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.

Never Can Say

I was having a chat with someone today about language. It's a familiar chat. New people come to the island, open bar, don't know lingo, feel a bit of a prat etc. Common, very common. Some will just say, "oh, there's no way I'll ever learn this" and just give up. Some, genuinely, don't have the time, and time is an issue. Some get on ok.

A point about language learning is that it is more difficult the older you get. It's a case of unlearning if you like, because what you know in your own language is basically hard-wired and you think using that hard wire. Another side is that there needs to be a structural form of learning, which is grammar and syntax. Grammar, Spanish grammar, appears more formal than English, but the main problem is that many British people have never really learned their own grammar, or rather they lack the wherewithal to explain their own grammar. This is not the case in other countries where grammar teaching is more central to education.

So then folks say, "oh no, I can't be doing with all this grammar". Seems boring. Personally I don't think so, but that's just me. Avoiding this structured approach, people pick up (they hope) tidbits of Spanish without necessarily knowing the structural roots. I think I've mentioned this before. Something like "¿cómo estás?". It's a basic form of greeting, but it needs some explanation to point out that "estás" is the familiar you form of one of the verbs "to be".

Anyway, maybe there is some help at hand. From "The Times" recently was an article about the use of mind mapping to learn a language. Without delving too deeply into the psychology of this, the basic idea is that one uses colours and pictures to create an association with words. There is a traffic-light system, green denoting the words that are the same or nearly the same as in English. In Spanish there are quite a lot. Words that end "ción" are often just like English - "información", for example. The pronunciation is different, but the word is basically the same. What's horrible in Spanish? "Horrible". Possible - "posible", just drops an "s". But both sound quite different.

Mind mapping was developed by a Brit called Tony Buzan. To be brutally honest, I am a bit sceptical. Like a nearish neighbour of mind mapping in terms of "new age" quasi-science psychology - neuro-linguistic programming - it has its doubters. Part of the reason for this though is that there are any number of charlatans running around claiming its benefits like the old time medicine shows. The writer in "The Times" reckons that, after eight weeks of her CD-based course, she was speaking Italian with a reasonable grasp. I can see how mind mapping would help with vocabulary, but I have only her word for saying that it also helped develop syntax and grammar. I don't know how that would work.

The thing is though that, after eight weeks of two one-hour per week personal Spanish lessons, I was speaking Spanish with a reasonable grasp. I didn't have to bother with colouring pens and drawing pictures. I knew how to use the main tenses, vocabulary was quite good, I could formulate sentences. Each to their own, but if the mind mapping seems a good one for you, then Collins publish the book and CDs under the name "Language Revolution" (Spanish version). At twenty quid, maybe worth giving it a go.


QUIZ
Yesterday - The Smiths. Today's title - last word's missing, it was The Jackson Five but the best version was by which beast of soul from the '70s?

(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)