Lost: A Feeling For Tourism

So, Jaime Martínez has spoken. Another historic and record year awaits us. Praise the Lord. Jaime did so while shielding his ample presence behind an artillery of statistics. Tourist spend, overnight stays, occupancy. On and on and on. Does anyone really take any notice of this stuff? Jaime obviously does, as he is an example of tourist-bureaucrat writ large - very large in his case. Stats, spreadsheets, percentages, these are his stock in trade along with the minutiae and obfuscation of property regulations. This, everyone, is tourism in a Balearics government style. Numerate but touristically illiterate. There is little feeling for tourism only for its data and references to article this, that or the other of whatever law or decree.

As chance would have it, the Mallorca Tourist Board (aka the Fomento del Turismo) appeared on the winter flights scene this week, its president, Eduardo Gamero, lending his support to the campaign for more flights. Having done so, the inevitable misunderstandings followed. It is perhaps fair to say that the title Mallorca Tourist Board is nowadays rather misleading. One can appreciate the misunderstandings, but it is necessary to point out - yet again - that the board is not a government body. In all its 110 years of existence it never has been. It is quite wrong to level criticism at it, though, for any perceived failures of tourism policy; it has no role to play in this and more, perhaps, is the pity.

The chance that I refer to was in the context of Martínez's numerical version of the islands' tourism. The Balearics tourism ministry and its agencies, such as the Balearics Tourism Agency, which superseded the former IBATUR, is a regulatory authority and one more prone to drawing up property law than concerning itself with the realities of the tourist. Hindsight and all that, but I remain convinced that had the Mallorca Tourist Board not been neutered, deprived of funding, sidelined by political jealousies after the regional government (and tourism ministry) were created in 1983, there would today be a far greater feeling for tourism at an official level. There had to be a regulatory ministry, as none had previously existed, but the propensity for existence justification through hyper-lexis (too much legislation) has made subsidiary the very essence of tourism, something that the Mallorca Tourist Board understood very well and did so, moreover, by bringing together an enormously eclectic mix of interests and individuals; the painter Joan Miró was, for example, closely involved with it.

Had the board been allowed to continue with promotion and the type of tourism development it had been involved with from the time of its inception, I can't help but feel that a better fist would have been made of confronting issues such as seasonality. Here, after all, through a board membership of the private sector, was an organisation that had the ear and the input of all those who mattered in the industry. I would thus argue that 1983, the year that regional government started, was when Mallorca's tourism took a wrong turn. Not totally, but wrong in a shift in emphasis away from that feeling for tourism. Thirty-two years on, Jaime and his battery of statistics just reinforce the perception of a turn that went the wrong way.