French Lessons: Promotional messages

What's a ridiculous French number? "Soixante-neuf" perhaps? Not ridiculous, but it has inspired generations of prurient chortling. "Deux" maybe? The number of years of suspended prison sentence that Chirac has received. "Mille-cent-trente-sept?" The year that Charles the Fat died, and ridiculous for no other reason than that the French used to deal in kings with ridiculous names.

The answer is in fact none of these. It is of course "trois-cent-mille". Or indeed slightly fewer than 300,000, the total number of French tourists who travel to Mallorca each year, and a number that hasn't changed since the turn of the century.

At a gathering of directors of different offices of Turespaña, the national tourism promotion organisation, the director for Paris cited the ridiculous number and bemoaned the small number of French tourists and an image they have of Mallorca as being "over-constructed".

The French tourism market is an odd one. You might wonder why the French would want to bother holidaying in Mallorca when they have their own Mediterranean or Atlantic resorts. There again, if you live in Paris, you might just as well hop over to Mallorca as head down to the Riviera. It is a tourism market that also has plenty of history. It was French tourists, for example, who pretty much first colonised Alcúdia in the early 1930s, dropping into the bay by sea-planes from Marseille.

But resorts or no resorts, Mediterranean or no Mediterranean, the reluctant French tourists are a mystery when you consider that they lag some way behind the Italians who also have sea and sun and can, and do, boast about cuisine and wines superior to those of Mallorca (just as the French would). The Turespaña director in Milan says that Mallorca has become a destination "à la mode" for the Italians, or rather "una moda".

The lack of French tourists, who could joyfully take to the beaches of Mallorca and lob Euro-harmony insults at the British (and indeed the Italians and Spanish) along the lines of your deficit is bigger than our deficit, was just one issue that the Turespaña directors had to contend with. It might simply be a case of Turespaña's promotional slogan of "I Need Spain" being more of a mouthful in French ("J'ai besoin de l'Espagne"), but Mallorca's image of being over-constructed is perhaps revealing, especially to a race whose own tourism tends to be understated by comparison.

It does rather depend where in Mallorca you go (or the French go), but the fact that the French might have this image emphasises the fact that promotion cannot rest on its laurels and that it also needs to create different messages for different markets. Unfortunately, on its laurels is where promotion is resting.

The massive cut to the Balearics tourism budget for 2012 and the resultant loss of tourism promotion spend (the total budget will have plummeted by 89% in the space of two years) was way higher than the Mallorca hoteliers federation, among others, had been expecting.

The Balearics finance minister - and note that it is the finance and not the tourism minister - has said that promotion will have to be "much more austere" but also "more distinctive". So distinctive in fact that the tourism ministry is planning on not bothering having its own stand at the Berlin travel fair. Shortage of cash should exercise the creative abilities and make more out of less, but, as the French experience suggests, promotion has to be differentiated (which does mean spending money). It might not be imagery that plays well with other nationalities, but the French presumably need to see quaint, stone-walled cottages and toothless pensioners sitting around a square partaking of some bread and wine - rather like France, therefore.

Meantime, the soon-to-depart national tourism secretary-general, the Mallorcan Joan Mesquida, has had his centimo's worth, warning of the dangers of the Balearics not undertaking promotion. As with the hoteliers, he is pointing to the fact that, though 2012 is set to be another good year for tourism, there has to be greater proactivity in cementing and improving on the gains made in 2011.

And as part of the wider promotional message, the regional government might do well to consider that relaxations to the tourism law to facilitate re-modellings of already over-constructed parts of Mallorca, e.g. to allow for Melià's plans for Magalluf, do not necessarily attract all of the island's main markets. The French, you would imagine, would not be so ridiculous as to buy the message of transformation or to buy a condo. And how much might one cost? "Trois-cent-mille?"


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.