Pop-Ups For Mallorca?

In 2009, and so against a background of economic crisis, the market research consultancy Euromonitor presented a report at London's World Travel Market which identified new tourist industry opportunities. One was for "eco-luxury". A second was the "nano-break" of only one day or perhaps two. The third was the "pop-up hotel". This was essentially a type of prefab that could be put up at small cost. It was particularly attractive, it was said, to Generation Y, aka the Millennials, defined - insofar as there is an accurate definition (which there isn't) - as those born between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.

These three opportunities have in a sense all collided, although the break is generally not "nano"; it's more likely to be longer. But it was nano enough at what was one of the first examples of a luxury, ecologically designed pop-up hotel. This was at the 2011 Glastonbury Festival. It was a giant tent - a luxury one.

The point about Glastonbury is that, while the Millennials will go, so also do other generations. The previous one - Generation X - is sometimes also referred to as the MTV Generation: music therefore. The one before Generation X is the baby boomers, who grew up with The Beatles, Motown and the Summer of Love.

Marketing loves to categorise generations according to aspirations, attributes and attitudes. As products of their times, generations do have different characteristics, but to assign them to everyone is just plain daft. It is also daft to assume that previous generations don't have some of these characteristics as well, and in tourism terms, the desire for "experiences" and for seeking out something different and alternative cuts right across generations.

Whichever generation, where the pop-up hotel is concerned, it helps to have a fair amount of disposable income. One of the leaders in the market is the UK travel company Black Tomato. It has a brand called Blink, as in blink and you'll miss it. According to the company's co-founder Tom Marchant, Blink offers 751,074,508,800 possible combinations to choose from in selecting and designing holidays: I'll take his word for it. The ultimate in customisation, Blink offers personalised pop-ups that come at a pretty hefty price. Four nights (so not quite nano) in "lunar-like bubbles" on the Salar de Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia costs six people a staggering 167,800 euros, to which the cost of transport has to be added.

As part of the ecological equation, the pop-up installations leave no trace of there having been there. I have to say that I don't know how they deal with issues such as, well waste, but I'm guessing that's all been thought about. But pop-ups don't have to be here today-gone tomorrow. In Tel Aviv, they've created the first pop-up hotel in a beach lifeguards' tower. Transformed into an ocean-front suite, it forms part of a tourism campaign by the city and the Israeli ministry of tourism.

It seems instructive that government should be supportive of this scheme. Israel is therefore not quite the same as Mallorca. When I became aware of the bubbles in Bolivia, my first thought - on seeing them on the salt flat - turned to Mallorca. If someone came up with an idea like the bubbles, everyone would have a screaming fit. And everyone would include environmentalist groups. That first thought was quickly followed by last summer's memory of the so-called privatisation of the beach in Cabrera by people who had hired a superyacht. The bubbles may be eco-friendly, but in Mallorca, the eco-brigades would cry foul. And which, among all the governmental agencies that exist in Mallorca, would ever give permission? The answer is almost certainly none of them.

The thing with Mallorca is that it doesn't do alternatives. Airbnb, with a good deal of justification it has to be said, is being demonised for offering alternatives. Nevertheless, there is opposition just because it isn't the same. And this can also be said of the tents and tree house offered via Airbnb that have attracted publicity in the past few days. These have been greeted with "horror", so it is being said.

Apart from any regulatory issues, this camping has been criticised as an example of attracting less than quality tourism, i.e. people who don't spend money. But who says that they don't spend? Moreover, the tents demonstrate that there is a demand for the alternative, something which Mallorca cannot tolerate. If it did, the legislative obstacles to establishing campsites set out over thirty years ago would not have been raised.

Had the tents not been just tents but pop-ups such as the Bolivian ones, would there be the same horror? Yes. The tourists would undoubtedly be "quality" because of their money, but Mallorca wouldn't want them or permit them.

Image of the pop-ups on the Salar de Uyuni salt flat from https://www.blacktomato.com/blink/

The Joys Of Glamping

Do you fancy some of this? "All the comforts of home with the luxury of a five-star hotel room, the airstream is an oasis of luxury set in the middle of nature." Or some of this? "Comfort and freedom, the ultimate bell tent experience, extremely luxurious ... this space can be whatever you like, a romantic space, get close to nature, if you wish ..." There are other examples, and they come from the website Glamping.com.

I confess to having a natural aversion to what I have long dubbed "brochure talk", a formulaic means of descriptive promotion, aided by a thesaurus with a select list of nouns and adjectives, which takes these nouns and adjectives and arranges them into meaningful sentences (usually meaningful) as needs require. Hence, the thesaurus contains emotive nouns such as "oasis" or adjectives like "ultimate".

While I consider brochure talk to be lazy, cliché-ridden and shallow, I can accept that not everyone might agree with me and that there may indeed be applications for which it is appropriate. And glamping may just be one of these. As far as I am aware, there isn't an oasis as such near to the "small, Spanish white pueblo named Alozaina ... (idyllic, peaceful and restful)", but I admit that it does sound somewhat appealing - a silver machine airstream mobile home that looks like a giant and kitsch-retro toaster parked in a craggy, pine-filled setting somewhere in remotest Andalusia.

Glamping - a neologism that combines glamour and camping - is, so we are being told, a genuine trend in sustainable tourism. As such, therefore, it must be "a good thing" because anything which is tagged sustainable is considered to be "a good thing". It is more than simply sustainable, though, and the clue lies with the glamour part of the neolexia. You can glamp - and I'm not sure, I may have invented a verb - in various parts of the globe, and the sustainably touristic glamour you receive in return for your desire to go glamping can be a yurt, an eco lodge, a treehouse or a very large Swan Essentials steel toaster with five-star interior.

Glamping.com's somewhat eccentric (nothing wrong with that) selection spans the globe, but in Spain it is confined to Andalusia. The offer is specialised glamping, but there is a less exclusive style which nonetheless adheres to the principle of the glamour part of the equation. Examples include the Jesolo International camp in Venice and the Marjal Costa Blanca Eco Camping Resort, which is not that far from Benidorm.

The attractions of this luxury style of camping lie, it is said, with an appeal to contemporary social and ecological consciences and to a demand for quality that doesn't break the bank (which might be the case with a hotel). There is an attraction, furthermore, for the vast majority of people (90% of the population of Europe, it is said) who have never had a camping holiday. While all of this may be true, if one is being picky, a social conscience might baulk at the all-inclusive nature of the Jesolo camp; it gives the impression of being something of a new-age Club Med minus the one-time sinful reputation. 

If we are to believe the marketing psychographics gurus, the planet is now populated by a youthful Millennial generation for whom the holiday experience is as important as if not more important than the accommodation. It's probably all guff, but if there is some truth to it, then Glamping.com should appeal to this Millennial being. It offers, it says, "a discerning guide to experiential travel". One doesn't have to be a Millennial, however, to enjoy this new fad for eco-friendly, sustainably-correct, quasi-back-to-nature happy camping. Families, seniors, those with wads of cash are all equally likely to wish to partake. And why not? Camping, with or without five-star luxury, in or not within a toaster on wheels has much to commend it.

But sadly, this trend will not be coming to Mallorca any time soon. The new tourism law is dumb on the subject. Camping is a non-subject in Mallorca. It was officially airbrushed into almost total oblivion over 25 years ago, and it is highly unlikely that it would make a startling reappearance. Yet, there is a good clientele to be had from camping, while glamping would seem to fit well with the ministerial mantra that chants "quality tourist". However, as with the spare-cash-flush private apartment renter, the potential occupants of a luxury yurt encampment in Mallorca are non-persons where the ministry are concerned. And the ministry knows best, even at the expense of ignoring tourism trends and tourist wishes. Camping is not a hotel. It is the tourism anti-Christ where Mallorca is concerned, which is strange when the ministry can also chant "sustainability".


* Photo from www.glamping.com

Happy Campers?: Not in Mallorca

In the Alicante province, near to the El Fondó nature park, there is what is called an eco-camping resort. Its name is the Marjal Costa Blanca Resort. It is a camping complex with bungalows and plots for caravans and tents. There are 1,432 of these plots. Some way north of the Marjal Costa Blanca is Benidorm, a resort most commonly associated with high-rise hotels but which also happens to be the national leader for camping holidays. The Costa Blanca and the Valencia Community are not the overall leaders for camping, however. Catalonia, and so the Costa Brava, is. The total number of camping places in Catalonia is over 200,000, only some 50,000 fewer than the total number of hotel places.

In the Balearics there are nine campsites, as in proper campsites for holidaymakers. Seven of these are in Ibiza. There isn't one in Mallorca. A letter-writer to the "Majorca Daily Bulletin" asked recently why Mallorca didn't have any camping. He guessed that it may have had something to do with the power of the hoteliers. It was a perfectly reasonable guess. It was correct.

Yesterday I referred to a law that was passed in 1984. The "ley sobre alojamientos extrahoteleros" (law on non-hotel accommodation) was the first piece of legislation that was directly to do with tourism following the establishment of the regional Balearics government in 1983. Among the issues that the law addressed was that of clandestine accommodation. The story about holiday lets goes back to this law and so also does the story about camping in Mallorca.

In essence what this law sought to bring about were improvements in quality and the provision of specific services. Allied to the first "Decreto Cladera", also in 1984, which established space requirements for hotel rooms, it was a way of introducing order to the tourism offer that hadn't until then been adequately controlled. The Cladera of the Decreto was the first tourism minister, Jaume Cladera, who arguably has been the best tourism minister the Balearics has had. He has certainly been one from a tourism background, unlike others. Though Cladera did a great deal that was good, he was close to the hotel sector, and once he ceased to be minister in 1993, he became CEO of companies linked to Stil Hotels.

In February 1986 there was another "decreto", one that followed on from the 1984 law. This decree dealt specifically with camping and even more specifically with "impeding the proliferation of campsites" in the Balearics of the type that had been established on the coasts of mainland Spain. Andrés Avelino Blasco Esteve, Professor of Administrative Law at the Universitat de les Illes Balears, has set out various pieces of legislation between 1984 and 1999 that affected Mallorca's tourism, and what he says about the decree on campsites tells us really all we need to know as to why the situation regarding camping is as it now is. It was Blasco who used the word "impeding" in outlining the "strict requisites" to be applied under the 1986 decree.

These established, inter alia, that there was to be a limit of between 70 to 100 plots (bear in mind the number that the Marjal Costa Blanca has), that there had to be safety measures, electricity supplies and sewage treatment or connections, roads or tracks of a certain width and one parking place for every two plots. The requisites also stipulated that there would be a minimum size per plot and that campsites could only be authorised for up to three years (presumably there would then be an application for renewal). Moreover, these sites had to be to luxury or "primera" standards, thus excluding the "comfort" economy class.

In pure space terms, the minimum was four times greater than that set out for hotel rooms. This was just one reason why camping failed to take off. The other reasons are pretty obvious. It was a business which would have been on shaky ground if the authorisation was for such a short period. Professor Blasco sums it all up thus: "The purpose of the decree seems clear - to hinder the implementation of campsites on the islands ... and to make it impossible for them to become a type of alternative accommodation to hotels and apartments. The consequence of this has been the virtual absence of this type of tourist establishment."

Of course, this doesn't explain why Ibiza has the campsites it has. One reason, and it is an assumption, may lie with the hippy culture of the island from the 1960s. Another is that, despite powerful hoteliers such as Abel Matutes, Ibiza is different in terms of its hotel lobby. Behind the 1986 decree, as Professor Blasco makes clear, was an intent to ensure that hotels in Mallorca dominated, a situation which does not exist in either Alicante and Benidorm or in Catalonia.