The Power Of The Hotels

If you have wondered just how powerful and how important Mallorca's hoteliers are, then a glance at the rankings of hotel chains produced by the magazine "Hosteltur" will tell you more or less all you need to know.

From a base of over 100 Spanish hotel chains, four Mallorcan groups are in the top five in terms of their turnover, and the same four feature in the top five of Spanish hotels internationally (by number of rooms). The four are, and you could probably guess at them anyway, Meliá Hotels International, Barceló, Riu and Iberostar. Only one non-Mallorcan group, NH, breaks the island's stranglehold at the top of the Spanish hotel industry, though another, Husa, does edge Iberostar into sixth place in terms of rooms in Spain alone.

Scan down the list of hotel companies in the Spanish room ranking and further familiar names appear, such as Grupotel, Viva, Garden. Mallorca's economy is founded on tourism and is founded, furthermore, on a hotel industry which also regularly has its members high on the lists of best-performing Mallorcan companies of any sort, which is hardly surprising, given the dominance of tourism and hotels.

Mallorca's hotel groups are not just important to the island's economy, they are important to Spain's as well. This concentration of economic power, which brings with it political influence, should leave you in little doubt as to how much the Balearic Government is inclined to listen to the hotel industry. If it seeks to limit holiday lets, then who is there to say no? If it accedes to demands for all-inclusive offers from tour operators, who is there to say it shouldn't, especially if a tour operator owns a piece of the action? Riu, as an example, is 50% owned by TUI.

The hoteliers get a bad press, partly because of issues such as holiday lets, yet Mallorca's economy would be nowhere without them, while the island would not have come to have acquired a status, a kudos, that its hotel industry has given it both within Spain and internationally.

It may be hard for some to accept, but we should really be praising the hotels.

A curiosity is how it has come to be that Mallorca could have four of the five leading hotel groups in Spain and four which feature among the top 30 of all the world's hotel groups.

Of the four companies, Barceló is by far the oldest, dating back to the start of the 1930s. Riu and Meliá were created in the 1950s, while Iberostar is the new kid on the block; it was founded in the 1980s. A simple explanation for the strength of these leading hotel chains is that they were in the right place at the right time to cash in on the tourism explosion from the sixties onwards, but this doesn't explain Iberostar, which came along that much later, and nor does it explain why Mallorca rather than other major centres of mass tourism in Spain.

There may, though, be a different simple explanation - business nous, entrepreneurialism and innovation. Does Mallorca have these in greater supply than elsewhere in Spain? It would be a facile conclusion to make, but consider how just one set of brothers has done so much for Mallorca. Miguel Fluxá is the president and founder of Iberostar: one brother is president of Lottusse, the original Fluxá family leather business; the other brother founded the footwear firm Camper.

Right place and right time did count for something, but it also demanded the right thing. For Riu, this meant tapping into the German market from a very early stage, creating an alliance in the '60s with the tour operator Dr. Tigges, then reinforcing the German link through its association with TUI, which was forged in the seventies, and afterwards embarking on expansion to the Canaries and, in 1991, the Dominican Republic.

The internationalisation of Riu and the other major Mallorcan hotel chains has been key to the positions they now enjoy. Mallorca exports its hotel know-how and technology, yet there is an irony in that this has helped to develop destinations which are competitors to Mallorca.

The big four may eclipse other hotel chains in Mallorca, but all of the chains combine to make one massive force of business, economics and political nature. Complaints against the hotels, such as those regarding all-inclusives, are, I'm afraid, unlikely to cut much ice. Just think of Riu. Half-owned by TUI which is quarter-owned by a Russian. And the Chinese are on the prowl as well; the HNA group is a shareholder in NH. What chance does the little guy have against all this lot?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.