Groundhog Month: All-inclusives

I know it seems like it's bad flavour of the month, but that's partly because June is the month for all-inclusive angst. Why? Because the season is well underway and some businesses, finding that they are not thronged, have to reach out and blame someone or something. The all-inclusive. I am in all-inclusive Groundhog month. It's been like this for years.

I seem to have spent a lifetime writing about all-inclusives. And another one reading all the familiar arguments and imagery that are used to discuss them. The poverty of the discussion, the recycling of the imagery bug me even more than all-inclusives bug me. So also does the implicit notion behind this impoverished discussion that any of this is new. Because it isn't. But it hasn't stopped it, once more, being the June flavour of the month.

I touched on the themes of this discussion the other day. One of them is that all-inclusives are appropriate only for remote parts of the world where no restaurants exist and where it is necessary to be holed up in a gated hotel complex because to leave it would be to risk having a machete taken to your throat. In other words, they are not appropriate for Mallorca.

We know all this. We've known all this for years. We've also known for years the imagery of resorts becoming "ghost towns" as we've known for years the analogy of the impact of out-of-town shopping centres on British high streets. We've known all this because the same imagery and analogies are used time and time again.

We've also known for years that it should be the job of the anonymous "authorities" to do something, when the truth is that there is nothing these authorities can do or are willing to do. We've known this because, without any suggestion as to how these authorities might actually do anything, they still keep being called on to do it.

Oh, sorry, there have been suggestions. Like banning all-inclusives. Ah yes, when all else fails, ban them, and bye-bye, TUI. But there is the law. European law. All-inclusives might be considered anti-competitive (it's been tried; Can Picafort, 2005), they might be subject to the services directive (and it's questionable as to whether many meet it), but they are, by the same competitive token, a product of an unfettered market. And the tour operators would drive a coach and horses through any attempt to make them otherwise. Oh, and by the way, there was once an attempt at a ban. In The Gambia. It was dropped after a year because the tour operators objected and threatened to pull out.

We've also known for years that the hoteliers are meant to be to blame, when they are not. The president of the hoteliers' federation has recently said that the increase in all-inclusive is out of the hotels' hands. This is a rather disingenuous deflection of criticism, but it isn't without some basis in truth.

So why does it all get dragged out, over and over again? Always the same points. Nothing changes, and hasn't changed for much of the current century, with the exception that the number of all-inclusive places increases. And amidst all these same old points is the dire consequence of bars and restaurants closing.

Yet, at the end of 2010, the number of restaurants in Mallorca had increased. By 3.4%. The number of cafeterias had increased. By 6.1%. Only the number of bars had fallen. By 1%.

Of course, such catch-all statistics do not reflect precisely the circumstances of different resorts, but they are an indication. Perhaps this increase is a result of it being difficult to find alternative means of making a living or of the greater ease there now is in simply renting premises rather than paying a traspaso. Whatever the reason, though, and notwithstanding economic crisis and the onward march of the all-inclusive, there always seems to be someone willing to take somewhere on, thus continuing to spread business thinly.

The repetitious discussion and the repetitious imagery will be used again. Next June, in all likelihood. Nothing will have changed. The discussion will not have moved on beyond what have now become the clichés of the all-inclusive discourse. And it won't have moved on, partly because there is nowhere for it to move onto. Unless the tour operators say so.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.