The Wrong Type Of Tourism Regulation

There was a time, and it wasn't so long ago, that the local Spanish media made very little noise about the issue of private holiday accommodation. The tendency was to go along with how the regional government and the hoteliers portrayed the issue, namely that there was an underground economy that was operating a form of unfair competition (to the hoteliers). The narrative ignored the fact that this underground economy was the product of legislative proscription. Prohibition has often led to ways which circumvent it.

The attitude of the local media changed when the national government declined to take responsibility for private holiday accommodation and shoved it down the line to the regions. In practice, where the Balearics were concerned, the tenancy act reform meant very little. The status quo was maintained. Yet, the media had finally been alerted to an issue that had been rumbling for years. It started to adopt a more critical posture and it was joined by politicians from PSOE, a party which had hitherto managed to steadfastly ignore the issue.

Last Wednesday, the Diario de Mallorca devoted its front-page headline and its first two inside pages to a story which started thus: "Mallorca is playing with fire". The fire is that of prohibition, one that is said to be driving tourists away from Mallorca and to other destinations and one that will continue to do so. The sources of information for this claim, primarily representatives of accommodation web portals, do of course have their own business agendas and interests to safeguard, but nonetheless here was an overt statement that was highly critical of the government's posture. "Persecution" was one word used to describe it. The difference in attitude to that in Catalonia and elsewhere in Spain, where there have been or are moves to create a properly regulated system of private accommodation, was revealed starkly.

Mallorca has had a history of not appreciating tourism trends. Low-cost airline carriers were once considered a threat, so attempts were made to kill them off. The misunderstanding as to what low cost actually represented was still being perpetrated only three or so years ago by someone who should have known better: the then president of the Fomento (the Mallorca Tourist Board). Low cost equalled low quality. It was wrongheaded but was in keeping with a malaise that continues to dog Mallorca. The island cannot or is unwilling to adapt to tourism changes, and these changes are ever more rapid than they once were.

The P2P sharing culture is the latest of these changes and one of the most potent. It attacks the complacent notion of hotel domination and a misguided belief that Mallorca should exist for the benefit of its hoteliers and no one else. At a time when the regional government can bask in the warmth from the glow of new or redeveloped hotel complexes, straining extra stars inside their walls and grounds, it does not accept that there is a different glow, that of the fire it is playing with (according to the report this week).

Fundamentally, the government demonstrates an unwillingness or incapacity of intellect to appreciate just how much travel and tourism are changing. Driven by technological applications, there is a societal shift towards the tourist as user, and it is he or she who dominates and not, therefore, the hotelier tourism god. Holidaymakers will not turn their backs on hotels totally or anything like totally. There will always be very high demand, especially as quality increases. But this isn't the point. The tourist-user is not beholden to a conventional model of tourism, as it has been applied in Mallorca. There is a vast market which is proving that this is the case, and it is one to which Mallorca has to adapt and so introduce comprehensible, fair and flexible regulations in order to feature in this new tourism world. Is Mallorca up to the challenge? Until it finds those with the intellect, the understanding of technological advances and constantly shifting consumer values and the capacity to not say boo to the hoteliers but to embrace them in establishing a co-ordinated model that benefits different parties, then no. But change might be on the way. Let's see what happens in May.