An Evening Down The Club: Holiday rentals

The Diario de Mallorca newspaper empire is headquartered on the Llevant industrial estate in Palma. This is one of those industrial estates with no industry, its layout and roads having taken an inordinately long time to have been re-done three or so years ago. It is an estate which is testimony to the bizarre priorities of urban planning. Spend time and money re-developing something that no one has any interest in using. Except the Diario, whose HQ has been there as long the original estate; longer perhaps. Maybe they built an industrial estate around it. Who knows.

You can't miss the Diario HQ, certainly not when it's dark. Its titles - "Diario de Mallorca" and "Mallorca Zeitung" - shine brightly above the desolate nothingness of the Llevant estate. Beacons of life and industry. The newspaper industry. I had been there before as I had once used its print works: if you need something printed with newsprint, then you use a newspaper printer. I had not been to the Club before. This is a theatre to which the great and good and the less than great and the bad are called to offer their views on matters of importance. The matter of importance yesterday evening was that of holiday rentals, an issue which has somehow become a Mastermind subject where I am concerned.

It was to have been a debate, which in fact it wasn't. The director-general from the tourism ministry had initially been billed but had probably realised that he had a longstanding engagement to wash his hair - not that he has much. So instead a lady called Margarita came along together with a translator. The debate was to be in English. Much of it wasn't. I was told that no one of any significance at the ministry speaks English, which probably says something. I also learned that the director general is in fact an architect by profession, which is useful for tourism and for studying the layout of unused industrial estates. It may not have mattered that he was washing his hair after all.

Margarita spoke, at length, about the Balearics tourism law. The words "permitted" and "not permitted" were uttered often. She was talking specifically about what can and what can't be rented out as tourist accommodation, which was relevant to the debate (such as it was) and which confirmed that the overriding concern of the tourism ministry is to blind everyone with bureaucracy. A lawyer, Javier, spoke, at length, about what was permitted and what wasn't. And in case anyone had fallen asleep, he then repeated all this during what was meant to have been a one-sentence summing up which lasted roughly five minutes. He knew his stuff, though.

Alvaro Middelmann, the former boss of Air Berlin in Spain and Portugal and the one-time president of the Mallorca Tourist Board, spoke with great common sense not about what is or isn't permitted but about tourism, which is rather more important than the intricacies of property law. As he normally speaks common sense, this was not surprising. He is one of a very few people in Mallorca who appear to actually understand tourism. The ministry doesn't; that became abundantly clear.

So, what did we learn? Not a lot. Or rather, I didn't learn anything I didn't already know. But if there was one strong message above all it was that the loophole provided by the tenancy act is a crook's charter. So long as there is a contract with the renter which expressly says there is no service being provided, then the rental is ok. Also assuming the property hasn't been advertised as a holiday rental, which does kind of beg a question. If a property is advertised for rent in a tourist area, regardless of how it is described or isn't, then the chances are that it will be rented by a tourist.

This loophole is useful in another regard. Rent out in this fashion and there's no IVA (VAT) to be paid. Hence, there is a situation which is being abused. Services do get provided, but the owner will make out that it is the tenant who has obtained them, not he. It is a loophole which adds to confusion rather than reduces it, and it is a loophole which is no use to those owners who wish to be up-front in advertising their apartments as a holiday let and in providing services. It is a typically Spanish double-speak legal loophole.

That, therefore, was pretty much it. A debate which didn't address the role of holiday rentals for a diverse tourism market, one which didn't really address tourism at all, despite my attempts to do so and those of Alvaro Middelmann. And what will come of it? Nothing, one imagines. Nice theatre, though.