Hope Lies In The Proles

I was interviewed by the BBC the other day. The interview was about all-inclusives and was to form part of a feature for the "Fast Track" travel programme.

The background to the feature was two-fold: the announcement by First Choice that it will be only offering all-inclusive packages as from next year, and the impact that all-inclusives have on local businesses.

The location that First Choice had suggested for filming was the Holiday Village in Can Picafort. This is a fine complex. It is modern, offers a good range of services and generally speaking is well regarded when it comes to reviews on the internet. It is four-star, and herein may lie a tale.

On the First Choice website there are ten hotels which appear most prominently when you search for Mallorca. The Holiday Village heads the list. In the Alcúdia-Can Picafort conurbation, there are four hotels in all, and only the Holiday Village is four-star.

Fair enough though; why wouldn't you pick the best that you have?

The presenter of "Fast Track", Rajan Datar, was not overly familiar with Alcúdia and Can Picafort, so I took him for a bit of a tour one evening. A port of call was a hotel complex that had been dropped by First Choice during the 2009 season. Bellevue.

The level of all-inclusive offer at this vast resort in Alcúdia has increased substantially over the past four to five years. In 2009 it was around 50%. The word locally is that it is now 80%, though local word is often not reliable. Let's just say that it would be a surprise had there not been an increase since 2009.

We went to a bar nearby. The owner is preparing to close at the end of this season, attributing this primarily to the impact of AI. He was happy enough to be interviewed for the feature. He was less happy when it came to the actual filming and choked up when reading from a poster that announces the closure.

A suffering bar owner is not the most objective of subjects for a report, but it can make for powerful telly. He displayed a lack of objectivity, understandable enough, when dismissing benefits that AIs might offer families on a tight budget.

For me, as I said during the interview, it's a no-brainer. I can completely understand these families opting for AI. But you always come back to the same seemingly intractable problem; that of the effects on the wider economy and on bars and restaurants in the shadows of all-inclusives.

I don't know what was said when the filming moved on to the Holiday Village, but I can guess. First Choice and TUI have been doing their best to put positive spin on all-inclusives, such as it being a myth that AI guests do not go off-site and do not spend outside. It is a myth, but then why do some guests find it necessary to go off-site and spend? Because the AI they have ended up at isn't much good. Holiday Village is more the exception to the fifteen to twenty-minute rule; how long it can take to be served with a beer in a small plastic glass.

However, the spend of AI guests is low. It has been proven to be so by research conducted by the university in Palma. TUI, perhaps inadvertently, added to the proof when it revealed that only 11% of guests' total spend found its way into the local community at a different Holiday Village, one in Turkey. And that is also a four-star.

This, the star rating, is relevant, because the higher the standard of the hotel and AI offer, then the more the myth of guests not spending off-site ceases to be a myth. I am at a loss to understand the logic as to why, if you get really good AI service, you would ever spend anything outside the hotel.

There is another reason for going off-site and that is because guests tire of what is on offer and also need a release to stop going stir crazy. And it is this which is perhaps inducing something of an AI backlash, together with a growing appreciation among many tourists as to the effects on the economy outside the hotel. There are plenty of tourists who will mock a bar owner saying hello in the hope of business by waving a wristband in his face, but there are plenty who are sympathetic. Without wishing to sound disrespectful, it's a touch Orwellian. The hope lies in the proles.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.