The Great Reform Act: Mallorca's hotels

President Bauzà and tourism minister Carlos Delgado have been parleying with the hoteliers. Love is now in the air where once were poisoned arrows, those being lobbed by the hoteliers in Mr. D's general direction.

Delgado is promising the hotels just about everything they might have wished for: a change of use for obsolete hotel stock; a new tourism law that will make procedures more flexible; a crackdown on illegal accommodation. Throw in some redevelopment of resorts and you have just about the perfect result for the hotels.

Just about, but not entirely. The redevelopment of Playa de Palma, still being battled over and still short of funding, is held up as the model for resort upgrading elsewhere - Magalluf and Alcúdia have been mentioned specifically - but not all hotels in Playa de Palma want to see changes that might remove the bread and butter of the three-star hotel.

But plenty do want improvements. Mallorca's tourism industry suffers from having been one of the first locations of the tourism industrial revolution of the mid-twentieth century. As with all original infrastructures, they become obsolete or old-fashioned; hence the desire to redevelop the resorts.

Knocking old hotels down isn't really an option except in extreme cases, but upgrading them or converting them is. One type of conversion would see hotels become condohotels; another would let them become residential. With either option, and depending on the precise nature of what "condo" might actually entail and what constraints, if any, were placed on what could be done with these residential former hotels, what you might end up with is a system whereby holiday lets are made available under the control of the hotels.

You can conclude, therefore, that behind the opposition to holiday rentals and behind what is now meant to be a more rigorous approach to stamping illegal ones out, there is another dynamic. The hoteliers aren't daft. They know full well that a market, a very sizeable market, exists for accommodation which isn't that of the hotel. What could be better than to get hold of that market as well, whilst at the same time seeking to eliminate or limit alternatives.

The hotels have been lobbying to be able to undertake conversions for some years. The consequence of this, however, together with a reduction in total hotel stock envisaged under plans for Playa de Palma (and therefore elsewhere, you would think) and the fact that Delgado doesn't foresee new hotels springing up in abundance, is that there will be fewer hotel beds around.

This could all make sense if you believe that Mallorca's tourism should become leaner if not necessarily meaner. However, take a certain number of hotel places out of the equation and the attack on the holiday-rentals market looks even more ludicrous than it already is.

Following my article of 5 July ("No Hope"), I had some correspondence on the issue, and one question that came up was just how many hotel beds there are in Mallorca. I'd thought finding the answer would be difficult. It wasn't. Thanks to the Fomento del Turismo (the Mallorcan tourism board), I discovered that in 2005 there were 283,436 beds. The figure won't have changed materially. It was also easy, because I had written about it before, to find out how many tourists, at the very height of the summer season, there are. In August 2008, the number peaked at 1,930,000 in the Balearics; it will be higher this year.

Allowing for the other islands and various other factors, you can guess that, at a conservative estimate, there are at least as many tourists who stay in rental accommodation such as apartments and villas as there are those who stay in hotels. If the hotels cut their overall capacity, and even if they don't, were holiday lets to be driven out of business or to be hounded more than they already are, where on earth would everyone stay?

The hotels might think that condos and hotels converted to residential use might go some way to housing these tourists, but the numbers would surely not be great. Plus, you would have lost those hotel beds into the bargain. Far from holiday lets being "unfair competition", they are in fact a competitive necessity - for Mallorca and its whole tourism industry.

I have high hopes for Delgado. He should go some way to proving that these hopes are not misplaced. He should look at the total mix of the industry he now presides over and come to a conclusion that the hoteliers might not like, but which Mallorca can ill afford to be without.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.