Look Back In Anger: Pedro Iriondo

The Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourism Board, is not a public, governmental agency. It is a private organisation. Its "junta", its own board, comprises directors of Grupotel, MAC, Sol Melia and Iberostar hotels as well as representatives of a bank (Banca March), business associations and others. The Fomento is proud of its "independence"; it is one of its values, along with, inter alia, "altruism and plurality". These words, respectively, mean concern for the welfare of others and a system of society which respects and includes minorities. They are fine, noble words. But they are just words.

The president of the Fomento, Pedro Iriondo, has been having some words of his own. They are extraordinary. They may be an expression of the independence that the Fomento holds so dear, but they do not accord with its other values. His attack on low-cost airlines, on the passengers they bring and on workers in hotels is anything but altruistic or pluralistic. It is small-minded and borders on the xenophobic. It is insular. No man is an island, and that includes Sr. Iriondo. No island is any longer an island in a global environment, and that includes Mallorca. Try telling Sr. Iriondo this.

At a forum organised by the university's school of tourism, Sr. Iriondo launched into both RyanAir and easyJet, accusing them of not bringing "quality" tourists. He lambasted the airlines' passengers, the British, who stay in unregulated apartments and in villas that they rent from other Britons. He attacked waiters and other workers who are not from Mallorca and who therefore cannot know Mallorca and cannot adequately "sell" Mallorca because they don't have a feeling for the island.

He went on to criticise the lack of business tourists from Britain, those who might attend conferences (an area of hoped-for development in Mallorca), because they don't want to fly with the low-cost airlines. He laid into the internet and into an image of Playa de Palma that is one of card-tricksters, Romanians, prostitutes and "masseurs".

If the Fomento were a public body, Sr. Iriondo would be sacked. As the head of a private body which features hotel groups for whom, one might presume, foreign waiters work, quite what other members of the junta make of his remarks, who can tell. Independence and an independent voice are fine, but not when they fly around in all directions, attacking anyone and anything in sight. EasyJet and RyanAir may attract all manner of criticisms, but they are also big business when it comes to Mallorca. One feels pretty confident in saying that Sr. Iriondo's predecessor, the director-general in Spain and Portugal of Air Berlin, Alvaro Middelmann, would never have uttered the same words.

When Sr. Iriondo rose to the presidency of the Fomento, he looked back at a time in Mallorca when everything was rosy, there were parties on the beach and everyone was happy. During his contribution to the forum, he looked back again, to his time when he started in tourism and when all waiters and other workers were Mallorcan and bought into an "I love tourists" philosophy. By looking back, not once, but twice, he has condemned himself. He is of the past.

He has looked back with a current-day anger to a time when everyone may allegedly have been happy, but they were also poorly paid (still are, many of them), lived under a dictatorship, were pretty much told what to do and what to think and did not have the greater opportunities that they now enjoy. Sr. Iriondo will know, but hasn't said this, that the tourists who came to Mallorca did so partly because the island was dirt cheap. His insistence on referring to "quality" tourists, and he is not alone in this, can be interpreted as a shocking insult.

Those not afforded the quality status are branded with something else. Yet, he ignores the fact that Mallorca was largely built on an economy-class tourism. Its tourism history is one of the mass, and the mass does not always come with huge wads of cash. It has always been the case. It was in the 1970s and remains so. The difference, back then, was that not having huge wads of cash didn't matter; indeed there weren't always huge wads, among the British, because of foreign-exchange restrictions.

Had Sr. Iriondo moderated his language, had he been less inclined to reminisce, then his words might have been treated with greater sympathy. You can just about understand what he was driving at, if you were being kind, but instead an impression has been given that is no better than one of the bar bigot for whom altruism and plurality are alien concepts.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.