The Alcúdia Anti-All Inclusive Party

A new party in Alcúdia unveiled its programme of priorities at the Casa de Cultura earlier this week. One says new, but Ciudadanos Islas Baleares has basically added the Islas Baleares to the citizens it was in 2011 when its abbreviation was C's. It is now C'sib. A lot of people will know Francisco Baeza, its candidate for mayor; he was also the candidate in 2011. He is well-known in the bar world in around The Mile, having once run the Don Pedro in the Siestas, which is where I got to know him. 

In the summer of 2011, I got involved with a BBC investigation of all-inclusives in Majorca. The programme looked specifically at the situation on the bay of Alcudia. Among some other assistance being sought, the presenter, Rajan Datar, wanted to interview a bar owner who was affected by all-inclusives. Immediately, I thought of Paco. The Don Pedro may be in the Siestas but it is of course right next to Bellevue as well. What Rajan got from Paco was some pretty emotional footage. Essentially, it was to do with how the rapid increase of all-inclusive at Bellevue, which didn't offer any until 2006, had devastated the business. Within the space of five years, all-inclusive had gone from nothing to approximately 80% of the complex's business.

One can of course seek to assign other reasons as to why a bar might fail, but let's be generous and accept that the assault from all-inclusive was the biggest. And this assault, in its human terms, was something that shocked even an experienced and greatly travelled journalist like Rajan. When I took him for a tour of Bellevue one evening, ending up at the Show Garden, he was pretty much gobsmacked. There was this vast amount of humanity, much of it waiting in never-ending queues for beer in plastic glasses at the all-inclusive bars. The one that wasn't for all-inclusive, the one we used, was pleasant: quick service (there were no other customers), a proper glass and, doubtless, a superior grade of beer.

That's some of the past which is needed in order to inform us of the present. Paco had run for mayor on the C's ticket three months before the BBC turned up. He didn't, in all truth, do terribly well, but the party was hardly known about at the time of the election. It also faced, as did any other party, the force that was with Coloma Terrasa and the Partido Popular in May 2011. No, he didn't poll particularly well, but he had encouragement, as he still does, from a number of other bar owners in the area. And a key reason why is one of the priorities that is in the 2015 C'sib programme. You've guessed it - all-inclusives.

The problem, though, for any party in a municipality is what it can actually do. A town hall does not have competence for regulation of hotel accommodation; the regional government does. The most that could be done is to express opposition to all-inclusives in given resorts, offer some proposals for making the situation fairer and hope that the government listens. Which, right now, it almost certainly wouldn't.

But there is a breeze blowing which suggests a wind of change might yet gust in. It is a purely political breeze, one that has sprung up in Greece and might become the north-easterly "gregal" that habitually freshens the beaches of the bay of Alcudia on a summer's afternoon and bring with it more than just some cooling for sunbathers. It all seems remote and unlikely that anything comparable to Syriza's policies on all-inclusives would be adopted either in Mallorca or in Spain, but you never know.

There was also the business of the tourism decree issued before Christmas which referred to "analyses of each tourist area" in respect of the "incidence" of all-inclusive. What the purpose of these analyses is no one really knows, and whether they would be accurate might be questionable. In Alcúdia, it is now easier to identify hotels which definitely do not offer all-inclusive rather than all the ones which do in some form or another. In addition to the obvious hotels, like Lagomonte and Club Mac, there are all those which offer the AI option, and it is one found increasingly at the up-market hotels. The three Viva hotels all do (the Vanity Golf doesn't). The Iberostar has the option, the Club Pollentia Resort has the option, so does the Estrella-Coral de Mar Resort, and one could go on. If the incidence of actual AI occupancy was less than a minimum 75% of all hotel places in Alcúdia, I would be amazed.

Even armed with accurate information as to incidence, what then? The tourism ministry has spoken about tighter quality regulations, but they haven't been introduced. The ministry delayed them because it wanted to do its analyses. Nevertheless, the information would presumably be available to a new government and perhaps even to the public. Whether it's believable is a different matter, though. But, that slight breeze wafting over from Greece might signal something and so, for Paco and C'sib, the time to capture the moment may have arrived.