The Decline In Tourist Satisfaction

Tourism, it is an obvious thing to say, is nothing without tourists. Ah yes, tourists; all too often, it seems, the last people that certain elements of the tourism industry pay any attention to. Gadeso, the Mallorcan research organisation, has to be praised for being something of a rarity. It actually surveys tourists. Hears what tourists have to say. There should be very much more of this questioning and listening. Gadeso's is one survey. Its results can be disputed, but they are nonetheless worthy of attention. They don't make for very good reading.

The Gadeso survey of tourist satisfaction is limited, this much has to be said. The number interviewed is only 400, but the organisation is confident that the number is representative and that the margin of error from its results is no more and no less than 5%. The headlining part of the latest is that satisfaction continues its downward creep. Year after year, overall contentment with Mallorca slips. Not greatly by any means, but it slips all the same.

If you go through the survey, there are winners and losers as far as tourists are concerned. The biggest losers are the hotels and the complementary offer, i.e. the non-hotel sector. The biggest winners are agrotourism, rural hotels and residential private accommodation. The hoteliers will hate the fact that the latter of these has a higher satisfaction rating. They should also hate the fact that were it not for these three sectors of the industry, satisfaction with Mallorca would be very much lower. Agrotourism and rural hotels beat regular tourist hotels by almost two points out of ten.

The complementary offer, split into five components for the purpose of the survey, fares just as badly as the hotels. The greatest satisfaction is reserved for services on beaches and for recreational activities, though both of these show a downward trend. It is gastronomy, used here in a general way to refer to bars and restaurants, that shows one of the largest falls in satisfaction. Put alongside an overall rating of only three out of ten for the price-to-quality ratio for the complementary sector, you begin to get an appreciation of why satisfaction with bars and restaurants is in decline. It's all about price.

Indeed, it is price which is probably the most significant finding. The hotels, despite dissatisfaction in other ways, rate pretty well when it comes to the price-quality ratio, but Gadeso concludes that this is largely because of all-inclusive. Price is the prime motivation for coming to Mallorca. It rates almost 16 percentage points above sun and beach in second place. Yet, this seems curious when there appears to be dissatisfaction with prices in bars and restaurants. It isn't curious when you throw all-inclusives into the mix, and of those in the survey who had booked all-inclusive in Mallorca, almost 60% had done so for the first time this summer. Price, price, price.

This doesn't necessarily mean that these tourists will be returning. All-inclusive package holidaymakers say that it would depend both on the resort and the characteristics of the hotel, and what is meant by these characteristics is that some hotels simply don't seem to have made adequate preparation for offering all-inclusive. There is also the question as to where they are located. The intention among tourists to be repeat visitors to Mallorca has fallen by four percentage points over the past two years. The intention to be repeat visitors to the same tourism zone is as low as 16.4%. Why? The nature of many resorts, i.e. their maturity and/or obsolescence. It might seem perverse that all-inclusive holidaymakers should care that much about the state of the resorts, given the assumption that many don't go out of the hotel grounds, but they do.

There are other findings which should make the island's tourism industry take note. Levels of cleanliness are considered to be deficient. Levels of acoustic contamination - noise, in other words - are too great. And, cutting to the bone of the notion that Mallorca is a destination for cultural tourism, cultural facilities are found to also be deficient. As Gadeso says at the start of its report that there is "the necessity to improve our product". It's hard to argue with the statement.