, given the lack of Palma police resources?
We do know, as Prohens made clear in the election campaign, that the moratorium on new accommodation places will be scrapped and that the 2012 tourism law (a PP law) will be revisited in respect of incentives to hotels to upgrade their quality. This latter aspect doesn’t necessarily mean more accommodation places, but it might.
Even if it doesn’t, Frontera suggests that more volume isn’t needed. So why scrap the moratorium, unless a purpose is to facilitate more holiday rentals (which the hoteliers wouldn’t exactly be delighted with)? The boom in apartment rentals (legal ones) enabled by the last government contributed significantly to the ‘saturation’ (aka overcrowding) and a deterioration in resident-visitor coexistence, with which they are apparently concerned.
Perhaps the most confusing aspect of all is that Frontera welcomed the change of government and an end to talk of tourism ‘decrease’. With Iago Negueruela no longer apparently bullying the hoteliers, they will be allowed - as she has noted - to get back to growth. But growth in what, if she doesn’t perceive a need to think in terms of volume and feels that we can all forget about airport numbers?
Yes, yes, I know there is and will be all the stuff about growing the low season. But so there was under the last government. And growing the low season won’t make a scrap of difference to all the volume in summer. It will continue to be huge, there will continue to be saturation, there will continue to be issues regarding coexistence. What do they want? God knows.
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