What Is The Other Barceló Up To?

According to those who study such things, the surname Barceló first surfaced in Mallorca in 1232, three years after the Catalan conquest. The original Barceló was a Pedro. He came from Montpellier, which wouldn't have done him any harm at all. King Jaume I was from the same city. Such ties counted for much when it came to the acquisition of power in the newly occupied land.

The surname is common in Mallorca and elsewhere in the Balearics. Amusingly enough, it is believed that the current tourism minister has a close family relationship with the hotel chain of the same name. This belief stems solely from the fact the name is the same. There is no such relationship and nor is there one involving one of Biel Barceló's predecessors at the tourism ministry: Joana isn't even Mallorcan, she's from Menorca.

Biel Barceló and Simón Pedro Barceló occupy very different worlds. Their common link is tourism. The former is not, as it is laughingly claimed by those captivated by the coincidence of the surname, in the pocket of the latter or indeed any other hotelier. Biel is a dyed-in-the-wool, left-wing eco-nationalist. Simón Pedro isn't. Common link notwithstanding, the two otherwise have so little in common that they may as well be from competing planets as opposed to competing sides of tourism policies.

While Biel tries his best to avoid being ejected from the government and tries his best (and succeeds) in antagonising holidaymakers and hoteliers by doubling the rate of tourist tax, Simón Pedro enjoys greater job security and harbours far loftier ambitions than lengthening the tourism season by a day or two. Simón Pedro wishes to rule the world of Spain's hotel chains.

Given the prominence of Mallorca's leading hotel groups (and not just in Mallorca by any stretch of the imagination), we are familiar with their leading lights. None of them, however, conforms with an American style of the business leader as celebrity. They are known, but they all give the impression of being low-key. There isn't any great sense of business machismo, bluster or a craving for the limelight. They just get on with running their businesses and being very successful (and rich), to boot.

It perhaps comes as something of a surprise, therefore, that someone with a meek and mild appearance like Simón Pedro is embarking on what - if it comes off - will be the mother of all hotel chain mergers. And when one says merger, it will of course be a takeover. There rarely is any such thing as a merger of equals.

Simón Pedro is eyeing up NH Hotels. In terms of the number of rooms in Spain, NH is the second largest hotel chain. Meliá has twice as many rooms as NH. Barceló, third on the list, is bested by NH to the tune of some 1,500 rooms, but it has well under half the number of hotels. Internationally, it is the same one, two, three. But they are closer when it comes to rooms. Meliá has getting on 47,000. NH has nearly 42,000 and Barceló over 35,000. NH, however, has 246 hotels. Barceló has 171 and Meliá 170. (These figures all come from the Hosteltur rankings.)

There are a great number of hotel groups in the Balearics and Spain. The history of tourism development has decreed that this should be the case. But this has meant that the industry is highly fragmented, which in turn means that there any number of takeover targets ripe for the picking. These aren't, however, of the size of NH. Hotel chains in Spain don't come any bigger, with the exception of Meliá.

Far more important than the fragmentation of the domestic hotel industry are the opportunities presented by scale and by scope in the overseas markets. A combined Barceló-NH would become not just the largest hotel group in Spain but the third largest in Europe. Critically, its size would give Simón Pedro something that he doesn't have enough of: presence in Asia and North America. Moreover, or so it is said, behind the meek and mild appearance is a determination to be Spain's number one and to become, together with NH, a "national champion" for Spain that can compete anywhere in the world.

Fundamentally, for Simón Pedro there is the need to look overseas. The Barceló Group could swallow up smaller domestic chains, but why bother when the scope for growth in Mallorca (especially Mallorca) and the rest of the country is limited. There is a whole world to grow in, and this is what Simón Pedro needs to do and intends doing.

So, while Simón Pedro makes his overtures to NH (and can apparently bank on the backing of Mariano Rajoy), Biel can only look on from the sidelines. What if Biel really had a close family relationship? Now, there's a question.

A League Of Their Own: Mallorca's centre politics

History is littered with the dead of failed new political parties. The gang of four of the Social Democrats didn't succumb to "anthrax" but they might as well have followed the title of this track by the post-punk Gang Of Four so little did they really achieve, other than paving the way for Liberals to become Democrats and to ultimately eat from the same table as the Conservatives.

Two-party politics tends to be the norm. In Mallorca it is no different. Of the two, PSOE is by far the older, reflecting its good and once genuine socialist worker roots. The PP is a phenomenon of the post-Franco era but it had a stuttering start in its original "alliance" guise as the electorate on the terraces were screaming "are you Franco in disguise?".

In the Mallorcan centre, kind of, was the old Unió Mallorquina before it was finally consumed by its rotten-to-the-core culture of corruption and consigned to the bin of political history. Except it didn't disappear completely. It acquired a new name, the Convergència. The electorate weren't really fooled and so at the last elections it was given a sound kicking. At the same time as the UM had been undergoing its transmogrification, another political kid arrived on the block - La Lliga Regionalista. It sprang from a source known as Jaume Font (and if you don't get the gag, let me tell you that font means both spring and source). He had fallen out big time with the now president of the Balearics, José Ramón Bauzá, and so went off and formed his own party. It fared equally as poorly as the Convergència at the elections.

To the uninitiated, it was hard to tell the two parties apart. They both claimed the centre ground and they were both in favour of differing degrees of regional self-government. There wasn't ever room for both and now, almost eighteen months after having failed to set the political world alight at the elections, they've decided to merge. The Convergència will converge with La Lliga in forming a league of their own.

On the face of it, the merger makes perfectly good sense, in that Mallorcan politics can ever be described as conforming to notions of good sense. In terms of the current political landscape, it has a lot going for it. The PP, apart from taking everyone's jobs and money away, has been doing a thoroughly decent job in attempting to appear as though they have no interest in regional autonomy or self-government in the Balearics. PSOE, ripped to shreds at the last election, has managed to keep up appearances of being totally useless. There is a fair old amount of political ground, therefore, for a likely lad party to gobble up, assuming anyone takes any notice and also assuming they don't all have lovers' tiffs more or less as soon as they have jumped into bed.

In this regard, things aren't too promising. Pollensa is one of the few towns where both parties have some sort of presence, so much so that La Lliga is part of the ruling coalition and the Convergència has a couple of councillors. Unfortunately, they can't stand each other for reasons that would take an entire article to explain and at the end of which you would still be probably none the wiser. As a consequence, there threatens to be a mini-Moors and Christians re-enactment with political blood spilt all over the nice new floors of the town hall building.

Local spats aside, there should in theory be some optimism for this new party. But then there are the skeletons that will continue to rattle. Font was once cited in a corruption case. It was one reason why he left the PP because Bauzá wouldn't sanction candidacies from anyone who was on a charge. The fact that the charge was archived (i.e. was not proven and was filed) probably won't prevent the dirty-tricks brigade from reminding everyone of the charge. Then there is the Convergència, a UM rose by any other name, some would argue. And all the time that Munar, Nadal and others from the old UM hierarchy are keeping the local beaks in gainful employ the misdemeanours of the past will hound it.

But lurking in the background, as he will be for the foreseeable future, is Manacor's mayor Antoni Pastor. He says he is giving no consideration to joining the new party. Exiled by the PP and so stateless in party terms, he would give the new party a massive boost, but then he knows this. He would probably want to be number one, but that would be difficult. My guess is that he still anticipates being welcomed back into the PP fold as its saviour and were he to be, he would shift the PP towards the centre and back to a position that is more favourable towards regional autonomy. At a stroke, the new party would be doomed.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.