A Million Places Can't Be Wrong

A few years ago, there was a report in a newspaper, the name of which I shall not mention (and it wasn't the Bulletin), which said that the number of hotel places in the Balearics would rise to one million. I don't recall when this magic number was supposedly going to be reached (perhaps it should have been by now) nor indeed the basis for it being reached, but it was, to put it mildly, an ambitious suggestion.

It was wrong because of the constraints on hotel building. Yes, there are new hotels, but to achieve one million places would require a doubling of the current stock. It isn't going to happen and it never will. The official number of places - some 420,000 - has been queried by the alarmists Terraferida (who do otherwise have some justification in their alarmism). They maintain there are 700,000. Sorry, that can't be. Not even the hoteliers can somehow hide almost 300,000 places.

The notion that there might be one million places was, at the time of that report, taken to be a "good thing". The more tourists the merrier was the general thrust of the thinking. Today, the more the merrier are among us, and they owe very little to an increase in hotel places, give or take, in Terraferida's estimation, the odd 300k.

There is a current attitude which concurs with the "good thing". More tourists, more people: bring 'em on. Mallorca lives from tourism and cannot, should not, do anything to deter growth. Quite the contrary, ever greater numbers mean ever more jobs and ever more tills tinkling with the sound of coinage. There is a further attitude. If there is deterrence, then Mallorca will slip back to times of yore, and the island will be riding its collective horse and cart, digging from the same potato patch and throwing its artisanal pots. Nothing more.

The colonialist view that Mallorca should be grateful for every last tourist who arrives at its points of entry either wilfully or ignorantly neglects basic theories of tourism development and society's attitudes. What starts out as a form of gratitude passes through various stages until it reaches antagonism and hostility. It is colonialism on a grand scale. It can be observed in the ever more aircraft lumbering across the tarmac, in the gloriously repugnant apartment blocks on water with their pile 'em high, pack 'em in communist designs that creep into the bay of Palma, in the velodromes of the island's roads. The territory is invaded by sea and by land. And no greater sense of irrational territorialism is there than that of road users. Hostility morphs into hate.

I am aware that this is a familiar theme, but its familiarity is what makes it crucial. There is a sense now of the theme having adopted the manifestation of crisis. Is this the consequence of the alarmism of Terraferida and others? To an extent perhaps it is. Those who shout loudest appeal to the instincts implicit in that ultimate stage of tourism development theory. They stir the pot. The brew becomes noxious.

Day after day we are fed a stream of information that merely increases the feeling of crisis. The accommodation crisis, the crisis of overwhelming numbers of vehicles and people. Into the latter bracket, the Llevant park has now been added to the endangered coves. Betlem and the like are being overrun. And it is hire cars which are running over these tiny places, entrance points to a natural world. Tourism authorities love to point to the natural wonders of the island, to their contribution to a sun-and-beach alternative. They extol the virtues of nature, of the natural heritage and landscape, and then suddenly find to their dismay that nature is falling victim to humanity. The colonialists will doubtless argue the more, the merrier, while small, one-time colonies such as Betlem and Colonia Sant Pere are colonised by fleets provided by Ford or Renault. Betlem becomes Bedlam.

These places can't cope. They start to tear their hair out. The noxious brew of Palma and its collapse by cruise leviathan and cloudy-day congestion spills out and spreads across the wounded land - the terra ferida. It forms small torrents in streaming towards sleepy enclaves unused to and ill-prepared for invasion. The gentle torrents become mighty ones. The torrents eventually break their banks. They flood like January floods. Except it isn't water. It's that brew.

As for the accommodation crisis, one manipulated by the hoteliers and the PP into a carefully crafted political lament for doctors and police, seasonal workers now have to resort to living in hotels. And paying the tourist tax (plus IVA). What's the point of their working if they hand everything back to a representative of the business collective many of them work for?

One million places. Why not?

Is Tourist Saturation Such A Negative?

There are many ways of skinning the statistical cat. It depends on the point to be proved and the motives for doing so. The Balearic tourism minister, Biel Barceló, will doubtless approve of what was being proved. It came in a report at the weekend. Mallorca has by far the highest proportion of hotel places per one thousand inhabitants of anywhere in the known tourism world. So high is this proportion that it is almost three times greater than the Canaries, five times greater than the whole of Greece and heading for ten times greater than all of Spain put together. And the point is?

That should be fairly obvious. Mallorca is saturated with tourism in a way that nowhere else is. It has slightly under 233,000 hotel places (which have increased by some 60,000 over the past two decades), representing 306 for every one thousand of those resident on the island. Add on all the various other types of accommodation (estimates/statistics vary) and the total offer is more in the region of 400,000.

Ah yes, you might say, but the Canaries are several islands. Greece has islands and a mainland. How can these be comparable? Well, they're not in direct terms, but if one takes specific islands, then what are the comparisons?

Tenerife attracts more tourism than the other Canary Islands. Its resident population is almost identical to Mallorca's (hovering around the 900,000 mark). It is far more densely populated as it is approximately 55% the size of Mallorca. But its hotel and other official accommodation places are far fewer. This number is around 160,000. Throw in some illegal stuff, and it's roughly a half.

Crete is more than twice the size of Mallorca. Its population is smaller (around 630,000). It has some 87,000 places. A guess might be, therefore, that it has about 100,000 places in all: a quarter of the upper estimate for Mallorca.

So Mallorca is, by comparison, saturated. However, that depends on the definition of saturation. As I have asked previously, what actually might constitute a maximum number of places and so therefore tourists? Or what might be an optimal limit to maintain and grow the island's economy? Does anyone know?

Though intuitively one can accept that there is overcrowding especially in high summer, intuition gets one only so far. The reverse argument, where the likes of Crete or Tenerife are concerned, is that they both have scope for greater development.

But taking whole islands as points of reference doesn't offer an accurate picture. In Mallorca, of the 233,000 places, around 80% of them are concentrated into four zones - Calvia, Playa de Palma and the bays of Alcudia and Cala Millor. A further point I've made before is that there is a strong case for such concentration. It is more efficient environmentally and in terms of resourcing and has been shown to be so in Benidorm. That resort's more or less 73,000 places are almost identical to the regular population and they are in a land area approximately a quarter of the size of Calvia, which has more hotel places than anywhere else in Mallorca (some 60,000). While Calvia's population is smaller (just over 50,000), Benidorm's tourism density in land terms is far higher.

While it is said that it has been the availability of private accommodation that has been contributing to Mallorca's saturation, it is undeniably the case that - for the island as a whole - the base of hotel accommodation greatly exceeds that of other destinations. This is the legacy effect. Resort and hotel development of the early boom years paved the way for ever more development, with most of it confined to the four specific zones.

Is this such a negative, though? From the point of view of efficiency through concentration of hotel places, then not necessarily. But where there is huge inefficiency stems from the fact that all these hotel places (and other accommodation) have been and are used for a limited season. The saturation effect is the consequence of massive development to satisfy a tourism economy which is so clearly imbalanced, which isn't the case in Tenerife and to a lesser extent in Benidorm.

But without this development, where would Mallorca be? The economy is rooted in one product and so therefore dependent on what is, for months of the year, unproductive real estate. Unproductive or not, saturation or not, concentration in specific zones or not, this tourism does have a general benefit that contrasts, for instance, with Tenerife. That island has all-year tourism, but the underlying level of year-round unemployment for a population of much the same size has traditionally been and remains much higher than Mallorca's.

Might it therefore be that this massive supply of accommodation, inefficient though it is, is an asset because of indirect employment? Saturation maybe, but what else is there?

Limiting Hotel Places In The Balearics

Putting a cap on the number of holiday places in private property is likely to prove to be an almost impossible task for the Balearic government, but places in hotels are easier to control. Biel Barceló has in the past differentiated between the two types of accommodation, stating that there is (or can be) a finite number of places in hotels, a situation which doesn't exist with private property. Concerned with overcrowding, it may seem discriminatory to seek to shore up this finite number when there is such an absence of regulation for the non-hotel sector, but this is what the government will do.

Under existing tourism law there are already constraints on adding further hotel places. If there is new development, then the new places have to take the place of others. This was all part of a drive by the previous government to weed out obsolete and outdated hotel stock and replace it with greater quality, and this has been happening principally through re-development of hotels. However, the law does make allowance for exceptions when it comes to building new five-star hotels or creating urban hotels, agrotourism establishments and rural tourism hotels. These do not have to replace others, meaning that there will be an increase in the total number of hotel places.

Barceló intends to change this law by removing these exceptions. Regardless of the type of hotel, new places would have, in every instance, to replace existing ones. This wouldn't necessarily mean that there couldn't be new building, but were there to be then existing hotels would either have to have their capacities reduced or close.

This latter option is also addressed under the current tourism law. It permits, subject to approvals, changes in use, one being that hotels can be converted into residential accommodation. In reality there has been very little evidence of this happening (there have been one or two notable cases but not much more). However, such a change in use was always going to provide the possibility of ever more private apartments coming on to the market (mostly illegally) for tourist purposes.

Barceló will therefore need to consider the change in use provisions that were included in the tourism law by Carlos Delgado. It would fly in the face of all his talk about overcrowding were they to remain on the statute, as it should be clear to anyone that not all residential accommodation will be used solely by owners. This then raises the question as to what might happen to hotels which in effect become redundant. A bold initiative, might one suggest, would be to arrive at accords with hoteliers to either expropriate old hotel stock or to permit conversion into social housing or accommodation expressly for rental to seasonal workers. At a stroke issues of pressure on the housing market, as have been highlighted already this season, would be greatly lessened.

Meanwhile, the complexities of drafting effective legislation for holiday rental regulation are being highlighted in the Canary Islands. The regional government there has come up with a raft of measures designed to curb the growth of private accommodation. These include the setting of standards through mandatory minimum sizes of beds, ensuring accommodation is equipped with certain kitchen devices, towels and so on. This doesn't sound unreasonable but the National Competition Commission is taking a rather dim view. It is opposing in particular a Canarian measure that would prevent holiday apartments being in areas which are already predominantly tourist zones: the centres of resorts in other words. The Commission has observed that the likes of Airbnb currently offer up to 85% of accommodation in areas that are otherwise dominated by hotels. To not permit apartments in these areas, the Commission argues, would severely limit competition.