Going Up-Market In The Balearics

How far can the Balearics risk pushing tourism up-market to the potential detriment of the bread-and-butter three-star tourist profile? It is a question that is being asked and one for which further information has come from the tourism ministry's yearbook. This shows that the number of beds in four and five-star hotels has risen by almost 17,000 since 2008. The drive towards quality improvement was born out of economic crisis, and so this increase should be considered a very positive one. Yet, with 57 more four and five-star hotels than there were in 2008, there remains the nagging worry about the islands potentially pricing themselves out of the market. Or should that be out of a market?

The president of the hoteliers' federation, Aurelio Vázquez, is in no doubt that the news is positive; it has been a "qualitative leap". With quality, investment and innovation in mind, Vázquez, who is also Iberostar's CEO for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, has been addressing the structure of the hotel industry in Mallorca and in Spain. He believes there is too much fragmentation, by which he means that there are too many smaller hotel chains which are not delivering and are not capable of delivering the necessary improvements to hotel stock. While this might sound like a call for large chains such as his own to gobble smaller ones up, he is almost certainly correct when he points to the negative consequence of fragmentation. Quality may suffer along with marketing and branding, all of them increasingly important in the global travel market. Vázquez concedes that Spanish chains have not necessarily been that good at branding, but larger ones have been upping their branding game notably. Be Live (Globalia), Meliá, Barceló and Iberostar itself are all examples of chains engaged in branding investment.

Vázquez, meanwhile, has been back on his holiday-lets hobby-horse. He has warned that Spain is "in danger of mortgaging its tourism" because of the growth in holiday rental accommodation. He accepts that standalone and semi-detached properties can be included in a regulated accommodation market but not apartments. But if he accepts that some types of property can form part of a "tourism model Spain wants for the next ten to twenty years", why can apartments not also be a part, so long as standards are set and adhered to? The logic is not always easy to follow.