Unbeatable Palma

Grupo Inversor Hesperia is a tourism company you probably won't have heard of. Iberostar, on the other hand, you will know: it is one of Mallorca's big-four chains. Hesperia isn't Mallorcan but it is important. It owns and operates hotels. It is one of the main shareholders in NH Hotels, which, together with Iberostar and the rest of the big-four, is right at the top of the Spanish hotel industry tree. Its hotels were integrated with those of NH, and while this integration has not gone as well as had been hoped and while Hesperia has also experienced some financial problems, it is still an important player.

This is just by way of background, as the Hesperia story is not really what interests us here. What does is what its CEO, Javier Illa, had to say the other day and what Rodrigo Moscardó, the CEO for Iberostar Hotels and Resorts in Europe and the Mediterranean, also observed.

You will recall - you could hardly not have noticed or have already forgotten - that Palma was bigged up by "The Sunday Times" recently. But this praise came only in the form of a journalist's opinion. It was very fine publicity, and it is being milked for what it is worth, but will opinion of people right in the industry - as in running hotel companies - capture the publicity machine-making imagination as much? Sr. Illa was speaking at a conference to mark the tenth anniversary of Magma Hospitality Consulting that focused on urban tourist destinations - cities, in other words. He said that Mallorca has an "enviable location ... with good temperatures all year" and, with reference to Palma, that the city has an "unbeatable future". Sr. Moscardó added that Iberostar was "betting 100%" on a "strategic location that is seeing the entrance of other types of products, such as small boutique hotels in the city centre".

If Palma is truly unbeatable, then it is a virtue to be shouted from the rooftop of the city's Cort, just as the number-one-city-to-live-in is, but the context in which Sr. Illa was speaking was that of "secondary cities". Palma is not a Barcelona or a Madrid and never will be. Yet it can and should compete, as will other Spanish secondary cities such as Seville and Malaga for which there are enormous opportunities now that economic recovery has set in. The observations of Hesperia and Iberostar underline what is a discernible movement and trend from which Palma and Mallorca should or could benefit. But there will be one obstacle to such ambitions. Palma is also not Malaga. It doesn't receive the volume of international flights in winter that the Costa del Sol does. Herein, as ever, lies the rub.

Demand in the off-season isn't there we are told, yet demand for Palma and other parts of the island was confirmed at another gathering, one of tour operators and airlines at Palma Aquarium which was organised by Germany's premier travel magazine "FVW". As an example, Alltours now has seven of its seventeen hotels in Mallorca open during the winter. But then Alltours, and its hotel chain Allsun, can rely on far better winter air links with Germany than the UK and other parts of Europe. The demand that the meeting was referring to was, therefore, principally German.

The overall message from this particular meeting was that Mallorca has the capacity to generate more winter tourism (which we already knew), but that more needs to be done to improve hotel stock - getting it up to at least four-star (four-star in Mallorcan terms, that is) and improving aspects of the non-hotel offer, including gastronomy. (The need for greater quality here may come as a surprise to many, but there are those close to the island's gastronomy industry who will confirm that it isn't quite as good as it is sometimes claimed.) General levels of quality have to be upped in order to compete with Turkey, Egypt and Greece; this was another message to come out of the meeting.

Still, this was precisely the sort of gathering which, for once, made sense in that it brought together players who matter - leaders of hotel groups, airlines and tour operators. Maybe a similar type of conference should be arranged for players from the UK market.