Resort Redevelopment: No Money, No Time

The Mallorca Hoteliers Federation is the most powerful of all regional federations. Its power lies, to a very large extent, in there being so many powerful hotel groups in Mallorca. Nowhere else in Spain comes close to the might which exists on the island. The power is such that the federation, acting on its own, can command the ear of the national government. The usual channel would be via the national confederation, but Mallorca can bypass this and go right to the very top.

While there might have been some misgivings regarding the previous incumbents of the positions of national tourism minister and secretary of state for tourism, the federation's relationship was never dogged by the politics which meant that a Partido Popular minister and Partido Popular president of the Balearics ceased to be on speaking terms. Nevertheless, the federation found it difficult to make headway, despite the secretary of state having been Mallorcan. With replacements for both positions in place, it senses that it might achieve more.

Soon after Matilde Asián was named secretary of state, she had a meeting with the hoteliers' president, Inma de Benito. In a rare act of solidarity with the current Balearic government, Benito requested that consideration be given to reforming the tenancy act. The hoteliers and government have different reasons for wishing this, but the reform would be the same: remove the loophole that facilitates so many holiday rentals.

Benito had some other requests, one of which was echoed last week in Berlin. This had to do with finding ways to obtain funds to rehabilitate tourist resorts. When she met Asián in December, the talk was of seeking European funds. Last week, it had simply become funds.

The hoteliers argue, with justification, that millions of private investment have gone towards modernising and upgrading hotels but that this investment has not been matched by the public sector. There are, to cite a general view, five-star hotels from which guests step out onto two-star pavements and streets. The infrastructure is as it has been for years but is getting worse.

We know of course all about Magalluf and Calvia's efforts to try and follow the lead of Meliá and others. But keeping up with these efforts isn't straightforward. Many town halls, having spent the years of austerity remodelling their finances, have surpluses. However, they can't use them; or only small parts of them. They are restricted by Madrid, which in turn bends to the requirements of Brussels.

Take the case of Palma. The town hall is regularly upbraided by hoteliers and residents alike because of its neglect of Playa de Palma. Yet here was supposed to have been one of the stellar resort transformation projects. How long has it been waited for? This isn't the fault solely of the town hall because the scheme has always demanded (and been promised) national funds. The scale of the redevelopment outstrips that of other resorts, but the failures to date serve only to highlight the demands of Mallorca's hoteliers.

Mayor José Hila, referring to Benito's request for national funding, said last week that the principal problem is the cut in public investment. And he isn't entirely wrong. Town halls are bound by rules for budgetary stability. These restrict what they can spend and when.

Town halls, where they are able to, do make investments. In Puerto Pollensa, despite all the rows, the improvement, mainly confined as yet to pavements, has been massive. Previously, some of them wouldn't have merited any star let alone two. The rows were, however, understandable, because of the amount of work required and the consequent inconvenience and noise.

These rows are now being repeated in Cala Bona and Cala Millor. It's reasonable to ask, as is the case, why the work is being done now and will last, in all likelihood, until May. Son Servera town hall, though, will have been mindful of how it is forced to budget for such schemes, which is basically the point that Hila was making.

In other parts of Mallorca, work has caused some rumpus: Paguera, Alcudia, Puerto Soller are and have been examples during this low season. But work in all these resorts achieves only so much. The years of underinvestment, and not just the years of austerity, have created resorts in desperate need of improvement. This extends to buildings as well, and not just hotels. In this regard, Calvia's attempt to incentivise owners has thus far been a dead loss.

The national minister, Álvaro Nadal, has himself spoken of the need to modernise "mature resorts". At present, though, budgetary demands limit his ability to effect modernisation just as they do town halls. If the time comes, though, and the purse strings are loosened sufficiently to enable wholesale resort redevelopments, a question needs answering. When could it be done? Lengthening the tourism season has its drawbacks. Just ask the good folk of Cala Bona.

* Photo: Work along part of Alcudia's Mile.

The "New" New Tourism Law

The past three years I have spent time - above and beyond the call of duty - trawling through pages upon pages of Balearic tourism legislation. It had seemed, in June 2012, that further time would be unnecessary, but no. Remarkable though it is, the law of 2012 was not the finished article. How strange the legislative process is here that three years later, this very law can be presented as the "new" law, though there is in fact quite a bit that is new and that has been added.

These differences have chiefly been integrated in the pursuit of "consensus", one that tourism minister Jaime Martínez says has been achieved. He is right up to a point in that even those sectors of the tourism industry which might still have disagreements with him have put them to one side in displaying a show of unity for the Partido Popular; they have all broken out in a cold sweat at the very mention of Podemos or a pact of the left.

We will find out how real this consensus is, but in the meantime we have to come to terms with what is the definitive tourism law document, signed by President Bauzá and minister Martínez and posted on the Official Bulletin on 17 April. For media and PR purposes, a highlight of this "new" new law is the provision for dealing with party boats, a matter - in the scheme of things - of relative inconsequence. But it is one that makes for a good headline and is far less dull than, for example, all the appendices showing the sizes and colours of establishment classification.

While there will doubtless be those who consider party boats to be of utmost importance, my principal interests - as they have been over these three years - concern private holiday accommodation, all-inclusives and resort development. True to form, private apartments remain excluded from regulation and so "illegal" unless they are rented out under the tenancy act. Terraced houses, i.e. ones with houses to both sides, which had also been excluded, are no longer. Otherwise, it is as you were.

When the law was introduced (sort of) in 2012, hotels were to be required to come up with quality plans. It was these which appeared to form the basis of possibly tighter regulation of all-inclusives, and the new version of the law does give some detail as to how these plans are to be submitted. However, they apply to all hotels and not just those which offer all-inclusive and they require self-evaluation, which would then be subject to verification from inspection. But crucially, there is nothing specific to the all-inclusive offer in this; it is a quality system geared towards star categorisation.

What the law does include is a requirement for all hotels to register their offer of "pensión completa integral" - which means all-inclusive - be this offer optional or unique. It also demands that this offer is explained in publicity material. But then, many hotels already do this. As for registering all-inclusive offer, what is the purpose of this information? If it is for quality purposes, then star categorisation is not how this has to be ensured. All-inclusives, the large, cheaper ones, offer regimes of service and room quality and overcrowding that need to be dealt with, and the star system only partially addresses these. Will inspection lead to improvements? This would be very doubtful. A recent report showed that the tourism inspectors - twenty of them in all - spend mostly all their time on illegal apartments and bars and restaurants.

Martínez proudly says that the law now regulates all-inclusives' quality plans, but this, one fancies, is a statement for political (and electoral) purposes. Study the law closely, and this is not the impression one gets. He also says that the level of all-inclusive is decreasing. Is it really? If so, where? Moreover, how can he possibly say that it is if the all-inclusive offer hasn't previously been registered? He's talking nonsense.

On resort development, there is a good deal about "intervention" in touristic areas and declarations of "touristic interest" which amount to what has already been put in place for facilitating improvements in so-called "mature (outdated/obsolete) zones", e.g. Playa de Palma. But establishing these principles in law doesn't mean that they are acted upon in practice. Some time soon, I am due to meet President Bauzá, and one of the preliminary questions I have sent him has to do with the very subject of resort regeneration, of which, apart from Playa de Palma and Magalluf, there is very little. On becoming president, he said that this regeneration could not be delayed. Yet his government has spent virtually nothing on it. And why hasn't it? Because it talks about the necessity but leaves it to others, thus showing no strategic and financing leadership.

The Dawn Chorus Of Bellevue

Dawn. There is a riotous chatter of birdsong, one that seems peculiarly alien to the tourism mini-megalopolis of Bellevue, where the chatter is typically of a different style - human and loud. The abundance of alert avifauna is a reminder of Bellevue's roots - those that it stands on. Albufera. To the side of the nature park, some way in the distance, is the tower of Es Murterar, the Kraftwerk craftily located so that the top of the turret invades most views. Its red markings are uncannily reminiscent of the post-Civil War towers along the bay of Alcúdia, its grey smoke merging into morning cloud that is broken by the vivid fire appearing well out to sea and setting ablaze with orangey-red the perfectly shaped forty-five degree incline of the rugged habitat of mountain goats, the Sant Martí mount, the guardian of Alcúdia, an ancient anachronism that abuts the outer limits of modern Bellevue.

At dawn, the evenly dispersed lights along the outdoor corridors at the back of the Fedra block glint as though on a giant electronic scoreboard. The street lights reveal the source of the watery whishing noise, the whirling sprinklers, Joni Mitchell's hissing of summer lawns, giving vehicles fortunately parked right by a partial car wash. At six, they go off. All is not dark, as dawn has brought its early light, but their disappearance is abrupt, taking aback and disorientating the makers of the other dawn chorus: the sound of luggage wheels on tarmac. Departing tourists are wending their way to reception.  

Avoiding a sprinkling from sprinklers, they wheel their suitcase barrows through a road broad and a bougainvillea-topped alleyway narrow, bumping over broken surfaces and humps that have risen from something unseen. Their journey is not long but it is long enough. At six in the morning, they trek like refugees to where they will be de-processed, deposited on a coach and driven to their place of deportation.

This happens in reverse. The coaches disgorge their human loads, who line up for their processing, sometimes in queues that tumble backwards out of reception. All their worldly touristic possessions packed inside their cases, they create the clatter and rumble of plastic rolling stock with a metallic syncopation as they go in search of the promised land. Which way? This way? That way? Is this the block? Is that the block? Excuse me, can you help me? Somehow, the maps don't always seem to be readily interpreted.

There are other Bellevues, tourist towns within towns, resorts within resorts. They don't just exist in Spain. France has them, too. They were products of the need to accommodate mass which, on the one hand, begat hotels built to order with standardised designs and standardised room sizes - the prefab sprouting of accommodation - and which, on the other hand, produced the holiday complex, an urban development that owed much to the philosophy of the campsite. From immediate post-war roots in Corsica's Club Olympique site and Gerard Blitz's original Club Med in Alcúdia and through the expansion of the Oltras' camping zone into the bizarre saucer spaceship architecture of Heliopolis amidst the naturist resort of Cap d'Agde, the early complex was one founded on notions of mucking-in and of no-frills before the term had even been invented. And also of the notion of sheer scale.

What happened in the process of constructing the standardised hotel and the complex was that intimacy was lost. Tourism went from being personal to impersonal. Mallorca, prior to the onset of mass tourism, had specialised in small, family, often quite up-market hotels. They remained but were mostly superseded in the dash for mass by the de-personalised edifice. This was holidaying with a feel of the comprehensive school movement. One day I was at a grammar school of 500 where I and teachers knew many people. The next day I was at a comprehensive of over 2,000, the largest anywhere in Britain. The personal disappeared overnight.

Scale combined with egalitarianism created monsters. Forty years or so ago, no one could have foreseen the levels of sophistication that tourism and tourists were to acquire. Marketing attempts to portray the personal and the customer focus, but it is mostly puffery, a disconnection from - in the case of a vast complex like Bellevue - the reality of the logistical impossibility of internally transporting guests in a dignified fashion.  

Mallorca, we are told, has embarked on a journey of modernisation, one that will transform resorts and accommodation. It is a journey towards a new standardised model, one of higher stars and spas. Yet, how can this journey be completed when there is such contrast between old and new, between resort mature and resort contemporary youth? When vast scale persists to the detriment of service? When the dawn chorus remains the rumble of little plastic wheels on tarmac?