Forever Changes

More on hotels. There are, from time to time, the bugles of the changing of the nationality guard at certain hotels. Three years ago, the restaurants of Can Picafort were ordering more cash registers in anticipation of increased Anglicisation of some of the vast hotel stock in the town. The Germans, they said, who had committed sunbedsraum in colonising Can Picafort some years previously, were retreating and taking their closed wallets with them. I don’t know that it made much difference to Can Picafort, though it is fair to say that the town is still host, in addition to more British, to a German market that might be characterised as being more Ostmark as opposed to D-mark, even if the current visitors don’t necessarily come from the eastern part. A front-line restaurant owner said to me last year that the general level of tourism in the town was “cheap”. I won’t mention the restaurant’s name.

Nationalities get branded according to their willingness to part with folded notes. The British, usually, are looked upon as being the most generous, the Germans as being tight and the Spaniards as letting one cup of coffee last for several hours. It’s a nonsensical generalisation of course, and has everything to do with differences in resorts and also hotels. In Alcúdia, the British are not always believed to be big spenders. Those in the all-inclusive Club Mac ghetto or in the all-inclusivised part of Bellevue have little incentive to spend, and, in many cases, they don’t have the money to spend either.

And then one comes to the Scandinavians. Last year, it was being said that it was Baltic euros and kroner that were keeping much of Alcúdia from penury. An exaggeration of course, but the Swedes and the rest tend to be good spenders. The mystery is that the Swedes are not drunk from the moment they leave the plane till the moment they leave, given that a night out on the booze in Stockholm or somewhere costs about the same as the annual GDP of a small African country. The nationality one tends to hear little of is the Dutch, who, apart from a reputation for being, well Dutch, rarely get mentioned when it comes to the European spending league. But they are all the size of rugby lock forwards, so one presumes that a fair amount of nosebag and watering is required to keep them sufficiently fuelled, which means goodly amounts of moolah.

But where was I? Ah yes, hotels. The Swedes and their neighbours have, over the years, turned the Sunwing Resort in Puerto Alcúdia into a Nordic zone of disgustingly healthy-looking blondness. In so doing, they nabbed for themselves one of the best locations for hotels and apartments in the area – slap bang on the beach, halfway from the port and halfway from the noise of The Mile. They couldn’t have planned it better. Some poor Brit, suitably impressed by the potential of a holiday there, contacted me last year, bemoaning the fact that the Sunwing website was not available in English. The reason why it was not was because they didn’t have any British clients. All sewn up by the Scanda tour operators. Well seemingly, this may be about to change as one of the two Sunwing hotels, the four-star Princesa, is due to go British following this winter’s major refurbishment, which will be good news for the British previously barred through the Scandinavian apartheid and will still be good news for the local hostelries as they should bring with them a minted tourism comparable to the Baltic spend.

While Sunwing becomes more cosmopolitan, another place is set to take, possibly, the dispossessed Scandinavians of the Princesa. I say possibly, as the Solecito Apartments, opposite the Club Mac, are hardly the same deal as Sunwing. But the apartments are, apparently, going Scandinavian and Dutch (quite how the Dutch get in on this I’m not sure, but be that as it may). This part of Alcúdia is pretty much solid Brit. Now the Solecito is not exactly huge, but for the bars there, used to serving up a diet of the full English and burgers, maybe they will have to invest in some raw herrings and smorgasbord. And my guess is that the new demographics might just mean higher spend, but perhaps I am over-generalising.


QUIZ
Yesterday – Carly Simon. Today’s title – one of the greatest albums of the ‘60s; American group and they were?

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