Tourism Without Tourists

If you were Mallorcan and were of an age to be going to university, you might fancy a few years at the Universitat de les Illes Balears studying tourism. The university has a strong reputation for tourism, Mallorca's main industry is tourism, so a degree should set you up nicely. Or so you might think.

There is a fair old debate going on as to the value of the tourism degree. It has been criticised for not being orientated to the tourism market itself, while obtaining a degree appears to be no guarantee of getting a job any grander than that of receptionist, assuming a job can be got at all.

It's a familiar story of course, and one not solely confined to a tourism degree or to university studies in Mallorca. But tourism is after all what Mallorca does, and the number of places on the degree course is not that high (400), so you would indeed think that something decent, career-wise, might come at the end of it.

Picking over the bones of the debate, however, another criticism emerges, and it is one of the choice of the course in the first place. Tourism, a bit like teaching (or certainly how teaching once was in the UK), is a career to get into mainly because it's there. It is a default choice. But it would seem that students embark on the degree not really appreciating what it entails.

I'm not surprised they aren't aware what the course involves. The document which sets it out runs to an excruciating 247 pages of tables, flowcharts and verbiage. Students, either before or during their studies, are not generally inclined to read what they are meant to; I can say this with some authority, as I certainly never did.

Even assuming they do read it, what do they expect to get from the course? The simple answer is a good job. But what job? This is the nub of the problem, or one of the nubs.

One can draw a comparison between tourism and publishing. I have been asked in the past for advice about "getting into publishing", to which the response has always been - what do you mean by publishing? It's the same with tourism; what is meant by it and what is meant by jobs within the industry?

Were students to read the entire prospectus for the course, they might get an inkling. Without detailing the whole course, some of its key modules cover marketing, management, finance, law and languages. English and either French or German are mandatory, but previous reports on the English-speaking abilities of students leaving the university suggest that two-thirds of them struggle with the language to the point of not understanding it.

But this isn't necessarily surprising. A multi-disciplinary tourism course makes its students Jacos of several trades and maestros of none, other than tourism, or so they might believe.

Yet, amidst the law and the management of the course, there is something which is glaring by its omission. Nowhere does there appear to be anything about the tourist himself. You can learn about some mechanics and operations of tourism but nothing about what it's like to be a tourist. Arguably, this is what the course should be about. Students in Mallorca may have some idea of what it's like to be a tourist, if they have been one, but can have no appreciation of what it's like to be a tourist in Mallorca or little appreciation of the cultures and backgrounds of the people they would hope to be make a living off.

Where are, for example, cultural studies in the tourism course? Cultural studies of the British, the Germans, the Russians or whoever. You come back, therefore, to the criticism that the course is not orientated to the market and therefore the people - the tourists - who make up the market.

Tourism is ultimately about people and understanding their needs and demands. I can think of managers in hotels in Mallorca who certainly didn't study tourism in their home countries, if they studied at university at all. They came to Mallorca and got jobs in the likes of entertainment. And because they were any good, they rose a managerial ladder. Crucially, though, they know about tourists and tourists from different cultures.

I can sympathise, however, with the students. The course seems like a reflection of much of what passes for a general debate about Mallorca's tourism. It is one in which tourism is somehow remote from its raw material, the tourists themselves. It's extraordinary, as though there is tourism but without tourists.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.