Senior Service: Mallorca's salvation?

It was the Americans, inevitably, who created new for old. The new age pensioner, as opposed to the old, became "senior". It happened quite a number of years ago, but now, of course, we are totally familiar with seniors and with the images which accompany them.

Seniors are all Robert Kilroy-Silk or Gloria Hunniford of appropriate vintages - not a hair out of place, with their own teeth and permanently delighted by Dell having shown them the wonders of communicating via a PC, by the letter they have just received itemising their health insurance premiums or by the foreign land in which they find themselves indulging in a spot of senior tourism.

The World Tourism Organization has been holding its nineteenth assembly. It is a mark of how diverse tourism has become that the organization in its early years used to gather in Torremolinos; now it has pitched up in South Korea. Geographical diversity is matched by tourism market diversity, hence a focus on the senior market in Gyeongju (and no, I'd never heard of it either).

The growth in the senior tourism market in Europe has opened up new countries as sources of tourists. Greece, for example. One might have thought that the Greeks have the benefits that off-season Spain can boast: reasonable weather, fair dollops of history and culture and their own version of tapas. Perhaps so, but the ancient Greeks increasingly fancy getting away from it all; getting away from all the burning cars in the streets presumably.

The Greeks add to the ever-increasing numbers of seniors from the more traditional markets, such as those of Scandinavia, moving about in winter. And mostly all of these tourists are heading to Spain in the off-season under the Europe Senior Tourism (EST) programme.

According to a body called Segittur, by 2020 five million European seniors will be travelling annually in the off-season as part of EST, and three regions of the country are set to capture the overwhelming majority of them - Valencia, Andalusia and the Balearics.

Segittur is a national organization dedicated to innovation in tourism technologies, primarily the internet at present. It, therefore, has Dell and all other computer companies to thank for the delight of Roberts and Glorias from across Europe who have got themselves online and who can take advantage of the opportunities for a Spanish winter holiday.

Senior tourism is not exactly new. In Mallorca it has typically been more of a social services type tourism and is one that has left resorts underwhelmed. Scandinavian pensioners, heavily subsidised, have been going to Alcúdia for some years, but this type of tourism does little or nothing for the local economy as barely any money is spent.

What is different about this new wave of senior tourism is that EST is aimed at a market that isn't simply being packed off to escape the worst of a north European winter by governments that hope to save on the cost of their health services. It is still described as "social tourism" but the offer is more up-market; accommodation, for instance, is usually four-star.

The holiday package is also partially subsidised - by the Spanish Government and regional governments, including the Balearics - and the subsidy varies according to country. Here, though, is a catch. Which country isn't included in the EST scheme? Well, the UK for one. But it's not as though this programme is just directed at new markets in the east of Europe; the likes of France, Austria and Italy hardly fall into that category.

The programme is, however, still in its early stages. A two-year pilot phase has created 100,000 visitors to Spain, so the Segittur target has quite some way to go, and to achieve it, it will need to embrace other countries, like the UK, Germany and also Russia.

So, is this all going to mean that winter tourism, courtesy of Roberts and Glorias (who do indeed feature in the EST website promotion), will be transforming Mallorca? Possibly. However, of the 100,000, two-thirds of them opted to go to Andalusia, to the Costas del Sol or Almeria. The 16,000 or so who came to the Balearics may have been higher had more hotels been part of the scheme, or perhaps one is back to the same old issue - that of the weather.

Nevertheless, it is a highly encouraging development, one that involves a market which does tend to spend money. And before you ask. No, the package is not all-inclusive; it's half board, which is even more encouraging.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.