Promoting Shanty Towns

Arenal, despite its current-day association with German tourism, wasn't always German-dominated. It was the first resort in Mallorca that I had any experience of. This was at the end of the 1960s. I can't say I remember much about the place, other than the sight of what was like a shanty town next to the hotel.

Today's Arenal is one of those resorts that doesn't, you might believe, need much promoting. It is synonymous among many a German visitor with Mallorca, those for whom Peguera and Cala Ratjada aren't synonyms. It's as well if it doesn't need much promoting because the municipality in which Arenal is located - Llucmajor - is scrapping its tourism trust, i.e. tourism board.

The trust was spending around 170,000 euros a year. This went on a few tourism fairs to publicise the different attractions of Llucmajor as a whole and not just Arenal and for a director who took a salary of 34,000 euros. Neither the spend nor the salary was in any way excessive.

The thinking where Llucmajor town hall, boracic like all other town halls, is concerned is that, as it now no longer receives any grants for promotion from the government, there is no point in having a tourism promotion operation. Couldn't the town hall manage without these grants? No. Because, or at least this is what the town hall is saying, the tourism minister Carlos Delgado has told them to stop the local tourism trust and to concentrate efforts on Mallorca and the Balearics that are operated by the ATB (Balearics Tourism Agency).

This is a strange explanation. Strange because other town halls are continuing to arrange their own promotion. Pollensa, for instance, has reserved 300,000 euros for this purpose. It is even stranger as Delgado had appeared to "get it" about promotion. He has said that promotion of a generic Balearics brand wasn't a particularly good idea, and he was absolutely right. In fact, it has always been a lousy idea because there is no recognisable Balearics brand as such. Indeed, Delgado had gone so far as to suggest that rather than just promotion of the individual islands, which do carry brand recognition, it was sensible for there to be promotion of specific parts of the islands, as in resorts for instance.

So has Delgado performed a U-turn or is Llucmajor inventing Delgado's instruction? Hard to say. Whatever the situation, there is no questioning the fact that money for tourism promotion is in desperately short supply whether it be for the islands or for the resorts, but there is also little doubt that Delgado's apparent enlightenment was correct; individual towns and resorts should benefit from their own promotion because there is no such thing as a "Mallorca" which embraces the whole island. Arenal, for example, is most certainly not Puerto Pollensa.

To make matters worse, Llucmajor's internet activities appear to have ground to a complete halt; even a Facebook page is not being updated. But Facebook, apart from being a powerful tool, is also extremely cheap. Indeed, it doesn't cost anything, apart from, in the case of a commercial operation, which Llucmajor is in a tourist sense, the cost of paying someone to maintain the page. Surely to goodness they can find a couple of grand a year for this if nothing else.

Abandoning even a basic internet presence such as Facebook is incredibly short-sighted, but so is abandoning promotion full stop. Let's be clear once again. Tourism is what Mallorca does. It is what many of its towns do. The expectation that Germans will just turn up in Arenal is similar to what I spoke about the other day with regard to British tourists being taken for granted. Yes, they probably will just turn up, but acting as though these tourists don't really exist in curbing communications so much that they are curbed out of existence is a sure way in the long term, or even the short to medium term, of making tourists wonder if they are wanted.

Llucmajor is Mallorcan tourism promotion in microcosm. It has all but given up, especially where the major markets are concerned. But as there aren't the funds for grand advertising campaigns, then at least some should be found for the social networks. Delgado has, after all, alluded to finding more flexible and creative ways of stretching limited budgets. So have I. Repeatedly. Returns on Facebook and other social media are likely to be good. But they won't be if no one can be bothered.

At the end of the sixties, Arenal could have been anywhere. It meant nothing. We were going to Madge-orca. That was all that mattered. We are no longer in the sixties. But you wonder sometimes. Are things so bad? Maybe there are shanties again.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.