The Revival Of The "Excursion"

There's a short film that those good people from Fotos Antiguas de Mallorca have loaded onto YouTube and which shows an excursion from Palma to Soller on the train. The date says 1930, though there is a short bit which shows a steam train. The electrification of the line was from 1929. There is a further short bit which says Ferrocarril Alaro, so maybe that was a separate excursion.

Be the trains as they may be, the film - black and white - is typically evocative of times past. By the looks of the trees the excursion would have been in winter or early spring, though had it been in summer one doubts if the dress would have differed greatly. Going on an outing in those days required attire, as one can see from other images of the era, to include a cap, a bow tie and a suit, which of course was just the men.

The excursion probably wouldn't have occurred in summer, however. Too hot. While the film shows people sitting or ambling around, it also features a spot of rambling and hiking. A somewhat bizarre aspect of this is that people - parents and children - are doing some clambering clad in their Sunday best (and it may well have been a Sunday).

It is just possible that there were "foreigners" among those on the Soller train. By the time of the film, "excursions" were an important aspect of early Mallorcan tourism. The word "excursionista" when translated - excursionist - sounds somewhat odd. It isn't a word that is greatly used, the preference perhaps being for a day-tripper or tourist. But neither of these words capture the essence of "excursionista". While it can be used more broadly, that real essence is one of an excursion into nature - rambling, hiking, enjoying the open air.

We were informed recently that there are some 300,000 hikers who come to Mallorca in the low season. It's a figure that I personally find hard to believe, but then other tourist statistics can seem somewhat fanciful as well. Whatever the real number is, there are - shall we say - a lot of people who come to hike and ramble. And for the tourism authorities - regional government and especially the Council of Mallorca - this open-air excursionism is virtuous tourism: respectful of nature and environment, or at least one hopes that it is.

A curious aspect of this seemingly recent promotion of hiking is that it is absolutely nothing new. This is why those trippers in 1930 - citizens of Palma, added to by one or two from Bunyola - may have been sharing the carriages with the odd foreigner.

The Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourist Board, was founded in 1905. Under the first article of its constitution, there are five particular objectives: things to be developed and promoted. "Fomento" means both development and promotion. The fourth of these states that it will facilitate in a practical way all types of excursions by ways (roads, tracks) and "hiking trails". There will be signs to indicate ways. There will be guides and there will be accommodation (hostels).

At the time of its founding, the Fomento recognised the essential need to improve Mallorca's transport infrastructure. A reason why was in order to indeed facilitate the fourth item on its agenda. What was to follow in terms of roads, railways, tunnels was driven in no small part by a need to develop tourism.

By 1908, two commissions - one for "improvements and excursions", the other for "information and publicity" - had produced a short guide to "excursions from Palma to the island's interior". These were excursions yet to benefit from the Soller train. In that same year, a specific group was established - Grup Excursionista Lo Fèmur. The translation isn't too difficult: the femur, the longest of bones, was necessary for this excursionist activity, i.e. walking.

So here is evidence that Mallorca's tourism was from the very beginning intimately tied to hiking and walking. The mountains were obviously a key aspect, though not exclusively, and over time - up to the start of the Civil War - the excursion broadened its appeal. It ceased to solely be for walking. It was a cultural trip usually involving a bus to key "attractions" on the island, such as Formentor and the Caves of Drach.

Although hiking has remained a constant since those early days, it is only recently that one senses a real determination to recapture the essence of the excursion that had been identified in 1905. The Fomento's wish for signage, such as now for the dry-stone route, has been a long time in really becoming complete.

The Council of Mallorca is very committed to this type of tourism, but it is one that always been there. It's as though we have gone full circle.

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.

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.

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.

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.