Threads

I have mentioned the Holiday Truths website here before; it is a pretty good site, if only because it is so easy to navigate. If one looks at the first page of the Majorca forum at present, you will find the usual hotch-potch of threads, but among them there is something that stands out - well, stood out to me. This is the common thread that runs through threads related to specific hotels in both Alcúdia and Can Picafort. Let me list them and see if you can work out that common thread - Delfin Verde, Club Mac, Condes, Condesa, Holiday Village Viva, Platja d'Or. With the exception of a seventh - Bellevue - these are all all-inclusive, or so all-inclusive as to not make much difference, and Bellevue is at least a third all-inclusive. There is another thread that asks about the price of AI in June, and included in that are the likes of the Condes as well. All-inclusive is the common thread. A snapshot and unrepresentative it may be, but it nevertheless does indicate where priorities are tending to lie, those of both the holidaymaker and the tour operator. Last year, Playa de Muro's Continental Park became flavour of the month, or months, in the same forum; it had gone AI.

While there have always been those who have discovered a particular hotel and kept on returning to it, the holiday decision has usually been based on choice of resort over anything else. But perhaps this is changing, or has indeed changed. It is possible to hypothesise that the resort is now secondary (or lower in the hierarchy) behind the top spot of a good-value AI. For many who opt for all-inclusive, the resort itself is largely irrelevant anyway. If indeed it is the case that the decision process is skewed away from the resort, where does that leave the promotion of the resort? The tour operators that exalt this or that resort whilst interspersing their brochure or website space with the best possible AI deals may be seen as promoting the particular resort, but in truth it is neither here nor there. Much of the resort promotion is very similar in any event, and where it differs in terms of certain specifics, one has to ask how much impact those specifics have. Do, for example, the Roman town and city walls of Alcúdia have any bearing upon the fact that your average Joe and Joan Holidaymaker send off their booking form for the Condes or the Club Mac? I would very much doubt it. Or rather, yes they may have a bearing, but only as an informational element; they are not crucial and nor are they necessarily going to form part of the holidaymaker's itinerary. In the case of Can Picafort, a resort lacking any obvious points of differentiation, the choice of the Viva Village is purely and simply an AI one, which is not to say that there is anything wrong with either the Viva Village or the decision process, but it is to say that Can Picafort is an incidental, a fact of geography and town naming.

To come back to the theme of 40 years since the BBC started its "Holiday" programme, back in 1969 your average holidaymaker would have taken notice. But he is now far more sophisticated in an unsophisticated fashion. He may know that there are city walls, but these are not what he wants; he seeks unsophistication and pure convenience, and is thus more sophisticated in making a choice without the trappings of what to him are largely irrelevancies. He is less adventurous but content in the knowledge that he does not have to justify his holiday in terms of anything other than the ease of the pool, the entertainment and the beer, all on tap at the all-inclusive. He can pick and choose if he wants to indulge in those "extras" of the local culture, and if he doesn't wish to, then who is to say he is wrong?

The promotion supporting mass tourism has always been inexact; by definition, mass tourism demands a mass promotional message. It has always been wrong for the simple reason that tourists differ. The all-inclusive has forged a quite different and large niche within the mass-tourism market, and the promotion to this niche falls in the main to the hotels and the tour operators. Resort and island promotion is ill-directed. Consequently, there has to be an admission that, while mass tourism is not finished, its mass has been diluted into numerous categories, all of which require different messages and different promotion. One size fits all was never the best option, and it is now totally discredited. For this reason, the "estación náutica" branding of Alcúdia could be a very sensible thing, so long as it is understood that it is one facet of the resort and pitched at a defined market (or markets), one that, by and large, is not all-inclusive. Different promotional messages can co-exist as part of an overall promotion of a given resort, but if they are not presented the danger is that the all-inclusive, given its seemingly inexorable rise, will become the new mass tourism. And if it reaches critical mass, then the resorts do indeed become irrelevant.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Deep Blue Something (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcmH1LdPNKA). Today's title - this is a TV question. The title is that of a controversial drama from 1984. What was it about?

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