Re-imagining A Resort: Calvia Beach

The World Travel Market (WTM) at London's ExCeL starts today. It is an important fair, and for the Mallorcan tourism industry there has arguably never been a more important WTM than this year's. And the reason why is Magalluf.

The decisions of Kuoni Nordic and an Italian family-holidays tour operator to drop Magalluf next year and a noticeable fall in occupancy levels in September and October would appear to be evidence of the harmful impact of the negative publicity that has surrounded Magalluf. There is, therefore, a good deal of pressure on tourism industry representatives to get a positive message across at the WTM. Fortunately, they don't seem to wish to accentuate the negative, as would be the case were the ill-conceived campaign to attempt to get British youth to behave themselves to be pursued. Instead, there is the positive to be accentuated, and typical of this is the video "Calvia Beach V1", which is now up on YouTube.

It is easy to be critical of this video. The imagery, primarily promotion for Meliá's new hotels, comes across as too divorced from other realities in Magalluf. These realities are not ignored but at the same time they are not given any prominence. But then, why would they be? Any great focus on the seamy side of Magalluf would diminish and undermine the message that the video wants to get across.

Of the Meliá people who feature in the video, the one with perhaps the greatest responsibility is the hotel group's vice-president for global brand marketing, Tony Cortizas. He talks about the re-imagination of a destination, i.e. Magalluf as Calvia Beach, and he it is who has to deliver and to turn the imagination into tangibility. The physical evidence of this re-imagination is already there, but embedding the name Calvia Beach into the minds of tourists from whichever country they might come from isn't as yet.

By 2016, according to executive vice-president for real estate, Mark Hoddinott, the transformation of the resort will be complete, but which resort is he referring to? And when Tony Cortizas considers the branding, which resort is he branding? He says that Calvia Beach is not about re-naming Magalluf - and nor is that likely to occur, despite the possibility having been aired - so what happens to Magalluf, to the Punta Ballena, to the parts which haven't been given the Meliá treatment? The transformation will not be complete in 2016, not in the sense of the whole of Magalluf having been transformed.

The Calvia Beach development is creating an uneasy resort apartheid at present, and it is one founded not just on the juxtaposition of luxury with the distinctly non-luxury but also on a battle between tourist market profiles. Cursach with its BH hotel complex would seem to be siding with the Meliá vision of the future and with a Meliá focus - in part - on the so-called Millennial Generation, a somewhat nebulous marketing concept which is supposedly characterised by twenty-somethings (and sometimes also thirty-somethings) who have very high expectations of hotels and who are the new generation of luxury travellers. But there are also many in this vast peer group who, because of their age, match this profile but are lying unconscious through drink on Punta Ballena rather than being millennial in a Wave House style.

The Balearics tourism minister, Jaime Martínez, has spoken of his desire to end bar crawls in Magalluf. In the video he reiterates the view that too many businesses have sought short-term profit with no thought given to the reputation of Magalluf. He would happily see an end to the apartheid, with the bar crawls ceasing and many a bar having to undergo its own process of re-imagination. But until such a time as a bar capable of permitting sex videos is re-conceived as some post-modernist art bistro, or whatever it might be, the transformation will remain partial. The branding, the re-imagination of Calvia Beach would stay a Meliá marketing exercise in unholy co-existence side-by-side with the old brand of Magalluf and all the negative but nonetheless powerful attributes it has.

Yet, it is not impossible to believe that through some process of conceptual osmosis, Calvia Beach and its re-imagination for the new age might penetrate the thick skin of Punta Ballena and implant notions of re-conception and thus new types of business. Transformation has to start from somewhere, and Calvia Beach may come to be all-embracing. There is, and it is alluded to in the video, the example of Miami Beach, especially its South Beach. Whether comparisons with Magalluf are wholly appropriate is questionable, but South Beach, at one time seedy, decayed, rife with crime, is now a place for the hip and ultra-cool. Impossible in Magalluf? Re-imagine.

Tackling Chaos In Magalluf

So, Calvià town hall has come up with a cunning plan to beef up security and to tackle delinquency in Magalluf next summer. For the record, these measures will include illuminating the beach at night (assuming this does not affect aircraft), closing the Punta Ballena to traffic at night, installing surveillance cameras and extra policing. The town hall also intends talking with the "responsible authorities" to deal with the matter of party boats and with businesses to address issues to do with bar crawls.

To say that the town hall has come in for a fair share of criticism this summer would be an understatement. Whether measures it has now announced will satisfy its critics and whether they will have any real effect will only be known next summer. At least it has reacted, though.

The problems in Magalluf are that well-known that they really don't require my repeating them. It is the fact that they are well-known, however, that has prompted the level of criticism aimed at the town hall as well as the kind of accusations made about local police which will only go away if future action is concerted and is seen to be applied with evenhanded rigour.  

For all this, the town hall, as with Palma and Llucmajor town halls, deserves some sympathy. The problems in Magalluf, Playa de Palma and Arenal are many, and not all of them are ones that town halls or local police forces are equipped to deal with or should even be expected to deal with; people falling off balconies comes into the latter category, organised criminality comes into the former.

These many problems can be defined in two main ways. One is that of what might be called anti-social behaviour (drunkenness and its attendant issues). The second is crime pure and simple. Anti-social behaviour may slip into crime when violence occurs but it is essentially, if not always in practice, containable by the different police bodies. A manifestation of such behaviour which could have become violent but which didn't was the way in which cars on Punta Ballena have been surrounded by drunk and offensive young tourists. The videos of this - and Javier Pierotti was the one who did most to draw attention to it - were shocking. The town hall will now close the street to traffic. It's a simple enough measure, thus proving that some incidents can be contained and even prevented.

It is the crime, though, which is by far the greater problem. It is one that the town halls cannot tackle. Only the National Police and Guardia Civil can, but even they are presented with obstacles. The most obvious criminality is that of the mugging prostitutes. These women, for the most part, ply their trade against their will. It has been shown by the arrest of gang organisers in Playa de Palma that women had been brought from Nigeria and forced into what they do. 

The police can round up these women, just as they can round up looky-looky men who are in Mallorca illegally, but doing anything with them is a very different matter. The impotence of police forces - the National Police, the Guardia and local police - is mirrored elsewhere on the island where problems are not as they are in Magalluf but are there nonetheless. Lock a looky-looky man up for the night, and then what? Fine him? How's he going to pay? Deport him? It's a very long, complex and expensive business. It is the same with the women in Magalluf or Playa de Palma. Many of the looky-looky men are exploited, most of the women are, and in the women's case, they have essentially been victims of human trafficking for subsequent exploitation. This is the prime criminality. Not what they themselves might do.

The success that the National Police had in arresting gang leaders involved in mugging prostitution in Playa de Palma has to be repeated. It is the only way to try and bring an end to all of this, and in Magalluf there is surely one very powerful business interest that will want it stamped out there.

Meliá are transforming Magalluf. They and their partners are investing heavily in bringing about a change to a resort which, even since Meliá's plans for it were revealed two years ago, seems to have deteriorated. This cannot be good for Meliá when the manifestations of crime are right there on the doorsteps of their new up-market creations.

Gabriel Escarrer, the boss of Meliá, apparently spent his summer holiday in a "chalet" in Magalluf. One wonders what he saw at night. Or maybe he didn't need to see. More than the small bar owners who complain about the looky-looky men and about alleged local police inaction or favouritism, it is Meliá which have the muscle to force improvements in Magalluf. Over to you, Sr. Escarrer.

* The video, "Magaluf Caos 2013", was the first posted by Javier Pierotti this summer.