The Three Degrees: Mallorca's winter tourism

I was dreaming of a less-than-white Christmas. No rubbish weather for me. Bronzed, golden brown. I was dreaming and then I was told to stop. By the BBC website home page. Make it real. Make what real? Make a holiday in the Canaries real, courtesy of Iberostar. I clicked the link. Dreams can come true.

You're given no false impression as to why you would wish to make it real in the Canaries. Off you go with the family, one of whom is the child with the snorkel kit who greets you as you click from the BBC site. And why is he wearing snorkel kit? Because he wants to go snorkelling of course. In the sea. Departing from a beach. In the sun. Sun and beach. In winter.

This is a promotion by the same Iberostar which grew rich on the back of Mallorcan tourism - Mallorcan summer tourism. Once you have scrolled down the list of the 13 four or five-star hotels on the four main Canary islands - all available with special offers to the end of November, for booking through the winter to the end of April - you come to a footnote. It is under "most popular destinations". Hotels in Majorca. Click.

Well, having clicked, you can probably guess. The red squares on the calendar mean the hotels are closed. All of them. Until April. Mallorca is "most popular", when it is open. But who can blame Iberostar for flogging the Canaries? They're doing what has long been one half of the mainstay of winter tourism promoted by tour operators, travel agents and now hotels. What do they all promote? Either snow or winter sun.

Summer tourism means sun and the movement of millions in its pursuit; winter tourism means snow or sun and the movement of millions more. But you move the millions to where you can pretty much guarantee good coverings of snow or good amounts of sun in temperatures of at least 20 degrees.

Sorry, Mallorca, but you fail the 20-degree test. By three degrees. It may not seem much, but the average temperature for the six months of the off-season is only 17. The psychological barrier is 20 degrees (minimum). Tenerife, by comparison and despite having almost as many days of rain if not as much rain as Mallorca (10 millimetres less on average), comes in at 21.9 degrees (which also happens to break the 70 Fahrenheit barrier). This is why the boy has his snorkel kit on, this is why dreams can be made real - in the Canaries - and this is why Iberostar makes them real there, and not in Mallorca.

Weather does matter. In fact, it is all that matters.

Mallorca's winter tourism. Discuss. Culture, gastronomy, bird-watching, hiking, Nordic walking, cycling, golf, senior tourism. There is much which is available and promoted; it combines to create an under-mass of winter tourism approximately one-tenth the size of that which comes in summer. Unless there were real incentives, such as major, and one means major, attractions, the ratio is unlikely to ever alter fundamentally. And it's all down to those missing three degrees.

There is a great deal of what one might call apologism for Mallorca in winter. And it is apologism that entails preaching to oneself or the converted. It is apologism that can cover all the list above and more that bring about the around one million off-season visitors. But it can only ever get the apologists so far, because something's missing. Three degrees' worth. At least.

This all said, it's a nonsense when you think about it. A nonsense, not that Iberostar or any other hotel chain, airline or tour operator would choose Tenerife over Mallorca, but that Iberostar and all the other hotel chains are sitting on colossal amounts of prime real estate in Mallorca which sit idle for six months of the year. All that asset being unproductive, being wasted; an asset and an investment that have contributed to the cost of land in Mallorca for everyone else, largely deprived of their own productiveness for twelve months of the year.

The tourism industry in Mallorca would probably like to believe that it is efficient. It isn't. It is massively inefficient. Inefficient in terms of asset and resources and inefficient in having been singularly incapable of arriving at solutions to make these resources more efficient, twelve months of the year. But then, what can it do about the weather? Not much. It makes efficient use of one resource - the sun - for six months, and that's it. In the Canaries, on the other hand ... .


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.