Everything Depends

And ever more on the theme of the month ... Mallorca expensive or not. One of our own, as it were, Glen, acquired stardom yesterday by having a letter to "The Bulletin" published in pride of place on page 2. Clearly, it was a bit of a thin news day, as there were several more letters on prices etc. on another page. Another 3 euro coffee, someone bemoaning the cost of a sandwich and a menu that was only in Spanish and German (that should be added to the list of yesterday), and another who has got a bee in his bonnet about alleged cartels operating in the car-hire business and on golf courses. Ho hum. And then the other side of the coin; examples of where one can eat out reasonably. As for that further 3 euro a coffee, it refers to a beach café in Porto Colom - four years ago. QED, Mallorca has long been overcharging. Maybe. Some friends went to Porto Colom, it would be three years ago now, and were distinctly miffed at what they had to pay for a meal at a particular restaurant. So maybe one could draw a conclusion about Porto Colom being particularly expensive, which, I imagine, would be completely erroneous. But some might do just that. One pricey meal, one pricey coffee, and Bob's your wide-boy, ripping-off uncle - Porto Colom is overpriced and over there - on the east side of the island.

Mallorca is not cheap, let's just nail the canard once and for all that it is. Last year Thomas Cook provided a survey of ten holiday destinations. This found that Mallorca was the third most expensive, only Florida and, surprisingly, Croatia being more so. Less expensive were, for example, Turkey and Bulgaria, with Goa the cheapest of the lot. The calculation in that survey was that Mallorca was cheaper than the UK by a factor of nearly fifteen pounds (daily spend) (22 June 2008: One On One). It all depends what you use as your measures of course. On 30 July I offered a number of items that made up a daily spend some way short of Thomas Cook's and which included significantly greater amounts of the boys' bevvy as well.

Depends. Depends. That should be the word of this debate. For every tale of expensiveness, there is another of cheapness. Back and forth we go. But it is the use of these single examples, these cups of coffee, these bottles of suntan lotion, these boxes of paracetamol, which is so galling. Galling because they prove precisely nothing. And the expectation that Mallorca should be cheap is something else that is galling. Have those who complain ever stopped and taken a look at prices of property in Mallorca? All that expensive, yes expensive, real estate, and they expect a coffee or a beer to cost a handful of centimos. Get real. That said, it still comes down to "depends" - where you go, what you buy, blah, blah.

Might the authorities, as suggested a couple of days ago, be minded to "do something"? You know what, I don't think they would be. And why not? Because they want so-called quality tourism. And that means tourists of money. And that does not mean pints for a euro, even if these were attainable, which they are not, or not sustainably attainable at any rate. Yet the authorities are misguided. The fact that hotel occupancies might be "catastrophic" this season are not as a result of prices, they are the result of a fall in the bread-and-butter regular mass tourism, that upon which the island is built. The authorities should take note of complaints of high prices, but only in the sense of analysing why they might be high. And they still wouldn't do anything, because they are bound by the rules of engagement that are market forces, economic circumstances, and the European Union. Want cheap? Ok, go to Bulgaria, but its prices will catch up.

Everything depends. Mallorca may not be cheap, but it doesn't have to be expensive, only if you want to make it so. In the UK, and in Holland, people have been telling me that everything seems so much more expensive now. And there is some truth in that, despite low inflation. But that also depends. Depends what you are referring to. I come back again to the assistant director at Bellevue. He reckons that there is a lot more budgeting occurring now. It wasn't always the case. People would go out to bars and the like and spend money and not really know what they were spending. This has changed, and has been highlighted by the crisis. People are far more aware, and it is this awareness, as much as anything else, which leads to the "expensive" claim. I am repeating myself I know, but I am convinced that in many instances prices have not gone up significantly, if at all, just that people seem to believe so because previously they hadn't taken much notice. But there again, maybe it all depends.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - John Lennon, http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x10ln3_john-lennon-nobody-told-me_music. Today's title - line from what was the first single by? There was a cover by one without shoes.

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