Image Rights? The right image of Mallorca

Gabriel Escarrer is the president and founder of the Mallorca-based hotel group Sol Meliá, now renamed Meliá Hotels International. An interview with him appeared in "Ultima Hora" at the weekend. When someone of Sr. Escarrer's eminence speaks, it is worth taking note.

A newspaper interview can only go into so much depth, which is unfortunate as it would have been instructive to have had more detail, such as that to do with the improvement of Mallorca's image.

This, in a way, was one of the more surprising parts of the interview; surprising because the image has improved, certainly when compared with one that the island had not so long ago when Mallorca was looked down upon and when it was very much Madge-orca, a place lumped in with Eric Idle's Watney's Red Barrel Torremolinos of so many years ago.

In part, it still is, but the image has shifted and the shift has been ongoing for quite some while. So a question I would like to ask is, what image do you believe Mallorca has? Your answers are likely to be diverse, which is what might be expected, as Mallorca is a place of huge diversity.

Recently I was asked to write about some of Mallorca's towns and villages. I was given a list of those to be covered. The piece ended up as a sort of tour. It started in Sóller, cut down to Banyalfabur, went across to Campos and Colonia Sant Jordi, up to Porto Cristo and then Artá and ventured inland via Santa Margalida, Campanet and Santa Maria until it came to an end in Lloret de Vista Alegre and Sineu, the geographical and arguably spiritual centre of Mallorca.

With the exception of touching on Can Picafort (as part of Santa Margalida), there was little by way of vast tourist resort in this tour (I would exclude Colonia Sant Jordi and Porto Cristo from such a description). Instead it was a route that embraced orange and lemon groves, an old railway, mountains, the terraces of Banyalfabur, Es Trenc, the view to Sa Cabrera, the caves of Drach and Hams, Talayotic Bronze Age settlements, the fiesta of La Beata, peculiar water phenomena, ancient hermitages, old markets, a baroque church with a blue bell, rural culture and the palace of the kings of Mallorca.

Want diversity? You've got it. The problem is that diversity does not mean image. Or not as the island's image is largely perceived. Sr. Escarrer said in the interview that the image needed to be cleaned up, that there needed to be a repositioning of Mallorca and one at an international level.

He was not wrong in saying this, but there is something distinctly not right about it. Because all this diversity, this different image is meant to have been part of a repositioning, one at an international level. Is Sr. Escarrer saying that the efforts of all that promotion that has gone on, or is supposed to have gone on, has been ineffective? One suspects he may have been being diplomatic.

I shan't be. It has been ineffective. Partly it has been ineffective for the right reasons, those of sun and beach, which remain Mallorca's most enduring attractions and reasons for being. Despite promotion of alternatives, sun and beach constitute the island's number one product and the most important of the elements of the island's promotional mix. And rightly so.

But sun and beach bring with them attendant problems. They are ones we are only too aware of and may well be to what Sr. Escarrer was alluding when he spoke of cleaning up the image.

In another newspaper at the weekend (the "Diario de Mallorca") there was an article which delved into crime in one of the main tourist centres of the island, Playa de Palma: pickpocketing, prostitution, drug dealing. To this can be added the periodic reports of violence. The need for an image clean-up has moved on from the days when Mallorca and some of its resorts were simply considered as being naff.

Despite media negativity and reporting of crime and violence, Mallorca's image has changed. But the change in image has a way to go, a long way to go. The question is how this image change is truly effected, how the diversity of the island is truly conveyed, and in such a way that the harmful consequences of seasonality, to which Sr. Escarrer also referred, are mitigated.

It's the sixty-four million euro question. And it has been ever since the euro was introduced. Prior to this, it was the the ten billion plus peseta question. It's a question, the answer to which no one has found. Sadly, one fancies it will never be discovered. Yet it should be. Start in Sóller, cut down to Banyalfabur ... .


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.