Resigned To Fate: Mallorca in winter

Driving through Playa de Muro one evening last week, I saw something unusual. Lights on. A few people milling around. The next day, I understood why. Pantechnicons and other vehicles for the Russian Katusha cycling team were parked in front of an Iberostar hotel. This hotel normally opens early for cycling teams, but this year it has opened particularly early.

Iberostar had previously announced that it was making inroads into the death of the resort during winter by having the hotel open for almost ten months. We now know what the company meant. Good for the hotel, some employees and some suppliers, not much good for anyone else. Professional cyclists won't be paying a great deal of attention to the rest of the resort, which is just as well. A couple of cafés and restaurants open at times but not one other hotel open. Not a single shop open. Even the little supermarket is closed.

This winter has been worse than ever: in Playa de Muro, in any resort on Mallorca. According to the hoteliers federation, a mere 17.5% of hotel places are actually available in January. It isn't only Mallorca, though. As an example, comparisons with Benidorm neglect the fact that, while Benidorm unquestionably attracts far more visitors in winter than any resort on Mallorca, it has been experiencing a downward trend for some years. In the Alicante province as a whole, hotel winter closures have risen by ten percentage points in the past two years. As a further example, on the Costa del Sol, that part of mainland Spain which benefits from the best winter weather, the hotel closure rate is up by around 5%. This still means that some 65% of hotels are open (oh that Mallorca could say the same), but even the Costa del Sol is not immune to the decline caused by seasonality.

Neither the Costa Blanca nor the Costa del Sol have quite the same disadvantage as Mallorca in terms of winter flight schedules. Their falls are attributed less to the logistics of travel and more to economic hard times in Europe as a whole and especially in Spain. Benidorm, regardless of the image conveyed by the Garveys and The Oracle, is every bit as much a Spanish resort as it is British (or any other nationality). It may, therefore, enjoy a bounce when or if the Spanish economy recovers, though even this might be questionable; the downward trend has existed for longer than economic crisis has.

Nevertheless, there is this domestic market which can come to the aid of the Costas in a way that it doesn't come, to anything like the same degree, to Mallorca's aid. The winter Spanish "pensionista" market may have been undermined by lack of subvention, but in truth it doesn't contribute hugely, and apart from this, the Spanish winter market is relatively small and generally confined to Palma and some agrotourism.

Pinning hopes on a revival in the domestic market is, however, a diversion, be this in Mallorca or on the Costas. Indeed, pinning hopes on anything is increasingly looking like a diversion. The Mallorca hoteliers federation, in lamenting the dire situation with hotel openings this winter, has announced that "we (in Mallorca) need to position Mallorca as a destination for the low and medium seasons". Well, who would ever have thought that this might be the need?

It is desperate that the hoteliers federation can be making such a statement, as it is one that has been a familiar annual cry for years. The Balearic Government may have come up with a "plan" for tackling seasonality, but this plan is little more than a re-working of equally familiar solutions and prescriptions, ones that have had minimal impact.

Mallorca is far from alone in seeking solutions to its winter malaise. The Costas advance similar solutions, as do destinations elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Only where heat is far more guaranteed is there a solution, and it is the same as that which drives summer tourism. Mallorca, therefore, will continue to beat the drum for its winter alternatives while coming up against the same drumbeats from other destinations hoping to break the cycle of seasonality and almost certainly failing because there is no differentiation and nothing that is unique or of sufficient incentive to create winter tourism over and above the very small scale.  

You don't just give up, but does Mallorca have to resign itself to a fate that there is never going to be a winter season? Perhaps it would be wise if the delusion that there will be was dispensed with once and for all. Only then, might minds be exercised sufficiently in seeking solutions other than the piecemeal of some cycling and some cooking. Solutions beyond tourism.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.