Of Mice And Meetings

The global market for MICE is worth 30 billion dollars a year. This is Mice not as in Mickey or the thing you click on, but the market for meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions. Nice little earner for someone, therefore. And guess what? Step forward Mallorca to tap into it. Any bit of the tourism market. There's no shame, Mallorca'll have it.

Of all the "alternative" tourism niches that are banged on about, Mice is the most obscure, partly because it doesn't really fit the idea of tourism. As a rule, tourists don't wear suits or ties, unless they're Russians. I was once waiting at the airport when the Ekaterinburg flight was coming into arrivals. Grim-faced Sverdlovskists, repeating on the airline diet of beetroot and cauliflower, and all sporting sports jackets, ties and hats. They'll learn. Give 'em a few years and they'll be turning up in their "Mafia on tour - Shagaluf" T-shirts.

The Russian Mice market is doubtless one, as with the rest of the Russian market, that Mallorca craves. The German market is currently Mallorca's largest, apart from the Spanish. In 2007, as an example, there were 2,240 meetings and conventions in Mallorca, of which 708 were German. The overall market is meant to be one of growth, one, along with all the other tourism alternatives, that will lead Mallorca to the promised land of a tourism future. However.

In April last year, the Mallorca Convention Bureau, which oversees much of the Mice business on the island, had to admit that in 2009 the level of business was down by 40% on 2007. The actual number of people who qualified as so-called tourists in this market in 2009 was all of 65,776, twenty-odd thousand from Germany and around 6,500 from the UK. Welcome to the promised land.

Put this into context. The total number of tourists which visit Mallorca per year is roughly 9 million. Mice tourism equates to 0.7%. It doesn't exactly sound like the basis for great riches of that tourism future. There is, though, a mitigating factor. Crisis. As the world recovers, so the Mice market will pick up. To some extent, it already has. In Spain as a whole, it grew by around five per cent during the first nine months of 2010. But this was Spain.

Mallorca's problem when it comes to Mice tourism is that Spain is full of rival destinations. Hosteltur, which is a sort of bible for the Spanish tourism industry, has recently produced a special magazine for congress, conventions and incentives tourism in 2011. There's barely a part of Spain that doesn't lay claim to this market, and in many parts of Spain there are the facilities that Mallorca is desperate to replicate, as in the new Palacio de Congresos in Palma.

The part of the Hosteltur magazine that is devoted to Mallorca and the Balearics is full of the usual tosh you expect from a brochure and is also full of references to what can be enjoyed by the business-class tourist - gastronomy, golf, hiking. Yes, all the other waifs and strays of alternative tourism. This, though, simply serves to emphasise the wider problem Mallorca has with attracting this different tourism. Everywhere else offers the same kind of thing, and when it comes to culture, for instance, in far greater abundance. Mallorca may have a lot to offer the Mice market, but so also do Barcelona, Madrid and anywhere else you care to mention. Barcelona, indeed, is reckoned to be one of the most popular convention destinations not just in Spain but in the world.

The competition, therefore, is fierce, which is a reason why the Palacio de Congresos is necessary in order to give Mallorca something more of a competitive edge. But despite the predictions of renewed growth in this market, how great might this be? Might Mallorca be able to push that percentage up to a round 1%? Again one needs to put this into context. Another of the world's popular convention destinations is Singapore. Mice tourism equates to 30% of its tourism revenue.

Even if the numbers could be boosted, the benefits to Mallorca as a whole are limited. Mice tourism is primarily Palma's tourism. There are conference and convention facilities away from the capital, such as Alcúdia's auditorium and hotels in Playa de Muro, but how much of the pie can these places ever hope to get? There is the additional issue of seasonality. Mice tourism is all-year tourism, but it is less significant during the peak summer months. The problem, as ever, would be satisfying a tourism market in the lower months when less is open and flights are more difficult to arrange.

Mice tourism is unquestionably valuable in that it brings with it tourists who have some value that you would hope they might spread about. But its value is unlikely to ever be more than very minor in the overall scheme of things. There's much riding on it and on the Palacio de Congresos, but its importance may well be being overestimated. To borrow from Rabbie Burns: the best laid schemes o' mice an' meetings gang aft agley.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.