What's The Environment Anyway?

Please don't shoot the statistical messenger. I'm a mere conduit of numerical glad or bad tidings, especially if there seems as though there's an angle to contemplate. Typically, one's response to the data overload delivered through tablets of percentages from government bodies and surveys or from websites and companies desperately in search of publicity ranges from a shrug of indifference to red-faced fury: how dare they take us for such fools?

While there are those who will insist that statistics exist in some number-crunching fantasy land, divorced from realities or personal perception, occasionally something comes along which makes one (well, me) pause and reflect. And so it is with a survey about attitudes towards the environment.

International "days" are frequently the excuse of a peg on which to hang a survey and its findings. Earth Day is 22 April. There has been such a day since 1970, the year in which the Earth was therefore invented. The day extends to 193 countries, according to Wikipedia, which may or may not mean that there are parts of the Earth excluded: they are not of this Earth.

Be that as it may, this year's Earth Day has inspired a website to address environmental attitudes. The site in question is Ofertia.com, which I confess to not having previously been aware of. The credentials for its survey are that it is basically a shopping website. There may well be a touch of the publicity-seeking as a consequence. We are now familiar with Ofertia, whereas before we were not, and it's all thanks to the environment.

What, you may well ask, does shopping have to do with the environment? A great deal when you begin to drill down into the detail of the retail process: land devoted to shops; the logistics demanded to supply them; the ultimate consequence of, for example, landfill; all that plastic floating around in the Med; cars and other vehicles moving hither and thither and polluting the atmosphere; ever more land needed in order to satisfy transport, i.e. roads.

Shopping, as far as the environment is concerned, does not have a great deal to commend itself. And the Balearic government has recognised this. The pro-business, pro-vast commercial centres Partido Popular once advanced (under Bauzá) a tax on commercial centres. The reason was all the pollution caused in the act of shoppers shifting themselves in order to carry away bundles of plastic packaging and domestic electrical goods to later be destined to rot away in the peculiarly monikered "green points".

When the large retailers threatened to take them to court, the PP quietly abandoned this and a couple of other "green taxes". To compensate for the lack of revenue, they instead imposed a massive charge on water use, something which, oddly enough, went below the radar. The current government, both regional and insular, has had its eyes on shopping as well. The Council of Mallorca is currently working on a land plan: the Council's main reason for existence is the drafting of land plans, or so it can seem. This one has to do with shopping; hence, there is at present a moratorium on new large retail sites.

Such concern for the environment, and here we get to the survey, does not appear to be shared by the citizens. Or rather, there is a concern but it is not as great as most of the rest of Spain. The survey suggests that the level of commitment to the environment in the Balearics is the third lowest among regions. Only Galicia and Navarre are less concerned.

Is this finding surprising? I would suggest that it most certainly is. More than statistical overload, we endure environmental overload in Mallorca. The environment can barely move because of eco groups of one sort or another, to say nothing of the eco credentials of political parties such as Més, whose tourist tax is, in case we forget, supposedly for sustainability.

But it is even more surprising if one considers what is meant by the environment. The word tends to presuppose visions of landscape and plastic washed on to virgin beaches. Yet the environment, and this is a stupidly obvious observation, is all around us. Everything is the environment, and everything influences the environment, including shopping.

We may tire of frequent reports that dissect the impact of man on fragile ecosystems in Mallorca, but the environment is greatly more than the habitats of species and coastal erosion because of the harm caused to posidonia sea grass. Perhaps the word - environment - is the issue. It conveys less than the whole, and the whole is the complete island, inclusive of the roughly 80% of land that is available for agricultural purposes. But the complete island is only small. Its environment (and its protection) is vital. Yes, I am surprised by the survey.

Margin Of Error: Tourist satisfaction

Opinion surveys can with some justification be said to only provide a snapshot of opinion, but companies which conduct them will always point to the professionalism of market researchers and the rigour of their methodologies, for which margins of error are taken into account and indeed duly noted.

The most recent Gadeso survey of tourist satisfaction had a maximum margin of error of five per cent either way plus a 95.5% level of confidence. What that means is that if other batches of people were surveyed, 95.5 times out of 100 there would be the same results within a five per cent margin. The original survey results can therefore be said to be if not totally definitive, then more or less definitive.

The survey only asked 400 people. Of all the millions of tourists who come to Mallorca, that sounds like a pretty small sample. It is, but within the market research industry (and a similar process is observable with all the statistics about tourist spend, etc. that are trotted out), there is an accepted standard for providing "reliable" data. The margin of error is that standard. For 400 people, the margin is defined as five per cent. The greater the sample, the lower the margin.

This explanation, whether of course you accept it or not, means that the satisfaction survey is sound in statistical terms. The problem, and this is the case with tourist spending surveys, is that the research is based on random sampling. Again, the margin of error would maintain that there is reliability, but of the millions who come to Mallorca, to be boiled down to 400 and to be representative of highly diverse backgrounds is a method that does make one wonder.

But let's say that the survey was pretty much accurate. If so, it doesn't provide for particularly encouraging reading. Despite the improvements that have been and are being made, the general level of satisfaction stubbornly refuses to increase. There are factors which start from higher base levels of satisfaction, such as the overall approval for accommodation, but this higher base is skewed through elevated appreciation of the non-mainstream, e.g. rural accommodation, to which can be added the newest element in the survey, that of the holiday rental. Both these secure significantly greater scores than hotels. In the case of holiday rentals, this should tell its own story of refuting claims that they are of a low standard, while hoteliers - for all their investment - are discovering that the punter isn't impressed enough to push the satisfaction rating upwards.

The factors which more than others drag the satisfaction level down are lack of cleanliness, noise and the "gastronomic and commercial offers": these are bars, restaurants and shops to you and me. As with all the time, effort, investment and publicity directed towards hotel improvements, so gastronomy, we are told repeatedly, has undergone something of a revolution. It may indeed have, but the revolution seems to have passed tourists by. As for the price-quality ratio of this "specialised offer", it is the worst performing factor of all. Ouch!

Of all the findings, it is the one about returning to Mallorca that perhaps offers the greatest alarm. This is down quite markedly from 2014, insofar as a 3.2% fall can be described as being marked, which the market research industry would insist that it can be. What does one conclude from this decline? Is it because of the numbers of tourists who, through a form of holidaying Hobson's choice, have abandoned other destinations, come to the safe haven of Mallorca and found it less than wholly satisfying? Hard to say, but if this is the case, then it is some confirmation of the fear that Mallorca is living through a time of plenty thanks only to the travails of others. 

Another type of snapshot of opinion, social media, provides an insight into what people on the island make of all this. If tourists are so apparently dissatisfied, then why are they coming? There was one comment from a shop owner who berated tourists (all of them?) for being rude. Unfortunately, it may be that rudeness or lack of good service which leads to the "commercial offer" being rated as low as it is.

But amidst those who join in on what for some is currently high season for tourist-baiting (nothing to actually do with the survey as such), there are others who are in agreement. There is an issue with cleanliness, for instance. And as for the hoteliers, they're just out for what they can make. No change there then, when it comes to a general local perception of the hotel industry.

Is the static level of satisfaction a reason to be concerned? Maybe it is, but I can't help but feel that if the same survey were to be conducted in some specific locations the levels would be considerably higher. Margin of error or not.

This Is Our Land: Perceptions of tourists

What is the single most important measure that needs to be adopted in Mallorca in respect of the tourist "product"? If you are resident, but not Mallorcan, or if you are a visitor (as in a tourist), what would you say was the most important out of the following: 1. the conversion of hotels; 2. the modernisation of the complementary offer (bars, restaurants, pretty much anything that isn't a hotel); 3. the modernisation of mature tourism centres; 4. improvements to transport connections; 5. the diversification of the tourist product; 6. environmental and cultural protection.

Of this little list, there is only one that suggests to me that it would be of paramount concern and that would be number four - improvements to transport connections, as in more flights in winter. Of the others, I don't know that British or other foreign residents or tourists would express much of a preference. Indeed, they might not really get the question. What, for example, is meant by modernisation of the complementary offer?

These measures are not ones that I have dreamt up; they were the six that formed the basis of the most recent survey of attitudes towards the tourist product conducted by the research organisation Gadeso. The survey was undertaken last month. Overwhelmingly, probably exclusively, the respondents would have been Mallorcan. It would be very much more interesting were Gadeso to conduct different research: that into attitudes of tourists themselves and from different nationalities.

The most important measure, according to the survey, is number six - environmental and cultural protection. The finding is no great surprise. It reflects the constant struggle between the commercial realities of tourism and the exploitation of the natural land and seascapes; a struggle that Mallorcans find hard to reconcile.  This protection embodies a proclamation of this (Mallorca) being our land (the Mallorcan people's land).

It would be untrue to imply that tourists are not also concerned about environmental and cultural protection. There has been research among tourists into just this issue. The French, for instance, are particularly dismayed as to the extent of coastal development. The Germans are considered to be so environmentally righteous (a stereotyping that may not be wholly accurate) that they are the only ones, including and especially including Mallorcan residents, who pick every last bit of a container apart in order to place it in the correct recycling bin.

But a general perception among Mallorcans is that tourists care little about either the environment or the island's culture. And where many tourists are concerned, they are right to perceive this. The consequent tensions between tourists and islanders are, therefore, the product of differing perceptions of the tourist product. It is because such tensions exist that research would be that much more meaningful were it to highlight where and why these perceptions diverge.

But tourists, far from being one homogeneous blob, are a vast collection of organisms wriggling in opposing directions. There is no one tourist perception. One tourist's aloof and nose-raised snootiness directed at a Brit-style or less-than-sophisticated bar is another tourist's contentment with even the naffest hostelry. Satisfying tourists as one unified whole is an impossibility because there is no such thing as a unified perception by tourists of the tourist product. The only way that such unity of perception might be attained is through some engineering that creates a relative singularity of tourist psychographics and socioeconomics.

Mallorcans might yearn for a homogeneous, "quality" tourist whose sympathies might correspond more with their own perceptions, a tourist who is environmentally and culturally sound and who is more inclined to engage in tourist pastimes that aren't simply to be found on a beach or by a pool. They might yearn for such a paragon of touristic excellence, but then what else does the Gadeso survey reveal? The least important measure is considered to be diversification of the tourist product, supposedly the grand panacea for Mallorca's ills, especially in the off-season. What this finding suggests is a reinforcement of the most important measure of environmental and cultural protection. It is a reinforcement of what many suspect; that Mallorcans put up with tourists in resorts in summer but don't particularly want them elsewhere or during the months of the off-season. This is our land. Nostra terra.

Behind the Gadeso survey one detects the admission of perceptions that are less to do with physical manifestations of the tourist product and more with the abstract - what Mallorcans think about tourists. Whatever they truly reveal, one thing is for sure, that Mallorcan and tourist perceptions of the tourist product are two very different things.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.