The Missed Opportunity For Excellence

We must be coming to the end of the season. The tourism industry is gathering, holding conferences. Autumn is a time for reflection and casting an eye to horizons new, and the industry gets into a collective huddle to review the past months and to deliver encouraging and motivational oratory - the visions of the future.

In six weeks time this global industry will descend on London. The World Travel Market is the first of the premier league industry events. More than 2.5 billion pounds of new business, 300,000 new connections, more than 50,000 travel professionals. So shouts the website. Buried under the safety umbrella of the Turespaña pavilion, the islands of the Balearics will await the inevitable. It's going to be an awkward market.

It would be stretching things to suggest that the eyes of the world will be turned towards Mallorca, but some eyes will be, as will ears. The difficult questions that will be asked, the forced smiles conveying harmony to be captured through the lens of a smartphone and instantaneously flagged up, shared and tweeted, especially if those smiles betray unease. But then, it is a compliment that such attention should be paid. What happens in Mallorca doesn't stay in Mallorca, and it never has done. Or not for the past fifty or so years at any rate. Mallorca has played a part, a very significant part in creating the peripatetic monster that is the tourism industry and its travelling roadshows of autumn and winter. If there ever was such a thing as Year Zero in tourism, then it was a Mallorcan invention. Mallorca was and is mass, and the massive attacks of other destinations were learned at its knee.

While the industry is preparing for its London November, closer to home, as in Mallorca, the industry is congregating on much more modest scales. There is a conference today. Telefonica and other genies of digital technologies will be offering their tablets of stone, made gigabyte transmission. The "social" communications of the digital transformation of the tourism industry, the new mass, hidden within the smily-faced virtuousness of the ease of information searching and sharing, that of Big Data and its cookie back-end data mining.  

There was another conference - it took place yesterday - that was equally as important. The management of risks in the tourism sector. Investment, the use of the internet, the internationalisation of business and the management of personnel in an environment geared, supposedly, towards corporate social responsibility. They might have added another risk - actions of regional governments viz. taxation, for example.

Forty-two years ago, ABTA held its first ever convention. The location it chose was Mallorca. The choice was highly appropriate. Britain's travel agencies had never had it so good, thanks in no small part to Mallorca. The coincidence of the oil crisis of the time shook the tourism industry and shook Mallorca, but it took only a short time for the industry to recover and for Mallorca to bounce back, its place at the centre of travel agencies' shelves once more confirmed. Here was reliable Mallorca. Big Mallorca.

That first ABTA convention should have been a springboard, but in terms of congresses Mallorca has never assumed the position that it should have done and nor has it ever assumed a position, drawn from the strengths of its experiences and of the pervasive interest shown in it, to diversify a world tourism leadership into a different type of world leadership - that as the centre for tourism excellence, knowledge, research and, yes, conferences and congresses.

There are and have been attempts. There is to be the business school, largely the creation of leading hoteliers. There is a fine tourism research centre at the university. There are technological developments, though there are also the embarrassing failures, as with the Microsoft centre. And then, of course, there is the Palacio de Congresos.

Amid all the recriminations and arguments surrounding the Palacio, there is also the sense that it is far too late. If there was ever going to be a major conference and exhibition centre, it should have been built years ago. That it wasn't points to where Mallorca failed to grasp the nettle of what it could now be: that world centre of tourism excellence and of conventions. Madrid may be Spain's capital, but it was not the epicentre for Spain's dramatic tourism boom. Mallorca was (and, it should be conceded, so also was the Costa Brava). Yet the Spanish equivalent of the World Travel Market is held in Madrid.

The opportunity that was missed lay with not appreciating that there was more than just living from tourism. There was living from the tourism industry as well - its meetings, its research, its education, its technologies. Winter, one would suggest, would be very different had that opportunity not gone begging.