When Tourism Generations Collide

It's a photo from 4 July, 1978. A certificate and gold medal are being handed over. The recipient is King Juan Carlos I. The award-giver is the Fomento del Turismo (the Mallorca Tourist Board). Two years later the king received another medal, a commemorative one to mark 75 years of the Fomento. Last year, a similar award was made to the king's son. Felipe VI, for his love of Mallorca, was to receive a medal in honour of the 110 years of the Fomento.

Two generations of royalty divided by more than a generation in time and in tourism culture, for which also read political culture. Curiously, though, when the Fomento's board gathered to consider its awards last year, a participant was the tourism minister, Biel Barceló, not someone automatically bracketed in the royalist camp. But the awards were not the government's, they were those of the Mallorca Tourist Board, an institution long marginalised yet sustained almost symbolically - a vital part of the island's heritage.

Sustainability and heritage. Both were to the fore as the tourism ministry delivered its own tourism awards on Monday. Symbolism was inadvertent in the choice of Es Baluard as the location. It was from this edifice of culture that the so-called anti-tourist guided tour (an oddity in itself) had started two days before. This was a "route" which Barceló, also perhaps inadvertently, had helped to foster. Tourism politicians need to take greater care when mentioning the word "saturation".

The generational shift in tourism and political cultures has been immense. Juan Carlos received his medals at a time when Mallorca and Spain were grappling with the meaning of democracy. It was a time also when Mallorca was starting to truly debate its model of tourism. The years of uncontrolled construction demanded such a debate. The medals, one can suggest, were representative of "old" tourism, symbolised by the Fomento. Organisationally and politically, it was to become sidelined by the political institutionalism of tourism - regional government and the first tourism ministry from 1983.

The "new" tourism has undergone its twists and turns, and the most recent was on the way to Es Baluard for the Night of Tourism, a gala event crafted from the rocks of heritage and from the philosophy of sustainability. Here is a word, sustainability, so often uttered that it is ceasing to have meaning. Or rather, it can mean whatever is required. New tourism deals in concepts of open meaning. "Quality" is another. Whenever did anyone - business, government or whatever - make a case for lack of quality or indeed promote it? Come to Mallorca, where quality is absent. The concept is redundant.

As I remarked over a month ago when considering these tourism awards ("And The Sustainable Tourism Winner Will Be?"), the night of tourism could easily be called the Biel night of tourism. The minister referred to the many challenges, to the government's determination for there to be responsibility, to the pride in Balearic land and people. "This is what makes us say with pride that we are Mallorcans, Menorcans, Ibizans and Formenterans. We have been and are a land of welcome, inclusive and able to attract people from across the globe to admire natural and patrimonial aspects that we are making unique and infrastructures that are turning us into pioneers."

The awards were the tourist tax in physical form. There is and has been misunderstanding about the purposes to which its revenue will be allocated. Enshrined in law - that for the sustainable tourism tax - are these purposes. Hence why, for example, there was an award for the Council of Formentera for an initiative designed to recover the countryside, the island's agricultural heritage. Why also there were awards for technological innovation - to Robinson Club Cala Serena for its alchemy in converting seawater, to solutions related to climate change, to the business application of social Big Data.

These awards underpin the tourist tax thinking, the latest "new" tourism. The purposes for the tax revenue can be derided, but they are evidence, if one likes, of whole-island touristic thinking and of the desire of a left-wing government to spread the wealth generated by tourism more widely.

Had there been a night of tourism under the previous government, the recipients, one imagines, would have been different. The "new" tourism of the PP was the founder of beach clubs, of resort transformation. The usual suspects would have been paraded by the PP. It is most unlikely that the hotel chamber maids collective would have been honoured.

It was a night to celebrate sustainability, to represent the "new" tourism. A world away from awards to royalty. Yet, who else received a Fomento award last year? Among them was Liberto Rigo, a veteran tour guide from the "Excursionist Group", a creation by the Fomento a hundred years ago, and one dedicated to patrimony, heritage, culture and nature. Old meets new.

110 Years Of Tension: Conservation

The Fomento was handing out its gongs the other evening. This Fomento is that of Turismo, the Majorca Tourist Board, 110 years old this year. Among the recipients, not in person, was King Felipe. A commemorative medal on the occasion of the 110 years will be heading his way. It is recognition also of the support that he, his father and mother and others in the Spanish Royal Family have given to Mallorca's tourism. At a time when the gardens of the Marivent appear destined to be enjoyed at first hand by the citizenry (and presumably also tourists) from next year - a decision which ushers in a sense of greater openness by the royals and also greater closeness to the general public - the contrast with how things were under the King's great-grandfather couldn't be greater. He was Alfonso XIII, who was to eventually end up in exile: Republican fervour was that much stronger in the 1930s than it is nowadays.

There again, the contrast in 1905 (and for some years after), compared to today, was total. Barely anyone, anywhere had heard of Mallorca. It was an island in the middle of nowhere. No one, or very few anyway, went to islands. For the traveller and the nascent tourist, small islands in the Med held minimal appeal unless they were the birthplace of a civilisation, such as Crete. And even there, there was hardly what you could call a flourishing tourism industry. How the hell did they get there, anyway? The early twentieth century traveller preferred the mainland city and its grand hotels: Palma had only just got one when the tourist board was founded.

Royal patronage of Mallorca in 1905 was not that of Alfonso. It came from a foreign royal, the Archduke Louis Salvador, an admittedly fairly minor royal, but a royal nonetheless. One hundred years dead, the Archduke was, in many ways, synonymous with tourism as it existed then. He was to become an honorary president of the tourist board a few years before war forced him to abandon Mallorca (ordered to leave by the Emperor of Austria) and before he was to die in Bohemia in 1915.

I'm unaware of the connection having been made - in vaguely official circles at any rate - between the Archduke's royal lineage, Mallorca and the history of the Nueva Planta, with its own anniversary having just been not celebrated. The Archduke was a Habsburg. He was, therefore, from the European dynasty that Mallorca and the rest of the Crown of Aragon, including Catalonia, had supported during what turned out to be the fateful War of the Spanish Succession. Alfonso was a Bourbon, a descendant of Felipe V, he who had decreed the Nueva Planta.

There is nothing to suggest that the tourist board in its early years concerned itself with such historical matters, but the connection surely couldn't have been lost on some of its members. When the Archduke died, on the two-hundredth anniversary of the Nueva Planta, Mallorca lost one of its great advocates, a supporter of the island from a legacy that the island was deprived of as the consequence of what in effect ended up as a civil war in the early eighteenth century.

As noted previously when looking back at the early years of Mallorca's tourism, the great and good who were involved with the tourist board came from a very broad range of island society. To the ambitions of businesspeople, engineers and the bankers were added the checks and balances that came from the worlds of art, culture, history and nature. This eclectic mix was able to foster development through what was mostly mutual and beneficial regard for seemingly opposing views - those of business and economic development on the one hand and of the environment and heritage, the island's conservation and preservation, on the other. Fundamental to this was the message that the Archduke gave and was to leave behind. His was a tourism of nature and of culture. He was one of Mallorca's first great conservationists. Despite his royal background, he would be a point of reference for certain eco-tourism politicians of the present day.

This said, it was that much easier for the Archduke to have been a conservationist. They weren't to invent Magalluf, for example, until the turn of the 1960s. Nevertheless, the message of the Habsburg defender of Mallorca resonates today, and none more so than in the arguments over what we are not supposed to call the eco-tax but do.

At the tourist board's awards ceremony, its president fired a broadside at the tourism minister, Biel Barceló (who was in attendance). The tax is unjust, it will affect competitiveness. What, one wonders, might the Archduke make of the tax? It is a tax that it is a culmination of 110 years of increasing tension that he couldn't have foreseen: the constant battle between conservation and development.

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.

The Last Days Of The Brochure

The hoteliers in the bay of Alcúdia clubbed together in order to produce a magazine for this summer season. Its name, unoriginally, is "Bahia". It's a nice enough publication, but why did they bother? Why, in this day and age, would you go to the trouble of introducing a new publication and printing it when all the information is or can be made available online?

The magazine forms part of a wider discussion of print versus digital for tourism and travel information, and with much of what is printed, it is a case of perpetuating what has existed for years. Longevity in printed form isn't in itself a strong reason for continuation, so there has to be another reason for still bothering with the printing presses, be the publication new or old. And that reason is a pretty simple one. Demand.

One of the more obvious types of tourism publication that would seem destined for being consigned to print history is the travel brochure. What's the point of it any longer? The information is readily available digitally and the holiday is readily bookable online. Moreover, the nature of the market is such that prices are flexible. Print is not flexible. Put a price on a holiday and no sooner is the brochure available than it is out of date.

The fact is, however, that, despite technological advances, the majority of holidaymakers still make bookings with the aid of a brochure. The majority may be dwindling to the point that it is becoming a minority, but roughly 50% of tourists (British ones, it should be pointed out) have yet to be convinced to abandon the brochure's traditional attractions.  

The demand is still there. But is it because half the population remain wedded to print and averse to the internet? That seems unlikely. More likely are the facts that brochures are of course free and that an armful of them make for a pleasant way to while away a wet winter's afternoon dreaming of summer sun. And there is the further fact that brochures, as with other publications, are physical and aesthetic comfort blankets in an age of constant media upheaval, change and innovation.

Not all old technology just fades away. Some of it, the more transient of technology, does. The Walkman is an example. It was usurped and no longer served any purpose. But print is not transient. It is so ingrained in the collective psyche and culture that it is most unlikely that it will ever fade away. There again, for all of those who remember the good old and much more straightforward days of brochure hunting and browsing, there are also those who have no such nostalgia: if it ain't digital, it ain't worth looking at.

Travel agencies are going to try their damnedest to ensure that the brochure doesn't go the way of all Walkmans. Without brochures, their businesses would be stripped of a large chunk of their reason for existing. But they may have to face up to realities. The brochure probably will fade away. And sooner rather than later.

With its passing would go years of travel tradition. And that tradition, where Mallorca is concerned, goes back to 1908, for it was in that year that the Mallorca Tourist Board produced its first brochure.

The decision to publish a brochure had been taken at the end of 1906. One reason why it took until July 1908 for it to appear was the cover. This required that someone did a painting. Faust Morell Bellet was the chosen painter, and he chose a scene of Palma as seen from El Jonquet. The brochure was printed in Switzerland, which may have been because the Swiss were well versed in the requirements of tourism; people used to go to Switzerland on their holidays back then.

It was printed in Castellano and French (an English version came out the next year), and the French version tells us what the prevailing notion of tourism was in 1908. Although Miquel Sants del Oliver had seen a future in summer tourism, the brochure proudly announced "Majorque, station d'hiver"; Mallorca, winter resort.

Other brochures followed, and they weren't all as lavish as the 1908 one. It had, after all, cost 2,816 Swiss Francs for 20,000 copies. The word "brochure" was in fact adopted to refer to a low-cost, reduced-quality publication. The first of these featured a grainy photo of the Caves of Drach on its cover. For its French audience, the brochure told them that the "ideal" winter resort of Mallorca was only 36 hours from Paris.

The future of the brochure hangs precariously from an ever shortening thread. When the thread finally snaps, all that will be left will be this nostalgia. One for the days when a photo meant a painter labouring long over one scene rather than the moments' effort of brightening, saturating and filtering with Photoshop.

The Man Who Invented Tourism

In Can Picafort is a road which, like others, goes in a straight line in linking the thoroughfare of the Carretera Artà and the Paseo Colon and which adds to the criss-cross grid layout of this part of the resort. Along this road are some pine trees which hang over the road itself and partially obscure a hotel. It is the Farrutx, named after the cape at the eastern end of the bay of Alcúdia, the tip of one of three giant claws - Pinar and Formentor being the others - between which are one enormous bite and one lesser bite of coastal crescents eaten by the voracious appetite of the sea. These bites are the bights (German, "Bucht") of Alcúdia and Pollensa, the bays of Alcúdia and Pollensa.

Can Picafort is a case example of two styles of resort urban planning in one. Though the whole of it is called Can Picafort, it is really two resorts in one. Can Picafort was created according to the grid system which stops abruptly around about where the marina is. The rest of the resort, Son Bauló, is the original resort, with origins dating from the 1930s. Its layout is totally different. Its circular style is evidence of a quasi-garden city design approach, the dominant planning philosophy of the 1920s and 1930s before 1960s' modernism brought with it the Milton Keynesian new town grid.

The name Can Picafort has existed since the end of the nineteenth century. It comes from what was little more than a shack that belonged to one Jeroni Fuster. It was called "Picafort", derived from words to refer to the strong itch from a mosquito bite. But there was little or nothing in Can Picafort until the 1960s. Photos show the early formation of the grid road system; sand tracks that led to the beach in the late 1950s. One of them, the main one, is now Via Suisa. At its beach end were once dunes. 

Son Bauló, as a tourist area, is thus much older. As Can Picafort as a whole developed in the 1960s, Son Bauló dominated, which was unsurprising as its basic infrastructure had been in place thirty years before, a product of the drive to create resorts between the world wars but one that had its roots some thirty or forty years further back in time.

Let's go back to that road with the pine trees and the Hotel Farrutx. Its name is Miquel dels Sants Oliver, a name that will mean little or nothing to guests at the hotel or to any tourist or indeed to many residents. In the small town of Campanet, they have started commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Oliver, who was born there in 1864. Later this year there will be further acts of celebration.

Oliver was a journalist. For a time he was also the editor of "La Almudaina", a newspaper that was founded in 1887 by his father. He was known for many things, but it was articles that he wrote in that newspaper in the early 1890s which made him a hugely important figure in the development of Mallorca's tourism. At the same time as Jeroni Fuster was lending the name of his shack to what was to become a major tourist resort, Oliver was setting out principles for a whole new industry - tourism.

It could be argued that Oliver invented Mallorca's tourism because what he, with remarkable vision foresaw in his articles, was tourism for the spring and summer seasons. It was to be some years before hot-weather tourism truly caught on, but Oliver's vision ran counter to the thinking of the time, that tourism was something for the mild winter. He wrote those articles against a background of economic crisis in the island's agricultural sector, the result in part of the phylloxera plague that struck grape vines. He saw the necessity for diversification, and tourism was that diversification. For it to be successful, though, there needed to be great improvements to infrastructure. His thinking directly led to the founding of the Majorca Tourist Board in 1905, though when we speak - in English - of a tourist board, we underestimate what this meant. Its Spanish name is more meaningful: Fomento del Turismo, the development of tourism, which was to be development in all facets, one of which, some years later, was the creation of resorts, such as Son Bauló.

Of course, what Oliver could not have foreseen was what came in the 1960s. He would probably have been horrified. Tourism visionary he was, but he was also sympathetic to rural traditions, such as those of his home town, and to the natural and unspoilt environment, like that of the bays in the north. Would he have liked his name to have been given to a road with a hotel called Farrutx in a resort built on dunes? Unlikely.

Built For Tourism: Mallorca's roads

They like their anniversaries in Sa Pobla, even if the anniversary isn't what typically might be thought to have special significance. One hundred years of electricity in 2012 were significant, 135 years of the train in 2013 were less so, as also are 90 years of the first bus this year. But, significant or not, centenary or not, they're all an excuse to look back to times when infrastructure was shaky and partial.

The first bus rolled into Sa Pobla from Palma ninety years ago. It was a further step, one separated by 46 years, in connecting the town and capital, the north and the south. The arrival of the bus was a welcome addition to a public passenger transport system that otherwise relied on the train. Yet, for all that 1924 marked an important development in public transport and 2014 marks ninety years of the Sa Pobla service, buses don't carry the same weight of history as the stories of Mallorca's trains, trams and indeed ships. Buses are less romantic. They are the neglected part of the island's transport history.

There was, however, an "omnibus" service in late nineteenth-century Palma some years before motor buses, those powered by an internal combustion engine, might have been available. The omnibus was a mule-drawn tram, and the service connected city with port. It wasn't until 1958 that Palma actually got a bus service; this was the year when trams were withdrawn.

But to go back further - to the 1830s - it was then that Mallorca began to have anything like regular road-based public transport; the first stagecoach service between Palma and Inca was established in 1837. In order to get anywhere by stagecoach, though, there had to be roads, and in the first half of the nineteenth century, those visitors which Mallorca used to get then were particularly critical of its transport network; roads were poor, very poor or non-existent. New roads did start to appear from 1845, but the road system was never more than rudimentary. It was the realisation at the turn of the twentieth century that tourism offered Mallorca an economic future which helped to bring about some improvement, the Fomento del Turismo (Mallorca Tourist Board), founded in 1905, being instrumental in persuading whoever it could of the need for such improvement.

It was, in no small part, the "excursion" which was the impulse behind the development of new or better roads. The tourist board invested in this infrastructure, as did town halls and private individuals, and they all augmented funds made available by the provincial administration. As an example, the road between Andratx and Estellencs was built with the help of one thousand pesetas from the tourist board and 1350 pesetas from the town halls of Andratx, Estellencs, Esporles and Banyalbufar.

Getting public money for infrastructure projects was far from straightforward. The state generally didn't pay for railways, other than through discretional grants, such as one which helped with the construction of the otherwise privately-funded Sóller train. The state did pay for roads, but getting authorisation could be a tortuous process and was not made any easier by constant political upheaval. One such upheaval led to the first dictatorship, that of Primo de Rivera, but this government proved to be heavy investors in infrastructure. In the year that the Sa Pobla bus service started, the government, noting the representations made to it by the tourist board, gave the go-ahead for a number of road-building projects on Mallorca. They were all projects with tourism in mind and so with tourist excursions in mind. Public transport was secondary. Or at least this is the impression one has.

There doubtless is information about early bus services out there, but if so it's not immediately apparent. What is clear is that by the 1930s bus services and road transport in general were genuine rivals to rail services. But where the bus services went and when they commenced operations is hard to say. 1924, therefore, may have been more significant than simply being ninety years ago. The service to Sa Pobla may well have been, at that time, the furthest by distance.

The projects that Primo de Rivera's government authorised certainly gave Mallorca a more coherent road network than had been the case. One road was that between Fornalutx and Lluc, which was the final part of the mountain road that started in Andratx and ended in Alcúdia. The road from Palma to Manacor and then to Portocristo received special funding for being a "national tourism circuit". And by the end of the 1920s, with the road system in some sort of usable state, the tourist board offered financial support to operators so that they could acquire large-capacity buses. The day of the "excursionista" had truly arrived. On roads built, not for public transport, but for tourists.

I'd Like To Thank ...

You know when the year is drawing to a close. It's the time when gongs are handed out and award-winners are obliged to make embarrassing speeches. Soon, in just over a week's time, we will probably be required to recognise that it was Mallorca what won it for Wiggo, or some such rot. If the Bradmeister wins Sports Personality, we'll never hear the end of it.

Rather lower down the list of awards ceremonies in terms of awareness among the local British community has been that of the Fomento del Turismo (otherwise known, if somewhat misleadingly nowadays and in English at any rate, as the Mallorca Tourist Board). It handed out its annual gongs on Monday evening. The Fomento was lucky enough to have been graced with the presence of the Balearics dear leader at its yearly thrash. President Bauzá went, he spoke and he told the audience that the annual promotional plan for tourism (there is one) will be unveiled on 17 December, the day after Wiggo's anticipated coronation by BBC licence-payers. Maybe we can also anticipate Wiggo being part of the annual plan.

Whatever the regional government has planned for its plan, we already know one thing. It will be doing more with less. Bauzá said so on Monday evening, thus reinforcing the message that has been forthcoming from tourism minister Delgado in those rare moments when he has been on-message and not on a hunting trip. Doing more with less does of course mean that there isn't any money. But I'm not about to criticise. I have said before that less money should exercise minds to be more creative.

The Fomento's president, Eduardo Gamero, spoke about tourism competitiveness being improved thanks to provisions within the new tourism law and also about what the Fomento does, highlighting in particular the work of the International Press Centre, which fully deserves having its work highlighted. The Fomento - and an organisation that is over a hundred years old really should be looked after rather better when in its dotage - is unfortunately strapped for cash and now reliant on its members for financial support. Whether the government has in fact paid the Fomento everything it owes it I couldn't say, but Sr. Gamero might well have reminded the dear leader were there any outstanding invoices buried under a pile of other demands on the desk of the governmental purchase ledger clerk.

Still, it does always help to keep in with those in high governmental places, and the Fomento went one step higher than regional government in doling out the 2012 awards. Recipient of the gold plaque was Turespaña, the national tourism promotion agency, and there to receive the award was none other than the national tourism secretary of state and the president of Turespaña, Mallorca's very own property expert, Isabel Borrego. Perhaps the plaque was handed over with a note asking Sra. Borrego to have a word with Bauzá about the invoices.

Turespaña joins an illustrious list of award winners over the past few years and a list of non-award winners, the most illustrious of these being our good friends GOB, the environmental pressure group. It was up for a gong in 2007, until someone suggested that GOB had not demonstrated that it actually supported tourism. But that was in 2007. We now know of course that GOB does support tourism. Eco tourism. Which means groups of no more than twenty ramblers at a time schlepping across the Tramuntana, conversing in Catalan and taking refuge in dry stone shelters which are self-sufficient in organic vegetables. The good news for the ramblers is that when they get lost or stuck, there is always the Guardia Civil Mountain Rescue Unit to come to their aid; it won a Fomento award in 2011.

Other previous winners have included motorcycle world champion Jorge Lorenzo (gold medal in 2010), an award which might suggest that Wiggo has a chance to add a Fomento medal to his trophy cabinet, the Yannick and Ben Jakober Foundation in Alcúdia (silver plaque in 2008) and the Vi Primitiu, the wine association based in Pollensa, which got a diploma in 2008.

And given that there has also been the odd hack who has received an award, without sounding slightly presumptuous, I would like to nominate myself for one next year. I'm not bothered about a plaque or a medal or even a diploma. I'll settle for the cash, so long as I know the invoice will get paid. With this in mind, I'd like to thank ... .


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Winter At The Start Of Summer

George Sand, Chopin's cigar-smoking OH, bequeathed to Mallorca a title. "A Winter In Mallorca" isn't particularly original, but it is accurate enough. It wasn't a spring, a summer or an autumn; it was a winter. It could have been something else, something less neutral, such as "The Chopins In A Cell (whichever one it was)" or "How To Aggravate Your TB" or "Valldemossa: Our Three Months Of Hell". But no, Georgie Girl settled for the purely and informatively bland.

The title has, over the years, become quite useful. Any reference to a winter in Mallorca, whether intentionally a reference to Sand or not, can nevertheless be interpreted as evoking the odd-couple tourists from the first half of the nineteenth century. Winter in Mallorca will, therefore, forever be associated with Mr and Mrs C, not that they were a Mr and Mrs, but be that as it may. Because of who Chopin and Sand were, or more importantly, what they did, winter in Mallorca means culture. Piano and dull classical music, thanks to Chopin, and literature, even if it was mainly a work of slagging off Mallorcans and the island's health service (nothing different with that, therefore), thanks to Sand.

Winter in Mallorca has been extremely useful, because it has enabled an entire programme of events, primarily of a cultural nature, to be developed in winter. And this culture is of course appropriate because of the Chopins. I say enabled, but the programme has been disabled for a couple of winters. "Hivern a Mallorca", "Winter in Mallorca" has ceased to exist; there is no winter any longer.

To the rescue, however, comes the Fomento del Turismo (aka the Mallorca Tourist Board). Intimately involved with the original Winter in Mallorca programme (it was pretty much the board's idea), it is now asking the Balearics Tourism Agency to revive it this coming winter.

There wasn't a Winter in Mallorca programme last winter, and if there was one the previous winter, they were keeping it quiet. It fell victim to a lack of financing, confusion within the tourism ministry as to who was actually running it and to a consequently poor system of promotion; a PDF with monthly information was either not updated or updated late, while certain tourist offices, such as my own local one in Muro, never used to receive the leaflets. It wouldn't necessarily have fallen victim to a lack of interest among what tourists happened to be about, but the inadequacy of the promotion wouldn't have done anything to generate interest.

There was a further reason last winter why the programme was probably abandoned, and that was the lack of senior tourism that had been promised but fell through because the Balearic Government wouldn't pay to help subsidise it. Whether this tourism will reappear this coming winter must be doubtful, but the Mallorca Tourist Board still wants to press ahead and make the programme a feature of the Mallorcan scene that it had been since the 1990s.

As ever, one does have to ask what contribution has been made. The Winter in Mallorca programme had become a mix of guided walks, cultural excursions and music events. Of the latter, there were typically chamber orchestra concerts, the occasional organ recital, Mallorcan folk and every now and then a "spectacular". None of it really set the pulse racing, to be honest. Nevertheless, stage a Mallorcan folk evening or have a quintet play in a hotel (one which happens to be open), and it's still worth the effort, and it amounts to making an effort when precious little effort is normally made.

If the Winter in Mallorca programme is to be revived and to be revived properly, by all means have the guided walks and excursions and the concerts, but make it, from a promotional point of view, far more dynamic. Such dynamism does exist, as with for example the fiestas in January. Build the programme around these, make them the real attention-grabber, because they can grab attention and they can be worthy of strong promotion.

The problem has been that promotion for winter has been too passive, apologetic almost. The Winter in Mallorca programme has lived off the Sand title rather than being forward-thinking; it has been something of the past in its marketing. There is one hell of a lot that Mallorca has in winter, but one would think that it were confined to a few guided walks and a string quartet. It most certainly isn't.

My advice to the Mallorca Tourist Board is do it yourself. I know you have lost your grant, but don't leave it to the government. You are the private sector. Engage with the attractions association, engage directly with the towns with the spectacular fiestas, such as Sa Pobla for Sant Antoni, and make Winter in Mallorca a truly vibrant programme. George Sand, and Chopin come to that, were bloody miseries. Forget about the association and make winter a joy.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Private Tourism: Mallorca Tourist Board

The Fomento del Turismo is a strange old organisation; old being appropriate, given that it makes much of its being the oldest tourist board in Europe (founded in 1905). Its name in English, the Mallorca Tourist Board, suggests something official, yet it is a private and independent body. This independence doesn't stretch, however, to being of totally independent means. Its corporate members supply a goodly amount of funds, but the board also relies on government money. And right now, it isn't getting any.

The board now has a new president, the gaffe-prone Pedro Iriondo having stood down and having been replaced by Eduardo Gamero, the ex-director general of tourism during Jaume Matas' time as Balearics president.

Gamero is no doubt seeking to use his political connections to try and swing the current government around to a more favourable stance where the tourist board is concerned, though an association with Matas might not be that much of a positive with President Bauzá who has sought to distance himself from the Matas era.

The government has been playing hardball with the tourist board. It apparently owes the board nearly 300,000 euros and last year failed to enter into an agreement of collaboration. The board has been left to survive on its corporate funding, but now finds itself, like pretty much any other organisation in Mallorca, in a delicate financial situation, one that threatens to undermine its work in tourism promotion and specifically that which relates to its press services.

With money so short and especially money for tourism promotion, the government's budget having been slashed into virtual non-existence, the board doesn't have much of a case in going chasing limited public money. Or perhaps it does. The answer, either way, lies in what it does that the government doesn't.

One area of its work that does appear to differ to that of the government is in the organisation of articles that appear in the international press. To this end, its press centre is involved not just in supplying information but also in arranging for journalists to visit Mallorca, to put them up and hope that they end up writing something nice about the island.

This is a fair enough exercise, but if one considers tourism promotion as a whole, why is it that there are agencies of government and a private and independent body (the tourist board) engaged in otherwise similar activities? If the press centre work is so important, could it not just as easily be operated by the tourism ministry? You have to ask, therefore, why continue with the tourist board or also ask why not hand over to it responsibilities that the government currently has.

There is a feeling that the tourist board's history is what keeps it going. Undoubtedly, it was a hugely important organisation, before, that is, the government started to genuinely organise its own tourism promotion operation, which wasn't until the late 1980s with the establishment of IBATUR, the agency which has since been wound up because it was caught up in corruption scandals in the tourism ministry; IBATUR having now re-emerged as the ATB, the Balearics Tourism Agency.

With the best will in the world, and notwithstanding arranging for fine hotels or villas for journalists in which they can pen glowing pieces about Mallorca, the information element of the press centre isn't particularly remarkable. It is an exercise in pulling together bits of information, but it is an exercise that would not be beyond the abilities of one person sitting in a spare room in a house. In fact, I could do it and would be willing to do so at no doubt significantly less cost. On the credit side, the board reckons that its international press activities in totality bring in four million euros of economic benefit, though how it arrives at this figure and over what period, who knows.

The fact is that the tourist board has not always enjoyed the best of relationships with the government. The current lack of collaboration stems in part, one presumes, from the empty nature of tourism ministry coffers, but it isn't a complete surprise given the at-times strained relationship with previous administrations, and is less of a surprise as minister Delgado has had to wield the axe so dramatically.

The tourist board may have to face up to a future in which it really is independent insofar as its funding is all private. It cannot use 107 years of history as a means of justifying public money. If it is to get this public money, there has to be a clear agreement as to what it does and can do that the government cannot or could not.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - Mallorca Tourist Board in financial difficulty

The Fomento del Turismo (commonly referred to in English as the Mallorca Tourist Board) faces a difficult economic situation and in continuing its role in tourism promotion if it does not get financial aid from the regional government. The problems facing the board were outlined by the new president Eduardo Gamero, who has replaced Pedro Iriondo. The board is in fact a private organisation represented by businesses from different parts of the tourism industry.

MALLORCA TODAY - Iriondo stays at Mallorca Tourism Board

Pedro Iriondo, the president of the Fomento del Turismo (Mallorca Tourism Board), has received the support of his own board and will stay in his post. This despite the publicity surrounding comments he made last week about low-cost airlines and foreign workers. The board believes that the words of regional president Francesc Antich, who had called for Iriondo to be dismissed, were excessive, and it has also made it clear that it is a private body and therefore not subject to demands made by politicians.

MALLORCA TODAY - Fomento will decide Iriondo's future

The board of the Fomento del Turismo (Mallorca Tourism Board) will meet next week on Monday to consider the future of its president, Pedro Iriondo, in light of his comments about foreign workers and low-cost airlines. Iriondo maintains that he will not resign and that he was misinterpreted.

Look Back In Anger: Pedro Iriondo

The Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourism Board, is not a public, governmental agency. It is a private organisation. Its "junta", its own board, comprises directors of Grupotel, MAC, Sol Melia and Iberostar hotels as well as representatives of a bank (Banca March), business associations and others. The Fomento is proud of its "independence"; it is one of its values, along with, inter alia, "altruism and plurality". These words, respectively, mean concern for the welfare of others and a system of society which respects and includes minorities. They are fine, noble words. But they are just words.

The president of the Fomento, Pedro Iriondo, has been having some words of his own. They are extraordinary. They may be an expression of the independence that the Fomento holds so dear, but they do not accord with its other values. His attack on low-cost airlines, on the passengers they bring and on workers in hotels is anything but altruistic or pluralistic. It is small-minded and borders on the xenophobic. It is insular. No man is an island, and that includes Sr. Iriondo. No island is any longer an island in a global environment, and that includes Mallorca. Try telling Sr. Iriondo this.

At a forum organised by the university's school of tourism, Sr. Iriondo launched into both RyanAir and easyJet, accusing them of not bringing "quality" tourists. He lambasted the airlines' passengers, the British, who stay in unregulated apartments and in villas that they rent from other Britons. He attacked waiters and other workers who are not from Mallorca and who therefore cannot know Mallorca and cannot adequately "sell" Mallorca because they don't have a feeling for the island.

He went on to criticise the lack of business tourists from Britain, those who might attend conferences (an area of hoped-for development in Mallorca), because they don't want to fly with the low-cost airlines. He laid into the internet and into an image of Playa de Palma that is one of card-tricksters, Romanians, prostitutes and "masseurs".

If the Fomento were a public body, Sr. Iriondo would be sacked. As the head of a private body which features hotel groups for whom, one might presume, foreign waiters work, quite what other members of the junta make of his remarks, who can tell. Independence and an independent voice are fine, but not when they fly around in all directions, attacking anyone and anything in sight. EasyJet and RyanAir may attract all manner of criticisms, but they are also big business when it comes to Mallorca. One feels pretty confident in saying that Sr. Iriondo's predecessor, the director-general in Spain and Portugal of Air Berlin, Alvaro Middelmann, would never have uttered the same words.

When Sr. Iriondo rose to the presidency of the Fomento, he looked back at a time in Mallorca when everything was rosy, there were parties on the beach and everyone was happy. During his contribution to the forum, he looked back again, to his time when he started in tourism and when all waiters and other workers were Mallorcan and bought into an "I love tourists" philosophy. By looking back, not once, but twice, he has condemned himself. He is of the past.

He has looked back with a current-day anger to a time when everyone may allegedly have been happy, but they were also poorly paid (still are, many of them), lived under a dictatorship, were pretty much told what to do and what to think and did not have the greater opportunities that they now enjoy. Sr. Iriondo will know, but hasn't said this, that the tourists who came to Mallorca did so partly because the island was dirt cheap. His insistence on referring to "quality" tourists, and he is not alone in this, can be interpreted as a shocking insult.

Those not afforded the quality status are branded with something else. Yet, he ignores the fact that Mallorca was largely built on an economy-class tourism. Its tourism history is one of the mass, and the mass does not always come with huge wads of cash. It has always been the case. It was in the 1970s and remains so. The difference, back then, was that not having huge wads of cash didn't matter; indeed there weren't always huge wads, among the British, because of foreign-exchange restrictions.

Had Sr. Iriondo moderated his language, had he been less inclined to reminisce, then his words might have been treated with greater sympathy. You can just about understand what he was driving at, if you were being kind, but instead an impression has been given that is no better than one of the bar bigot for whom altruism and plurality are alien concepts.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Personal Service - Tourism, information and banks

Our friend Pedro Iriondo, the head of the Mallorca tourist board (Fomento del Turismo) and a chap who looks variously like Nixon (the film version) or "Knuckles" Norman, an East End associate of the Krays, is back in the press pages singing a familiar song. In an interview with "The Diario", he says basically the same as he has said elsewhere, including snatches in "The Bulletin". While lengthy enough, the interview really doesn't add to the sum of our existing knowledge. What is slightly new is that he has a chance to speak about the effects of corruption at the tourism ministry. It doesn't give a very good image to tour operators - I think we could have guessed that, and indeed I have said this very thing - but it also has meant that money intended for tourism promotion (in short enough supply) has of course been allegedly filtered off in different directions. The only other thing, amidst the normal stuff about all-inclusives (bad but what can you do), seasonality (there has been lots of promotion - but how effective?) and what the coming season holds (hard to say), that was new - to me at any rate - was the idea that images of people wearing masks in Playa de Palma last summer was somehow a set up by other tourist destinations. This was all to do with swine flu, and Iriondo reckons that this, and the mask-wearing, had a negative impact on tourism numbers, more so than ETA and its bombs. Apart from stupid sensationalism by the German paper "Bild", I don't know that it did. As for suggesting that perhaps the Turks and Croats and Bulgarians had ganged together to get some bad publicity, well this does seem somewhat far-fetched.

Back in Bulletin-land, I am somewhat baffled by the paper's email what's on thing. Its website gives a daily running total of the numbers who have sent in their email address together with dates of when they plan to visit Mallorca, and for which they then get an email giving them a list of things that are going on. The daily total announcement, all a tad self-congratulatory one can't help feeling, is a bit like the Blue Peter Christmas appeal. "We've now raised 296 Fairy Liquid bottles that will be turned into a Jeep to help the starving of (add as applicable)." The reason for bafflement is why they're doing it. Seems like work for someone, when putting the information onto the website would, one might have thought, be less hassle and might also have the benefit of generating additional site traffic. There again, maybe this is all part of a more personal touch that the internet has dispensed with. Like banks. Touching on the news about the Halifax branch in Puerto Pollensa closing, what it, and indeed other Mallorcan banks, have going for them is that the customer isn't simply left to the de-personalised cyberworld of internet banking as the means of communication. Personal contact. With the bank manager. How very quaint. However, I do wonder if there isn't a drawback with this. Is the relationship with the bank manager or with the bank? When the manager leaves, might the customer also leave if there is a strong recommendation for another bank, or rather another manager? In fact this isn't a "might", it's a yes. I've done it myself.

Still, at least a relationship with a bank can endure for some years. Unlike that between tour operators and Mallorcan tourism ministers. Unless the former intend to get themselves banged up in the next cell.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Happiness - Mallorca tourism promotion

How to win tourists and influence people. Smiling, happy people having fun. It starts at the top of the tourism trade and filters down, reminiscent of days when there was so much more of a personal touch, barbecues on beaches and even the local Guardia coming along and joining in. So recalls ... . So recalls someone who needs to win tourists and influence people. Smiling, happy person. There, on the front page of yesterday's "Bulletin". A sullen Frank Langella as Nixon? No, this is the head of the Mallorca tourist board. Smiling, happy person, winning tourists and influencing people. Why oh why use a photo of someone who looks so terminally hacked off?

Pedro Iriondo, president of the Balearics travel agents association and founder of the agency Viajes Kontiki in 1974, became head of the tourism board at the end of last year. He has been a member of the board's ruling committee for several years and had been its vice-president since 2005. Here he was, granting an interview, which unfortunately says little that we don't already know: why don't the shops open in Palma on a Sunday; the competition that is Turkey and Egypt; the reliance upon tourism in Mallorca; the need to exploit golf and other niches, such as nautical tourism; and the need to work closely with tour operators. I'm sure that Sr. Iriondo has some fine ideas, but the interview was thoroughly depressing; a re-hash of what we know to be the case and a distinct sense of the impotent. Take all-inclusives. He doesn't approve, but accepts that there has been a market change. What we already know, and what we already know cannot be put back into the bottle. What we already know, that it is the tour operators who hold the whip-hand.

Iriondo has taken over from Alvaro Middelmann as president of what is known as the Fomento del Turismo. While referred to as the Mallorca Tourist Board, it is a private, non-governmental body. The promotion of Mallorca and the Balearics, via the government, is handled by the tourism institute IBATUR. The board is thus, as it says on its website, "a forum where everyone in tourism on the island can come and debate important issues, policies and decide on a future tourism strategy". It continues by referring to the need for "forward thinking, consensual solutions for our future", and by "our" one takes this to mean the island's whole tourism industry. The Fomento can lay claim to being the oldest tourist board in Europe. It is, therefore, a body of some not inconsiderable significance and influence. But in its, if you like, mission statement, one comes back to an issue regarding who or which bodies actually drive "future tourism strategy". Is it the government or the private sector? And if it is the latter, then which parts of it?

At the conclusion of the interview, Iriondo says that "we've go to sort out our prices, provide better quality and revive the personal touch". Fine. But where does the impulse come from to do so and how can these things be done? In the interview, he refers to the fact that it is difficult to provide good product at low cost, unlike some competitor countries, to the fact that the personal touch has been lost because of the expansion in size of hotels, and to the know-how of Mallorca's hotel groups - several of which can be credited with having high quality, yet which are also, through the export of know-how and their own international ambitions, contributing to the development of competitor destinations. Take a look, for instance, at the Iberostar site and its five-star Bellis complex in Turkey. But to come back to where that impulse might come from, it is worth taking account of the composition of the tourism board's ruling body - three major hotel chains as well as the association of hotel chains, the associations for yacht clubs, golf courses and restaurants, a bank, a car-hire firm ... one could go on. If that lot can't sort something out, then who can.

Mallorca, and the Balearics, have experienced difficult times in the past, and the Fomento has acted in the past to revive the island's tourism at times of recession. So it has something of a track record, but Sr. Iriondo believes that the current recession is "different" to previous ones, impacting hard on employment and the tourism industry as a whole and highlighting the economic reliance on tourism. He sees the need for more and more promotion, yet the promotional budget - the government's - has been reduced.

It all, I'm afraid, does add to that rather depressing image. Forward thinking, consensual strategies. Indeed. But rather than an appraisal of what we know, it might be nice to learn what we don't - those strategies in other words, and who exactly is going to implement them.


"The Bulletin" also reported on the launch of ABC Menorca (Association of British Companies Menorca). This really does look like something potentially quite impressive and of significance, certainly given the array of organisations and individuals who were present at the launch. Despite the scepticism referred to the other day, this body does seem, within terms of its British-market remit, to have broad support from other business groups and indeed at governmental level. It is a very different beast to the association that sprang out of Calvia at the end of 2008. But it has one important similarity, in that it is evidence of people taking an interest, becoming involved and looking to do their best for businesses. It should be applauded, and if it crosses into Mallorca, then it could also prove to be a force for good.


QUIZ
Yesterday: For example, Pentangle, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFGRnUzfOEI. Today's title: "Happiness". Brilliant, a blog favourite band, some say duo. Oh, and it's not Ken Dodd.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.