The Giant Pumpkin Of Tourism

"The biggest fruit in the world." This was a headline on the BBC website's home page. The fruit was a pumpkin, a fruit in which I do not for one moment pretend to be an expert but which holds an affection because of the annual pumpkin-growing contest that is judged at Muro's autumn fair. In the US, pumpkins are as much as three or four times the size of anything a Mallorcan grower can aspire to: the giants pumpkins of America dwarf the giants of Muro.

No one would claim that giant pumpkins at a fair in a small rural town are in themselves going to make a difference to Mallorca's tourism, but the BBC's pumpkin article had a very clear touristic element. This wasn't contained in the article itself. It was the banner at the top of the article. "Visit Croatia. Share Croatia," it read. It had been placed on behalf of the Croatian National Tourist Board. These banners can be somewhat hit or miss in respect of where they might appear and so therefore who might see them, but this randomness notwithstanding, the banner spoke volumes. The difference between Croatia's tourism promotion and Mallorca's was stark. Croatia is active in a way that Mallorca most definitely isn't. Were Mallorca active, there might have been some appeal in a banner for the island featuring at the top of the pumpkin article. Not, as I say, because the pumpkin fair would have thousands of tourists beating a path to Muro but because it is indicative of an often batty, alternative Mallorca the regional government would so love the world to know about and yet which it fails so abjectly in informing.

Croatia is arguably the European champion of tourism promotion. It gets web promotion in a way that Mallorca mystifyingly doesn't, or as yet hasn't seen fit to genuinely embrace. The word "share" in the banner says much. Croatia's social-media presence is enormous, while Mallorca's is not; it is a giant pumpkin-sized approach versus a seedling. I have railed often enough against Mallorca's poor social-media activity and so wonder if the baffling lack of presence is indicative of a wider issue.

One senses that Mallorca's tourism is at a crossroads. A strategic desire is for the up-market, but is there truly an acceptance of such an exclusive market to the exclusion of others? Is, therefore, an incoherent approach to web promotion a manifestation of this uncertainty? Technology and marketing are combined in ways they never have been before, yet neither appears to have a clearly defined role. What does Mallorca want from web technology and what does it really want by way of its tourism market?

Neither the government nor the tourism industry can neglect the past. Despite an aloofness (a misguided one) that has been shown by some in Mallorca towards the current-day concept of low cost, it was precisely this - low cost - on which the island's modern-era tourism was based. The term is an invention from the 1990s, but Mallorca grew as a consequence of cheap-as-chips tourism for the masses and spawned some of the resort hideousness that the government would also so love to get to grips with. This was tourism of the giant-pumpkin variety. The larger the pumpkin, the less taste it has. Mallorca reaped what it had sown: a massive fruit comprising 98% water, little substance and little taste. 

This has of course changed over the years, but Mallorca is still faced with the giant-pumpkin conundrum. How does it add vastly more starch and sugar of a quality, up-market style while year after year still planting the seeds for massive-sized  production? How can it, when vertically integrated tour operators have to sell on volume to meet airline, airport and hotel obligations or when far too many hotels (which would need a miracle of investment) will remain for the high percentage of tourists who represent the water content or when too many jobs rely on the island's benevolence in providing a form of tourism social services for visitors whose actual contribution to the economy is otherwise negligible or often negative?

Croatia has grasped the promotional nettle because its government has taken the lead. In Mallorca the government does not lead. It trusts in the private sector to do its thinking and doing. President Bauzá said a year ago that his government had spent nothing on its tourism policy because it was in the hands of the private sector, which is all well and good, but while there is a giant pumpkin to be filled, the private sector of hotels and tour operators will do so in whichever way suits it, the result being, in the absence of clear leadership, strategy and web promotion, a fruit of a different variety - a lemon.