Sunday, December 22, 2013

Far From Ideal: The rural tourism idyll

Rural tourism is a part of Mallorca's tourism mix which provides an inland idyll but which is also idealistic. The island, along with the rest of the Balearics, doesn't, in national terms, do at all badly in terms of rural tourism performance. In June this year, as an example, the Balearics topped the national list with more overnight stays in rural tourism accommodation than any other region of the country. The total number of these stays was 92,963. In September, the number was higher - 112,605 - and this represented an increase of almost 30% over the same month in 2012.

Heartening though these statistics may appear, they should be put in context. Overnight stays in hotels in the Balearics for September amounted to 8,560,293. Rural tourism, therefore, equates to (or equated in September at any rate) 1.3% of hotel volume in tourist areas, i.e. the coastal resorts.

Add up the different types of non-hotel accommodation for September, and the overnight stays were 1,750,863. Rural tourism was a touch under 6.5% of this non-hotel tourism (in fact the figure does include rural hotels). The other non-hotel accommodation comprises camping, of which there is a negligible amount in Mallorca but some in Ibiza, and tourist apartments. (When reports refer to tourist apartments, it isn't entirely clear what these are, so it is wise not to necessarily treat them as consisting of the so-called illegal offer.)

However one looks at the numbers for rural tourism, and despite the healthy performance in the Balearics compared with other regions, this is a type of tourism which is on the margins of the tourism mix. And yet, it is a type of tourism - through agrotourism, converted country mansions as hotels etc. - which the Balearics tourism ministry holds out great hope for. It is why the ministry was therefore permissive in facilitating the creation of more rural tourism accommodation in the 2012 tourism law and why its colleagues elsewhere in government are proposing an amnesty on illegal rural properties (some 20,000) which could in certain instances be transformed as additional accommodation.

The ministry, in this same law, was at pains to establish in principle the need for quality standards (for all types of accommodation), but standards (or lack of them) may be an issue which explains why, across Spain as a whole, there is a low loyalty factor among holidaymakers who stay in rural accommodation. Only 25% of clients say they would return, and the Balearics do not head the list when it comes to repeat business (Extremadura and the Basque Country come out on top).

The loyalty factor aside, rural tourism is far more susceptible to wild fluctuations in demand than regular coastal tourism. In April this year, as a further example, there was a national decline of just over 50% in rural tourism stays compared with the previous April. The slightly earlier Easter may well have contributed to this, but even so, 50% is a far from insignificant fall. For the Balearics, there was still some good news as the islands were again number one, but with only 38% of places occupied.

Standards may not be a key issue. I fancy that rural tourism is a more discretionary type of tourism than coastal tourism. It is something which visitors give a try and not something which they intend repeating on a regular basis. While this is supposition, there are some more solid issues to take into account, and one of them is the nature of services on offer. For instance, how good, if at all, are wifi networks in rural areas? Wifi is an increasingly important ingredient for the traveller, but if communications infrastructure is lacking, then rural accommodation may find that clients prefer to give it a miss.

To wifi one can add the total package that is made available to the rural tourist, and it is this which could well represent the biggest challenge to rural tourism. Two years ago, an article in "Hosteltur" attacked the rural tourism sector for being "allergic to change" and for simply being boring. It is as though the rural setting is considered sufficient to attract guests, when it quite plainly isn't. Tourists, wherever they go, are more demanding than ever. And as noted yesterday, the report for the ITB Berlin travel fair revealed that, in contrast to the growth in urban tourism, the demand for rural and nature tourism has been falling. The ideal of the rural idyll, it might be said, doesn't match the dynamism and vitality of the city; one might be boring, while the other isn't.

In the Balearics at least, there is better performance than elsewhere, but it is performance which makes only a small contribution to the total tourism picture. It is probably worth pushing rural tourism more, but how much more? Is there genuinely the demand, while a not unimportant matter related to any growth in rural tourism is that of resources. A criticism of Balearics "quality" rural tourism is that it has a huge hunger for water, which is costly and inefficient when compared with densely populated, coastal, urban areas. 

Rural tourism sounds good in theory and it does have much to commend it but its importance is being exaggerated.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very good points of tourism needing the input of advancing technology to expand, Andrew. The island definitely suffers from Doughnut Tourism, doing far better on the coastal areas than it does further inland, for obvious reasons. Inland needs to offer a totally different type of experience in order to compete. A very difficult order to fill!