The sudden burst of good news coming out of the tourism sector seems a bit fishy. You wait for months, years even, for news of grand, new hotel projects and then three of them come along at once.
The convoy of hotel buses that has emerged in the media isn't an entirely new fleet. The five-star Port Sóller Hotel & Spa has been under construction for some time; the news surrounding it has to do with the announcement of its opening in March next year. The Hyatt International hotel-as-Mallorcan-village project in Capdepera was given an initial airing back in April 2009. The Meliá Hotels International scheme for Magalluf, already well flagged, has now suddenly expanded from three to seven hotels.
New or not so new, it is the timing of the various announcements that is important. There is surely no coincidence. Rather like a country occasionally requires a royal wedding or a war, the regional government has urgently needed the shiny new services to Sóller, Capdepera and Magalluf to simultaneously pull up at the bus stop for Burying Bad News, while the ABTA convention hitting town is presumably totally incidental to any of this.
Of the three schemes, the Magalluf one is the most important. Arab money sending Sóller and Capdepera into inter-five-stellar overdrive is not unimportant, but neither project represents a resort re-think. Meliá's does.
It helps if you happen to have a number of hotels in close proximity, which is the case with Meliá in Magalluf, because the scheme doesn't simply envisage hotel redevelopment; it will involve a remodelling of the resort. It is massively ambitious and massively important. If it comes off, and there's no reason to believe it won't, it, rather than the stuttering attempts in Playa de Palma, will be the first of the resort revolutions.
The planned changes to the tourism law are fundamental to what Meliá have in mind. The condohotel conversion will apply not only to the Royal Beach but also to the Sol Trinidad. The Sol Jamaica will be completely rebuilt as a hotel that will also be for residential use. In addition to what happens to the seven hotels, there will be a beach club, a new boulevard, a conference centre and facilities for cycling.
More than just redevelopment, the plan cannot be underestimated in terms of its vote of confidence in Mallorca. For one of Mallorca's major (international) hotel chains to be willing to pump an initial 100 million plus euros worth of investment into Magalluf proves that a mature holiday destination and resort can still be attractive.
And what it will mean for Magalluf? One would guess that its current tourism profile would not be unaffected. It would all rather depend. The Mallorca Beach and Antillas Barbados hotels, for example, will be joined together to create a gardened complex for a "client of greater quality". It doesn't sound as though Meliá have the Shagalluf image uppermost in their thoughts.
A further reason for the government to be happy to have the good news seep out is that it is only too aware of the naysayers who would wish a plague on its new tourism law house and on the houses of the hotel industry. The unions don't like the new law because condohotels will mean fewer jobs; the restaurants and club owners don't like it because it smacks of creating unfair competition, or so they claim.
The restaurant and club owners are, like the unions, staking out the battleground. They are suggesting that the new law will result in a price war and in the attraction of a tourism client of "low quality", without actually explaining why this would be the case. The club owners we know all about. It's not client quality they're worried about; it's the potential for other Mallorca Rocks to spring up, thanks to the law permitting concerts in hotels. They don't like the competition full stop.
But what they are really driving at is the fact that the government is putting its weight behind the hotels and only the hotels. They have a point, but then the government knows, as should the restaurant owners, that there is only one game in town when it comes to redevelopment. It isn't the government, and it certainly isn't the restaurants. The hotels are the only hope. If it means, as in Sóller and Capdepera, the attraction of foreign investment, then so much the better.
The good news might seem convenient, but as we have waited so long for any, the fact that it all comes along in one fortuitous news-massaging go should not make it any less welcome.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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