My, how hotels have changed. Those of you of a certain vintage will remember how they were. I'm not referring to the likes of the Ritz, but to the holiday hotel of yore, the first recollection of which I have is from the year that England won the World Cup. It was called, may still be for all I know, the Yelton Hotel in Hastings. I'm guessing that they considered this to be a home from home type of family hotel. They were quite wrong. By that time we lived in comparative luxury. Not every part of our home, all furnishings, all walls, all everything smelt of beef lunches. In fact, none of it did, unlike the hotel. Nor did we have Double Diamond on tap, and we most certainly did not have an "entertainment" room which failed to entertain.
Three years later came the great foreign adventure. Arenal. Here was something different: the outdoor pool, for example, which contrasted greatly with the one in Bournemouth during 1967's Summer of Love. Buried in the bowels of the hotel edifice, plunging into it gave the impression that one might disappear into the centre of the Earth. They're probably still hunting for small children even now. Arenal was therefore several notches up on the sophistication ladder, despite there having been a shanty town as a bedroom view.
Sophistication is the keyword. The holidaymaking client nowadays requires sophistication. It comes in different guises, and the appreciation (or not) of its level of sophistication does rather depend on the punter's aspirations and expectations. Generally speaking, though, Mallorca and everywhere else are straining every hotelier sinew to invest in sophistication. Take the infinity pool, for example. Whereas the pool in Bournemouth in 1967 could seemingly oblige by condemning one to an ever-downward-spiralling vortex of infinity, the 2017 model is just infinite on a horizontal plane. Where does it go? What a clever trick.
Although there are still hotels trapped in a 1970s' time warp, the great majority now conform to the demands of 21st Century Tourist Man (and family). Spas are ubiquitous, chill-out zones are de rigueur, wifi has replaced the Double Diamond by being on tap and may well be transmitted by the contemporary beer tap, given the ominous and mysterious advance of the Internet of Things. It is the latter which defines this new age of the hotel experience. Technology has advanced sophistication as much as any competitive threat from Turkey and elsewhere.
The leap is as gigantic as it has been rapid. Back in the day when some people were on the pitch, thinking it was all over, the Yelton's technological aspirations could stretch no further than the telly in the telly room. Harold Wilson may have been announcing that there was a white heat of technology, but here was the tepidity of technology, if that.
Hotel technology took an age to embrace the age of technology. Since its relatively recent discovery, however, it has moved ahead with boundless energy, powering energy-efficient systems through the computations of software, marketing offers in a constant whir of Big Data profiling, converting the real to the less real - virtual reality.
How far can all this go? The possibilities presented by technology create a new infinity, virtual reality being just one aspect but a highly tantalising one. There were those who might have scoffed when some years ago I presented a vision of hotel virtual reality entertainment (Miley Cyrus was being virtually reproduced), but scoff no more.
I am not a futurist. Perhaps I've missed a vocation and the possibility of raking in shedloads purely on the basis of blue-sky thinking, as my vision of hotel robotics and virtual Miley bears a certain similarity with someone who is a futurist and who presumably doesn't come cheap.
James Canton used to work for Apple. He has advised more than a hundred companies as well as the White House. And what does James envisage? Among other things, the current-day theme hotel will be transformed into an immersive environment. Guests will experience live events and interact with them in real time or through virtual reality. In other words, the themed hotel becomes a virtual environment, capable of drawing on imagery from wherever, such as the past. In my vision, that past imagery was of the guest being shown how resorts once were, when guests left their compounds and did things like going to a bar.
Robots, says James, will be programmed in such ways to make guests' stays exceptional and personalised experiences through the provision of information, service and entertainment. And that is not a great distance away from my RepBot and making available virtual Miley entertainment.
Infinite. The possibilities are infinite. Perhaps the re-creation of the past might even be of plunging into the infinity of the Summer of Love.
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
Thursday, July 14, 2016
Hotelbeds: The best of Mallorca
Hotelbeds is unquestionably a successful business. "The world's bedbank", as it calls itself, is a world player. From having once offered only one destination market - Spain - for one traveller-providing market (the UK), it now has (fifteen years after it was founded) 180 country destination markets offering more than 75,000 hotels and 120 supplier markets. That's impressive stuff, and the all more impressive for being "made in Mallorca".
The business came into being following the purchase of Viajes Barceló (part of the Barceló hotel group and now B the Travel Brand) by First Choice. The travel agency was to be sold back to Barceló, but what was the international event and destination services division, which included Hotelbeds, was kept hold of. When First Choice was formally absorbed by Tui in 2007, Tui Travel Accommodation & Destination was established: its director was the founder and president of Hotelbeds, Joan Vilà.
Because of a strategic restructuring, Tui sought a purchaser for Hotelbeds. It found one in the form of fund managers Cinven and CPPIB, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the Canadian government pension fund managers. There was more to be impressed with. The price. Hotelbeds went for a total of 1,165 million euros; the deal was sealed this spring.
Vilà has said that the business was founded right at the time that the travel industry was about to undergo massive transformation. Hotelbeds caught the initial wave, therefore, of the technologically-driven new age of travel. Value in the business obviously resides in the numbers it can generate. Tui revealed that the price paid to buy the business (almost 50% greater than had originally been hoped for) equated to 1.2 times the 2015 revenue with an underlying operating profit of 69 million euros.
But major acquisitions aren't made solely because of the numbers. Among other factors that attracted Cinven and CPPIB were the quality of senior management (with Vilà at the helm), a strong record of year-on-year growth and the technologies. Cinven understood the value of the latter very clearly. It has been a significant investor in Amadeus, a global leader in IT solutions for the travel industry and a company that is based in Madrid.
One might in fact argue that the greatest value lies with the systems. It is revealing to note that a couple of years ago, Hotelbeds identified another Spanish company, Transhotel, as a main competitor in the domestic market. Transhotel hit the rocks in 2014, and a reason for its problems was the fact that its technologies were said to have been outdated. The travel industry, never slow to change and adapt, has been moving at increasingly rapid speeds for the past fifteen years. Businesses which are slow end up in liquidation.
The combination of travel, tourism and technology is something that the Balearic government is keen to explore as a means of economic diversification, reputation enhancement and job creation. It is totally fitting, therefore, that the government should look upon Hotelbeds as precisely the type of business that it wishes to promote. Totally fitting also that within the government there is a combination of tourism and technology in the portfolios of its vice-president, Biel Barceló.
Since he adopted these responsibilities, we have heard a great deal about the tourism portfolio and very much less about innovation and research. Earlier this week, though, Barceló and President Armengol went to Hotelbeds at the invitation of Joan Vilà. Barceló observed that the company "fits perfectly" with the government's economic plans.
It does so in a variety of ways. It attracts talent to come and live in Mallorca (the purchase is not going to change the location). They add to the sum of knowledge locally, which is in any event already high: around a half of the 1,600 staff at the Palma HQ (there are over 6,000 worldwide) are products of the University of the Balearic Islands. They represent also the government's desire for quality employment. This said, and acknowledging that one review is hardly representative, a current employee reports that while the work atmosphere is good as are opportunities, the salaries are low and there is a high level of employee turnover. This might rather depend on the nature of the job though: call centre jobs (by no means all the employment on offer) are known for their high turnover, while in general this is a company operating in a fast-moving environment with highly competitive demands.
This caveat aside, and the employee who supplied the review does nevertheless give Hotelbeds a four out of five star rating, here is a business which does indeed fit with the government's vision. Moreover, its dedication to technological advances in Mallorca was reinforced last year by the creation and funding of the Hotelbeds Group Chair of Tourism Innovation at the university.
An impressive business, and a model worthy of the government's attention and interest.
The business came into being following the purchase of Viajes Barceló (part of the Barceló hotel group and now B the Travel Brand) by First Choice. The travel agency was to be sold back to Barceló, but what was the international event and destination services division, which included Hotelbeds, was kept hold of. When First Choice was formally absorbed by Tui in 2007, Tui Travel Accommodation & Destination was established: its director was the founder and president of Hotelbeds, Joan Vilà.
Because of a strategic restructuring, Tui sought a purchaser for Hotelbeds. It found one in the form of fund managers Cinven and CPPIB, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the Canadian government pension fund managers. There was more to be impressed with. The price. Hotelbeds went for a total of 1,165 million euros; the deal was sealed this spring.
Vilà has said that the business was founded right at the time that the travel industry was about to undergo massive transformation. Hotelbeds caught the initial wave, therefore, of the technologically-driven new age of travel. Value in the business obviously resides in the numbers it can generate. Tui revealed that the price paid to buy the business (almost 50% greater than had originally been hoped for) equated to 1.2 times the 2015 revenue with an underlying operating profit of 69 million euros.
But major acquisitions aren't made solely because of the numbers. Among other factors that attracted Cinven and CPPIB were the quality of senior management (with Vilà at the helm), a strong record of year-on-year growth and the technologies. Cinven understood the value of the latter very clearly. It has been a significant investor in Amadeus, a global leader in IT solutions for the travel industry and a company that is based in Madrid.
One might in fact argue that the greatest value lies with the systems. It is revealing to note that a couple of years ago, Hotelbeds identified another Spanish company, Transhotel, as a main competitor in the domestic market. Transhotel hit the rocks in 2014, and a reason for its problems was the fact that its technologies were said to have been outdated. The travel industry, never slow to change and adapt, has been moving at increasingly rapid speeds for the past fifteen years. Businesses which are slow end up in liquidation.
The combination of travel, tourism and technology is something that the Balearic government is keen to explore as a means of economic diversification, reputation enhancement and job creation. It is totally fitting, therefore, that the government should look upon Hotelbeds as precisely the type of business that it wishes to promote. Totally fitting also that within the government there is a combination of tourism and technology in the portfolios of its vice-president, Biel Barceló.
Since he adopted these responsibilities, we have heard a great deal about the tourism portfolio and very much less about innovation and research. Earlier this week, though, Barceló and President Armengol went to Hotelbeds at the invitation of Joan Vilà. Barceló observed that the company "fits perfectly" with the government's economic plans.
It does so in a variety of ways. It attracts talent to come and live in Mallorca (the purchase is not going to change the location). They add to the sum of knowledge locally, which is in any event already high: around a half of the 1,600 staff at the Palma HQ (there are over 6,000 worldwide) are products of the University of the Balearic Islands. They represent also the government's desire for quality employment. This said, and acknowledging that one review is hardly representative, a current employee reports that while the work atmosphere is good as are opportunities, the salaries are low and there is a high level of employee turnover. This might rather depend on the nature of the job though: call centre jobs (by no means all the employment on offer) are known for their high turnover, while in general this is a company operating in a fast-moving environment with highly competitive demands.
This caveat aside, and the employee who supplied the review does nevertheless give Hotelbeds a four out of five star rating, here is a business which does indeed fit with the government's vision. Moreover, its dedication to technological advances in Mallorca was reinforced last year by the creation and funding of the Hotelbeds Group Chair of Tourism Innovation at the university.
An impressive business, and a model worthy of the government's attention and interest.
Thursday, January 08, 2015
A Generation Of Misunderstanding
It would have been twenty-five years ago, a generation ago. I was invited onto a working party reporting to the European Commission. The subject was what was then referred to in broad terms as electronic publishing. We knew about the internet, we knew (vaguely) about what was about to come - the world wide web - we knew about database publishing and we knew about how different nets (networks) had been functioning primarily for military and academic purposes. What we didn't know and nor did the Commission was where this might all lead in terms not just of publishing but also information provision.
The working party was not unique in having an environment in which a certain tension existed. At my company this was called, because it suited the organisation's politics, creative tension, when in reality it was purely tension. On the one side were the strategists, the marketers, the businesspeople. On the other side were the technology buffs. At that time, it is perhaps fair to say, the techies looked down on their counterparts. They understood the gobbledegook. The business side didn't. The result was usually argument rather than proposal or action.
I was a non-technologist in search of a technologically understandable (possibly) organisational business model. Certain things had led me to where I was at that time in terms of thinking. One, from a few years before, had been a boss's insistence that I familiarise myself with Edward de Bono and lateral thought. Another was meeting someone called Peter Schwartz, nowadays referred to as a "futurist", then the head of scenario planning with Royal Dutch Shell. Schwartz dealt with what-ifs on a grand scale. Little was not possible, if you only applied your thoughts to it.
There were other influences, such as what Jan Carlzon had implanted as CEO of the Scandinavian Airlines System, i.e. an organisational pyramid with the customer at its peak, and any amount of case-study research from Harvard and elsewhere into the application and diffusion of then recent innovations in applied technology - the PC, the Mac, the digital watch, the Sony Walkman.
What if Carlzon's pyramid was adapted? It could still be the customer on top of the pyramid, but who was the customer? Or rather, who would be the customer? Would the customer be more than this? A user perhaps. The term user had little currency at that time, but it was there nevertheless. The nets which ultimately led Tim Berners-Lee to the web had users. PCs had users. What if there was a wholesale shift of values within society, towards greater technology acceptance and use? Advances had in the few years before suggested there might be.
This was the essence of the model. It wasn't one which foresaw technological developments or their rapidity, but it was one to form the bones onto which the flesh of those developments might be grafted, and a generation on, it is pretty much how technology now is. The intensity has increased enormously of course, but organisations of all types have come to understand that the user sits on top of the pyramid and is there to be served. Or maybe one should say that some organisations understand this model.
Something else that would have been hard to foretell was just how much societal values were to alter. There might have been a clue from the bulletin boards which pre-dated the web and the forums which sprang up once it was established. But it needed a game-changer, and that was Amazon, not because of its original book delivery service but because of the facility for user review. It was Amazon which popularised the notion of user opinion on the web; readers in its case. From this came all manner of opinion, recommendations and criticisms. The genie was out of the bottle and it has proved to be unstoppable in the ways in which information is shared and sought after. It is now hard to conceive of a time when a fundamental shift in society's values in its use and acceptance of technology might even have been questioned.
All this leads to the present day and to Mallorca and to its tourism. Some organisations get it. The regional government doesn't. Where are the users (the tourists) in its model? Heaven knows. They are not recognised by there being the means for information sharing - through official channels of social media. They are not recognised by there being an appreciation of the latest leap in societal values, namely the whole culture of sharing and the technological applications which enable this, the P2P phenomenon which is proving to be a further game-changer. The government is oblivious to the user, to his or her values. It is beholden to those who might say that they have the user (customer) at the top of their pyramids: the tour operators who shove product at the customer and call it a brand in the hope that a loyalty is created which itself is questionable in a user-led society that has outsmarted the conventions of business; and also to the hoteliers, latecomers to product as branding, but safeguarding and indeed reinforcing a model in which the hotel is the tourist experience in an age when "experiences" have taken on an alternative meaning, enabled by sharing, which goes way beyond the confines of the hotel campus.
It is as though the last twenty-five years haven't happened. A generation ago the tourist was fed limited information that did his or her thinking. The tourist was constrained in his or her outlook by the boundaries of non-technological society. This is not how it now is. The tourist is a flexible user in conversation with others - peers if you like - who are not part of a still rigid tourism model. Twenty-five years on, and it is not understood who it is who drives an organisation. The user.
The working party was not unique in having an environment in which a certain tension existed. At my company this was called, because it suited the organisation's politics, creative tension, when in reality it was purely tension. On the one side were the strategists, the marketers, the businesspeople. On the other side were the technology buffs. At that time, it is perhaps fair to say, the techies looked down on their counterparts. They understood the gobbledegook. The business side didn't. The result was usually argument rather than proposal or action.
I was a non-technologist in search of a technologically understandable (possibly) organisational business model. Certain things had led me to where I was at that time in terms of thinking. One, from a few years before, had been a boss's insistence that I familiarise myself with Edward de Bono and lateral thought. Another was meeting someone called Peter Schwartz, nowadays referred to as a "futurist", then the head of scenario planning with Royal Dutch Shell. Schwartz dealt with what-ifs on a grand scale. Little was not possible, if you only applied your thoughts to it.
There were other influences, such as what Jan Carlzon had implanted as CEO of the Scandinavian Airlines System, i.e. an organisational pyramid with the customer at its peak, and any amount of case-study research from Harvard and elsewhere into the application and diffusion of then recent innovations in applied technology - the PC, the Mac, the digital watch, the Sony Walkman.
What if Carlzon's pyramid was adapted? It could still be the customer on top of the pyramid, but who was the customer? Or rather, who would be the customer? Would the customer be more than this? A user perhaps. The term user had little currency at that time, but it was there nevertheless. The nets which ultimately led Tim Berners-Lee to the web had users. PCs had users. What if there was a wholesale shift of values within society, towards greater technology acceptance and use? Advances had in the few years before suggested there might be.
This was the essence of the model. It wasn't one which foresaw technological developments or their rapidity, but it was one to form the bones onto which the flesh of those developments might be grafted, and a generation on, it is pretty much how technology now is. The intensity has increased enormously of course, but organisations of all types have come to understand that the user sits on top of the pyramid and is there to be served. Or maybe one should say that some organisations understand this model.
Something else that would have been hard to foretell was just how much societal values were to alter. There might have been a clue from the bulletin boards which pre-dated the web and the forums which sprang up once it was established. But it needed a game-changer, and that was Amazon, not because of its original book delivery service but because of the facility for user review. It was Amazon which popularised the notion of user opinion on the web; readers in its case. From this came all manner of opinion, recommendations and criticisms. The genie was out of the bottle and it has proved to be unstoppable in the ways in which information is shared and sought after. It is now hard to conceive of a time when a fundamental shift in society's values in its use and acceptance of technology might even have been questioned.
All this leads to the present day and to Mallorca and to its tourism. Some organisations get it. The regional government doesn't. Where are the users (the tourists) in its model? Heaven knows. They are not recognised by there being the means for information sharing - through official channels of social media. They are not recognised by there being an appreciation of the latest leap in societal values, namely the whole culture of sharing and the technological applications which enable this, the P2P phenomenon which is proving to be a further game-changer. The government is oblivious to the user, to his or her values. It is beholden to those who might say that they have the user (customer) at the top of their pyramids: the tour operators who shove product at the customer and call it a brand in the hope that a loyalty is created which itself is questionable in a user-led society that has outsmarted the conventions of business; and also to the hoteliers, latecomers to product as branding, but safeguarding and indeed reinforcing a model in which the hotel is the tourist experience in an age when "experiences" have taken on an alternative meaning, enabled by sharing, which goes way beyond the confines of the hotel campus.
It is as though the last twenty-five years haven't happened. A generation ago the tourist was fed limited information that did his or her thinking. The tourist was constrained in his or her outlook by the boundaries of non-technological society. This is not how it now is. The tourist is a flexible user in conversation with others - peers if you like - who are not part of a still rigid tourism model. Twenty-five years on, and it is not understood who it is who drives an organisation. The user.
Friday, November 15, 2013
The Day Of The Millennial: Future tourism
Baby boomers, Generation X, now Millennials, marketing and social researchers love to categorise generations. They have certain attitudes, aspirations, lifestyles and values (both moral and financial). They become niches but in fact giant niches of global proportions, entire movements in terms of how they think and behave.
David Burstein is 24. He is the author of "Fast Future: How the Millennial Generation is Shaping Our World". Note his age. He is a Millennial. He is part of a generation which is giving a completely new meaning to the club of 18-30. The Millennials.
Mark Zuckerberg, a co-founder of Facebook, was born in 1984. He is at the upper-age limit, therefore, of the Millennial generation, and he, along with some who aren't Millennials, e.g. those who founded Twitter, has been a major influence in shaping the Millennial generation and so in shaping "our world". The Millennials are taking over. They will take over. They will be the most important generation, more so than the baby boomers. Millennial thinking will change the world forever.
Burstein, in a presentation for TEDxNYU (Technology, Entertainment, Design at New York University), compared the arrival of the Millennial generation and the primarily technological elements that are influencing it with the breakthrough at the start of the last century, one that saw the development of the automobile, the airplane and the harnessing of electricity help to bring about a greater democratisation of society and cultural change. The Millennial generation represents a time of fundamental shift, similar to that at the start of the last century, not just in terms of the use of technology and the pace of technological change but also in terms of what Burstein calls "social software"; how people interact and how this shift is affecting businesses and political systems as well as society.
Certain characteristics of the Millennials are well understood. It is the generation which has totally embraced web and mobile technologies. It is totally connected online and through the smartphone. It shares, it apps, it is driven by technologies and innovations, such as that which Mark Zuckerberg unleashed on the world. But as with any generation, its characteristics are only really understood if practicalities are understood, and one of these is the impact on tourism.
It almost goes without saying that technology is important to the Millennial tourist. For this reason, and as part of what is now an ongoing debate within the Mallorcan and Spanish tourism industry, offers such as free wifi become essential and no longer a nice little extra. Both before and during their travels, Millennials make extensive use of social media. It is what his or her peer group says and posts and recommends which influences and guides his or her decisions. No player in the tourist industry can any longer afford to ignore social media, but unfortunately many still do or pay it too little attention.
Burstein has offered various thoughts as to how the Millennial tourist behaves. He or she looks to travel for the experience. He or she isn't necessarily attracted by ostentatious luxury. He or she customises the holiday, thus making the package less relevant. And to Burstein's thoughts can be added those from consultants (BCG - Boston Consulting Group) who say that the Millennial tends to book travel on a more last-minute basis than other generations and that, in five to ten years time, the Millennial will have become the dominant demographic in terms of travel spending.
This is all of course a tremendous generalisation, and there is one ingredient which appears to be missing: what happens when the Millennials start having families, and how will this affect their travel and holidaying behaviour? But I'm not inclined to dismiss Burstein's or BCG's ideas. Quite the contrary. As a student of Mallorca's tourism history, I can see a parallel with what Burstein says of the quantum leap at the start of the last century with what happened to Mallorca's tourism. It started, in that a framework was established to exploit and to understand what at that time was not understandable and highly uncertain. It took a long time for potential to be realised but Mallorca, in 1905, was right at the forefront of looking to the future.
If there is indeed to be a fundamental shift, then it is advisable that everyone gets their heads around what it might mean. Seeing the future, especially one that will develop as rapidly as it will because of technological advances, is far from easy. But, as with my vision of the Mallorcan "super all-inclusive", connected by technology which branches out of the current confines of a hotel complex and forms a mini-resort in its own right, it is time for there to be a serious debate as to the shape of Mallorca's tourism over the next twenty years.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Love Croatia: More Mallorcan marketing failure
ABTA's decision to not stage its annual convention in Mallorca next year is surprising insofar as the intention to return two years after the emergency relocation to Mallorca in 2011 had been signalled at last year's convention. But, and lest anyone forgets this, there are plenty of other destinations that ABTA can choose from, just as there are plenty of other destinations that tourists can choose from.
From a personal point of view, the decision is disappointing. While there are plenty who look upon an ABTA gathering as one big photo opportunity, it is - for those who can be bothered - an occasion to learn about what is happening in the world of travel and specifically about what is at the cutting edge.
Tourism and travel are nothing without good marketing. While most within the travel industry would understand this, a perception persists that marketing equals something specific - the glossy approach, the magazine, the expensive advert, the hyperbole of a clichéd article or brochure description. This is the glamour part of a supposedly glamour industry. There is a place for glamour, unquestionably there is, but there is also marketing which is as important if not more so - it is the geeky, nerdish part: the systems, the operations, the technology.
Last year's convention was dominated by technology: by the use of social media, apps, voice recognition, search facilities, you name it. For the technology savvy or the gadget freak, it was convention heaven. For the technology indifferent or technology sceptic, it was hell on Mallorcan earth.
When it comes to technology, there are those who get it and those who don't. As a consequence, prejudices and assumptions are created depending upon which of the technology poles one is connected to: the positive or the negative. The result is that tourism marketing is either technology-driven and little else or it is technology passive, if that. The truth, of course, lies somewhere between the two poles.
One example of this is the use of mobile apps. At one extreme, there is a view which suggests that apps are the only game in tourism marketing town; at the other, there is no view - apps may as well be invisible. Neither view is correct. All the technologies that have sprung up in recent years have created a sub-category of one of the 4Ps of marketing; promotion has its own marketing mix of a multitude of media, none of which can be neglected.
But many of these media, if not neglected, are nevertheless treated less than well. Moreover, a lack of appreciation as to what these different media can do creates a marketing disadvantage, and it is not as if this appreciation needs to be marketing rocket science.
Take Facebook. ABTA is going to stage its convention in Croatia next year. It is one of the destinations that is a key competitor for Mallorca (some would say its biggest). As a simple experiment, I typed "Croatia Facebook" into Google and then typed in "Mallorca Facebook" and "Majorca Facebook". Try it yourselves if you want, but if not let me tell you that the first Google entry for Croatia led to a "Love Croatia" Facebook page; 788,634 likes for the "official" Facebook page of Croatia. The Mallorca ones? The results offer absolutely nothing similar; they are fragmented and inconsequential, and fragmented is unfortunately a synonym for Mallorcan tourism marketing.
Four Pillars, the UK hotel group, has just issued the results of a survey into the use of social media. This found, among other things, that 52% of Facebook users said that friends' photos had inspired their holiday choice. It also found, and so confirming previous research which has pointed to the diminishing importance of established media, that 92% "trusted" recommendations above all other forms of advertising (only 47% "trust" TV, magazine or newspaper ads).
This survey emphasises the importance of Facebook and of review sites such as Trip Advisor. These social media have supplanted conventional websites and established print and broadcast media as the main means of travel and tourism communication. It's the reality. There can be no scepticism any longer. Yet in Mallorca, there is a lousy and outmoded web presence provided by tourism authorities (and others) who should know better by now. There is an absence of an official and coherent use of social media and an apparent absence of anyone directing tourism marketing who appears to appreciate them.
ABTA knows all about technology and all about the importance of media technologies for today's tourism. It has decided to give Mallorca a miss next year. But in preferring Croatia, there may be more to the decision than it simply being a case of Buggins's turn. 788,634 people can't be wrong.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
From a personal point of view, the decision is disappointing. While there are plenty who look upon an ABTA gathering as one big photo opportunity, it is - for those who can be bothered - an occasion to learn about what is happening in the world of travel and specifically about what is at the cutting edge.
Tourism and travel are nothing without good marketing. While most within the travel industry would understand this, a perception persists that marketing equals something specific - the glossy approach, the magazine, the expensive advert, the hyperbole of a clichéd article or brochure description. This is the glamour part of a supposedly glamour industry. There is a place for glamour, unquestionably there is, but there is also marketing which is as important if not more so - it is the geeky, nerdish part: the systems, the operations, the technology.
Last year's convention was dominated by technology: by the use of social media, apps, voice recognition, search facilities, you name it. For the technology savvy or the gadget freak, it was convention heaven. For the technology indifferent or technology sceptic, it was hell on Mallorcan earth.
When it comes to technology, there are those who get it and those who don't. As a consequence, prejudices and assumptions are created depending upon which of the technology poles one is connected to: the positive or the negative. The result is that tourism marketing is either technology-driven and little else or it is technology passive, if that. The truth, of course, lies somewhere between the two poles.
One example of this is the use of mobile apps. At one extreme, there is a view which suggests that apps are the only game in tourism marketing town; at the other, there is no view - apps may as well be invisible. Neither view is correct. All the technologies that have sprung up in recent years have created a sub-category of one of the 4Ps of marketing; promotion has its own marketing mix of a multitude of media, none of which can be neglected.
But many of these media, if not neglected, are nevertheless treated less than well. Moreover, a lack of appreciation as to what these different media can do creates a marketing disadvantage, and it is not as if this appreciation needs to be marketing rocket science.
Take Facebook. ABTA is going to stage its convention in Croatia next year. It is one of the destinations that is a key competitor for Mallorca (some would say its biggest). As a simple experiment, I typed "Croatia Facebook" into Google and then typed in "Mallorca Facebook" and "Majorca Facebook". Try it yourselves if you want, but if not let me tell you that the first Google entry for Croatia led to a "Love Croatia" Facebook page; 788,634 likes for the "official" Facebook page of Croatia. The Mallorca ones? The results offer absolutely nothing similar; they are fragmented and inconsequential, and fragmented is unfortunately a synonym for Mallorcan tourism marketing.
Four Pillars, the UK hotel group, has just issued the results of a survey into the use of social media. This found, among other things, that 52% of Facebook users said that friends' photos had inspired their holiday choice. It also found, and so confirming previous research which has pointed to the diminishing importance of established media, that 92% "trusted" recommendations above all other forms of advertising (only 47% "trust" TV, magazine or newspaper ads).
This survey emphasises the importance of Facebook and of review sites such as Trip Advisor. These social media have supplanted conventional websites and established print and broadcast media as the main means of travel and tourism communication. It's the reality. There can be no scepticism any longer. Yet in Mallorca, there is a lousy and outmoded web presence provided by tourism authorities (and others) who should know better by now. There is an absence of an official and coherent use of social media and an apparent absence of anyone directing tourism marketing who appears to appreciate them.
ABTA knows all about technology and all about the importance of media technologies for today's tourism. It has decided to give Mallorca a miss next year. But in preferring Croatia, there may be more to the decision than it simply being a case of Buggins's turn. 788,634 people can't be wrong.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Needed: A New Model Economy
The Centre for Economic Research (Centre de Recerca Econòmica - CRE) has put the Balearics economy on red alert. I don't know if alerts had previously been issued but red should have been the colour since the turn of the century. The CRE knows this. In March this year it made an announcement that has now produced its red-alert warning, one to the effect that the economic multiplier effect of tourism has been shrinking since 2000. Put simply, this has meant loss of competitiveness; tourism numbers have risen but revenues and jobs have not risen in line with these increased numbers.
The CRE believes that the current model of tourism in the Balearics is out of date. It is difficult to argue with this. In fact, it has been out of date for very much longer than the years of this century. You can go back to the start of the nineties to find evidence of a percentage of tourism (around 10%) that constituted a net loss. In March the CRE put forward the case for concentrating on more profitable tourism, which would almost inevitably mean fewer tourists but ones with greater spending power.
Such a shift in emphasis has been previously considered. Five years ago the Antich government proposed this as part of its "Plan Turismo 2020". The problem with this plan was that there never any plan as such, though in provisions of the current government's tourism law there are clear nods in the direction of the principle of fewer but greater value-adding tourists.
The pursuit of tourism profitability explains the expectations for Russian tourism. The director for Spanish tourism in Moscow has identified the fact that Russian tourists typically spend the equivalent of up to 40% over and above the cost of their holiday package. Or put another way, they spend at least 50% more than tourists from other countries.
Much as Russian tourism will grow over the next few years, the CRE has implied that there are the limits to this new tourism's capacity to adjust the current model of Balearics tourism. It is right to do so as it would be a case of short-termism to place so much emphasis and hope on a remodelling of the tourism industry without a simultaneous development of other parts of the economy. It is the lack of economic diversity that really concerns the CRE and it is one that should concern everyone and should have been concerning them for years.
In 2008 the IMF warned that Spain would be the country worst affected by the credit crunch. One can argue that it hasn't been the worst affected but such things are relative. Among what the IMF had identified, and which was pretty obvious, was the problem created by over-reliance on certain industries, notably tourism and construction. Such over-reliance was far greater in the Balearics than in Spain as a whole, and despite reassurances from regional government as to tourism's role in moving the Balearics out of recession or a state of very limited growth, these reassurances are weak when the capacity for growth that tourism offers is as feeble as the CRE suggests.
Short and medium term there may be a bounce because of tourism from the new markets, but it is the long term which counts and this entails diversification. The trouble is that this diversification, where it has ever been seriously addressed, suffers from vagueness as to what it might actually comprise.
Another of the Antich 2020 plans was for innovation and development. In that the ParcBIT technology park in Palma has grown over recent years, then one might suggest that this was a more successful plan than for tourism. Yet it remains unclear where Mallorca's technology is heading. Even more unclear is what it might mean in terms of employment or business creation. The island's talent will continue to be attracted to the mainland centres of industry rather than fanny around on Mallorca, while an absence of finance will prove an obstacle to entrepreneurship. But even if businesses are created, will they be anything more than small and so employ small numbers of people?
Diversification can mean all sorts of things. In the 1960s it meant one thing and one thing only - tourism - and the consequent loss of manufacturing and agricultural diversity. What Mallorca and the Balearics need is an overall industrial strategy, but who will develop it? The current government? This would be most unlikely when the minister ostensibly in charge of business affairs is the same one who is going around applying financial cuts. The CRE has pointed to structural failures in the Balearics economy. It might also add that there is a structural failure in government.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
The CRE believes that the current model of tourism in the Balearics is out of date. It is difficult to argue with this. In fact, it has been out of date for very much longer than the years of this century. You can go back to the start of the nineties to find evidence of a percentage of tourism (around 10%) that constituted a net loss. In March the CRE put forward the case for concentrating on more profitable tourism, which would almost inevitably mean fewer tourists but ones with greater spending power.
Such a shift in emphasis has been previously considered. Five years ago the Antich government proposed this as part of its "Plan Turismo 2020". The problem with this plan was that there never any plan as such, though in provisions of the current government's tourism law there are clear nods in the direction of the principle of fewer but greater value-adding tourists.
The pursuit of tourism profitability explains the expectations for Russian tourism. The director for Spanish tourism in Moscow has identified the fact that Russian tourists typically spend the equivalent of up to 40% over and above the cost of their holiday package. Or put another way, they spend at least 50% more than tourists from other countries.
Much as Russian tourism will grow over the next few years, the CRE has implied that there are the limits to this new tourism's capacity to adjust the current model of Balearics tourism. It is right to do so as it would be a case of short-termism to place so much emphasis and hope on a remodelling of the tourism industry without a simultaneous development of other parts of the economy. It is the lack of economic diversity that really concerns the CRE and it is one that should concern everyone and should have been concerning them for years.
In 2008 the IMF warned that Spain would be the country worst affected by the credit crunch. One can argue that it hasn't been the worst affected but such things are relative. Among what the IMF had identified, and which was pretty obvious, was the problem created by over-reliance on certain industries, notably tourism and construction. Such over-reliance was far greater in the Balearics than in Spain as a whole, and despite reassurances from regional government as to tourism's role in moving the Balearics out of recession or a state of very limited growth, these reassurances are weak when the capacity for growth that tourism offers is as feeble as the CRE suggests.
Short and medium term there may be a bounce because of tourism from the new markets, but it is the long term which counts and this entails diversification. The trouble is that this diversification, where it has ever been seriously addressed, suffers from vagueness as to what it might actually comprise.
Another of the Antich 2020 plans was for innovation and development. In that the ParcBIT technology park in Palma has grown over recent years, then one might suggest that this was a more successful plan than for tourism. Yet it remains unclear where Mallorca's technology is heading. Even more unclear is what it might mean in terms of employment or business creation. The island's talent will continue to be attracted to the mainland centres of industry rather than fanny around on Mallorca, while an absence of finance will prove an obstacle to entrepreneurship. But even if businesses are created, will they be anything more than small and so employ small numbers of people?
Diversification can mean all sorts of things. In the 1960s it meant one thing and one thing only - tourism - and the consequent loss of manufacturing and agricultural diversity. What Mallorca and the Balearics need is an overall industrial strategy, but who will develop it? The current government? This would be most unlikely when the minister ostensibly in charge of business affairs is the same one who is going around applying financial cuts. The CRE has pointed to structural failures in the Balearics economy. It might also add that there is a structural failure in government.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Private Information: Tourist offices
A few years ago a friend (Jake from the Giant Maze) and I came up with an idea for a separate and private tourist information office (in Puerto Alcúdia). Part of the concept would have been to heavily feature technology, for example video display screens, which would have formed a key means of generating revenue from major advertisers.
I am reminded of this idea, which came to nothing as it would have been too expensive and was potentially too risky, when seeing that Palma town hall is considering the privatisation of its tourist information offices.
Palma has set up its own tourism "foundation", in other words a group that comprises various businesses and organisations that will undertake the "365" promotion of the city. An annual budget of 3.6 million euros has been set aside (ten grand a day then). Despite this new source of finance, the town hall is addressing the cost of running its information offices, which would amount to half this budget.
Is privatisation of tourist offices a good idea? It happens elsewhere. For example, Berlin has a privatised tourist information company, in Cornwall they are looking at privatisation and in Adelaide, Australia, there is a privatisation process underway, but it is one that is requiring an independent inquiry to ensure there is no conflict of interest in the sale and that the sale has the correct controls.
Without knowing fully what the state attorney-general in South Australia is concerned about, the fact that he has raised a concern should be enough to induce wariness as to how privatisation might operate in Mallorca.
Palma has in mind that the offices should be able to generate revenue to meet part of their running cost (without being exact) and that to do so, they would cease to be as tourist offices currently are (in theory at any rate) - neutral in matters of promotion.
The tourist offices would, in effect, become like shops, able to sell tickets for various attractions and events which currently they do only occasionally. For example, the offices in Pollensa sell tickets for the music festival, but this is a specifically Pollensa cultural event, one to which the town hall contributes funds. Otherwise, and although tourist offices are full of publicity for this or that, they are supposed to steer clear of indulging in what might seem like direct promotion or favouritism.
From my experience, tourist office staff are pretty professional in this regard. And as an example of how the offices seek to retain neutrality, last summer Pollensa town hall was forced to issue a warning to businesses which have publicity material in the outdoor display units in Puerto Pollensa to stop indulging in a publicity war and interfering with each other's material.
But once the tourist offices are obliged to make money, the rules change. In Palma, one line of revenue would be from restaurant promotion. Whether restaurants would be willing to pay is one issue, but were they to, then a can of worms could potentially be opened.
A problem with making the offices revenue generators is whether, in the pursuit of "sales", their core role of simple information provision would be compromised. If you have ever, like I have, spent time observing what happens at tourist-office desks, you will have come to appreciate that much of the tourist encounter involves questions of the how-do-I-get-to, where-do-I-go-to variety. One office told me that one of its most frequently asked questions was where were the nearest toilets.
The tourist encounter can be repetitious, basic and extremely time-consuming. If tourist office staff have to also sell tickets for this excursion or that attraction, then delays in handling enquiries will increase.
Technology, you would think, could be made to eliminate many of the repetitious and basic enquiries. Possibly so, as also it could be made to handle other information. One town that has been embracing technology is Artà, not a town with a massive tourism industry but one that has adopted the use of audio guides and now also QR (quick response) codes which are photographed with mobiles in order to provide information in five different languages.
Whether the privatised tourist offices in Palma would make use of technology or not, there is an altogether more fundamental question. Where are they? In October, when mayor Mateo Isern was first talking up the Palma 365 promotion campaign, it was being pointed out that Palma's tourist office provision was abysmal by comparison with, for example, Barcelona and even with neighbouring Calvià. They can privatise the offices all they like, but they won't make money if tourists can't find them.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
I am reminded of this idea, which came to nothing as it would have been too expensive and was potentially too risky, when seeing that Palma town hall is considering the privatisation of its tourist information offices.
Palma has set up its own tourism "foundation", in other words a group that comprises various businesses and organisations that will undertake the "365" promotion of the city. An annual budget of 3.6 million euros has been set aside (ten grand a day then). Despite this new source of finance, the town hall is addressing the cost of running its information offices, which would amount to half this budget.
Is privatisation of tourist offices a good idea? It happens elsewhere. For example, Berlin has a privatised tourist information company, in Cornwall they are looking at privatisation and in Adelaide, Australia, there is a privatisation process underway, but it is one that is requiring an independent inquiry to ensure there is no conflict of interest in the sale and that the sale has the correct controls.
Without knowing fully what the state attorney-general in South Australia is concerned about, the fact that he has raised a concern should be enough to induce wariness as to how privatisation might operate in Mallorca.
Palma has in mind that the offices should be able to generate revenue to meet part of their running cost (without being exact) and that to do so, they would cease to be as tourist offices currently are (in theory at any rate) - neutral in matters of promotion.
The tourist offices would, in effect, become like shops, able to sell tickets for various attractions and events which currently they do only occasionally. For example, the offices in Pollensa sell tickets for the music festival, but this is a specifically Pollensa cultural event, one to which the town hall contributes funds. Otherwise, and although tourist offices are full of publicity for this or that, they are supposed to steer clear of indulging in what might seem like direct promotion or favouritism.
From my experience, tourist office staff are pretty professional in this regard. And as an example of how the offices seek to retain neutrality, last summer Pollensa town hall was forced to issue a warning to businesses which have publicity material in the outdoor display units in Puerto Pollensa to stop indulging in a publicity war and interfering with each other's material.
But once the tourist offices are obliged to make money, the rules change. In Palma, one line of revenue would be from restaurant promotion. Whether restaurants would be willing to pay is one issue, but were they to, then a can of worms could potentially be opened.
A problem with making the offices revenue generators is whether, in the pursuit of "sales", their core role of simple information provision would be compromised. If you have ever, like I have, spent time observing what happens at tourist-office desks, you will have come to appreciate that much of the tourist encounter involves questions of the how-do-I-get-to, where-do-I-go-to variety. One office told me that one of its most frequently asked questions was where were the nearest toilets.
The tourist encounter can be repetitious, basic and extremely time-consuming. If tourist office staff have to also sell tickets for this excursion or that attraction, then delays in handling enquiries will increase.
Technology, you would think, could be made to eliminate many of the repetitious and basic enquiries. Possibly so, as also it could be made to handle other information. One town that has been embracing technology is Artà, not a town with a massive tourism industry but one that has adopted the use of audio guides and now also QR (quick response) codes which are photographed with mobiles in order to provide information in five different languages.
Whether the privatised tourist offices in Palma would make use of technology or not, there is an altogether more fundamental question. Where are they? In October, when mayor Mateo Isern was first talking up the Palma 365 promotion campaign, it was being pointed out that Palma's tourist office provision was abysmal by comparison with, for example, Barcelona and even with neighbouring Calvià. They can privatise the offices all they like, but they won't make money if tourists can't find them.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Rubbing Off: Microsoft in Mallorca
If you take a look at the list of companies on Palma's ParcBit technology park, many will probably be unfamiliar. Halfway down the alphabet, though, you will find a very familiar name. Microsoft.
In May 2009, Microsoft opened its first technology centre devoted to tourism anywhere in the world. The Palma-based Microsoft Innovation Center (note the suitably Americanised spelling) Tourism Technologies was founded with three main objectives in mind, one being, and this would be pretty obvious, to create new initiatives for technological innovation that add value to the tourism sector.
Microsoft's mere presence in Mallorca has been a boost to the island's technology industry, but how much of a boost?
When the Microsoft centre was opened, the then president, Francesc Antich, spoke of it as contributing to an aim of raising the value of innovation and development in the Balearics to 5.6% of GDP by the end of his period in office. This was probably always a somewhat ambitious target. Though spend on I+D increased by 10.5% in 2010, the actual contribution in terms of GDP via investment was the lowest of any region of Spain - 0.41% of regional GDP.
One of Microsoft's flagship developments was a "distribution platform" for the whole tourism offer in the Balearics. This web-based portal, described as not being a website as such, was intended to be a single system for different players in the tourism industry by which they could commercialise their services and products and make savings of up to 40% in doing so.
The fanfare that surrounded its announcement in spring last year did rather downplay the fact that it was going to cost the regional government more than had been envisaged. As always, I stand to be corrected, and I would very much like to be, but I cannot find a reference to its having been launched.
Another development has been the "global tourism hub" for the Windows Phone 7, a "killer" application for the tourism industry. Whether it will really prove to be a killer app is another matter. Microsoft also faces competition; from Google, for instance.
Nevertheless, the development, with the Palma centre behind it, has indicated Microsoft's intent and, as much as Microsoft also provides consultancy services to local businesses, it is the rub-off effect from its presence on Mallorca's technology industry that is arguably the greatest benefit the island stands to gain in its aim of getting I+D to be a far more significant element in the regional economy.
The gain for I+D is not, though, the only one that is hoped for, because tourism is at the heart of the Microsoft technologies, and the rub-off effect for tourism is coming from a possibly unexpected area - that of tourism connected to the cinema.
Though, as far as I am aware, it has not been stated as such, a reason for the filming of parts of "Cloud Atlas" on Mallorca may have been Microsoft. The company's reputation (and its being American) is one thing, but as important if not more is its relationship with the Mallorca Film Commission and with the Cluster Audiovisual, the association of audiovisual producers in the Balearics.
Microsoft, together with the Cluster Audiovisual, has come up with what is potentially a brilliant idea, and one that goes a long way to overcoming what might be the disadvantage for tourism from filming at locations such as those used for "Cloud Atlas". The idea is known as "Film Travelling", the slogan for which is "what film do you want to journey to'".
Essentially what this is, or will be, is a video database that will show locations of a film on a map. The intention is to map the Balearics and give a guide to where filming has occurred and what was filmed, and it wouldn't have to be confined to cinema productions. The rub-off would be that the database could be used by the tourism industry to sell visits related to the locations.
When the filming for "Cloud Atlas" was first spoken about, along with its potential benefits for tourism, a point I made was that these benefits would not be as great as might be hoped for as fans of the film wouldn't necessarily know what the locations were. "Film Travelling" solves this problem. It will be launched, it is hoped, at the same time as the premiere of "Cloud Atlas", which does just make you wonder a bit more about whether Microsoft had some influence on the choice of location. Whether the company did or didn't, its benefits to Mallorca's technology and to its tourism are beginning to rub off.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
In May 2009, Microsoft opened its first technology centre devoted to tourism anywhere in the world. The Palma-based Microsoft Innovation Center (note the suitably Americanised spelling) Tourism Technologies was founded with three main objectives in mind, one being, and this would be pretty obvious, to create new initiatives for technological innovation that add value to the tourism sector.
Microsoft's mere presence in Mallorca has been a boost to the island's technology industry, but how much of a boost?
When the Microsoft centre was opened, the then president, Francesc Antich, spoke of it as contributing to an aim of raising the value of innovation and development in the Balearics to 5.6% of GDP by the end of his period in office. This was probably always a somewhat ambitious target. Though spend on I+D increased by 10.5% in 2010, the actual contribution in terms of GDP via investment was the lowest of any region of Spain - 0.41% of regional GDP.
One of Microsoft's flagship developments was a "distribution platform" for the whole tourism offer in the Balearics. This web-based portal, described as not being a website as such, was intended to be a single system for different players in the tourism industry by which they could commercialise their services and products and make savings of up to 40% in doing so.
The fanfare that surrounded its announcement in spring last year did rather downplay the fact that it was going to cost the regional government more than had been envisaged. As always, I stand to be corrected, and I would very much like to be, but I cannot find a reference to its having been launched.
Another development has been the "global tourism hub" for the Windows Phone 7, a "killer" application for the tourism industry. Whether it will really prove to be a killer app is another matter. Microsoft also faces competition; from Google, for instance.
Nevertheless, the development, with the Palma centre behind it, has indicated Microsoft's intent and, as much as Microsoft also provides consultancy services to local businesses, it is the rub-off effect from its presence on Mallorca's technology industry that is arguably the greatest benefit the island stands to gain in its aim of getting I+D to be a far more significant element in the regional economy.
The gain for I+D is not, though, the only one that is hoped for, because tourism is at the heart of the Microsoft technologies, and the rub-off effect for tourism is coming from a possibly unexpected area - that of tourism connected to the cinema.
Though, as far as I am aware, it has not been stated as such, a reason for the filming of parts of "Cloud Atlas" on Mallorca may have been Microsoft. The company's reputation (and its being American) is one thing, but as important if not more is its relationship with the Mallorca Film Commission and with the Cluster Audiovisual, the association of audiovisual producers in the Balearics.
Microsoft, together with the Cluster Audiovisual, has come up with what is potentially a brilliant idea, and one that goes a long way to overcoming what might be the disadvantage for tourism from filming at locations such as those used for "Cloud Atlas". The idea is known as "Film Travelling", the slogan for which is "what film do you want to journey to'".
Essentially what this is, or will be, is a video database that will show locations of a film on a map. The intention is to map the Balearics and give a guide to where filming has occurred and what was filmed, and it wouldn't have to be confined to cinema productions. The rub-off would be that the database could be used by the tourism industry to sell visits related to the locations.
When the filming for "Cloud Atlas" was first spoken about, along with its potential benefits for tourism, a point I made was that these benefits would not be as great as might be hoped for as fans of the film wouldn't necessarily know what the locations were. "Film Travelling" solves this problem. It will be launched, it is hoped, at the same time as the premiere of "Cloud Atlas", which does just make you wonder a bit more about whether Microsoft had some influence on the choice of location. Whether the company did or didn't, its benefits to Mallorca's technology and to its tourism are beginning to rub off.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Friday, October 07, 2011
The Travelling Blackberries
One of the things you would probably expect at an ABTA convention is a lot of travel agents. ABTA is, after all, the Association of British Travel Agents. Going by the list of delegates at the Palma thrash (around 800 or so), I would guess that only around an eighth were in fact from travel agencies. ABTA isn't just about travel agents as it is "The Travel Association" and so includes tour operators as well, and the line between a travel agent and a tour operator can blur, but the attendees seemed to overwhelmingly come from other parts of the travel world. Many of them were those, like me, who talk about travel and tourism. The convention is a great occasion for talking shop among those who do a lot of talking anyway.
Given the uneven distribution in terms of those who do and those who don't do - arranging holidays or travel, that is - what is the point of it all? There is of course the "networking" defence, sometimes known as getting to know people, and this getting to know tends to involve excruciating conversations littered with business newspeak. "We can envision synergetic windows of opportunity going forward" or some such tosh.
There is the chance to learn new jargon in this newspeak world. I noted down the term "disintermediating". I haven't a clue what it means, but I intend to use it regularly in future; you've been warned.
But a more important point of it all is, as has been the case ever since the conference or convention (call it as you wish) was hit upon as being a "good idea", that it's a bit of a jolly. Even in economically-straitened times, and by God, didn't we hear about how straitened these times have become and will become, there has to be an opportunity for the travel community to let its hair down and to fire off images of it doing so thanks to the latest gadgetry.
I well remember the jolly and the times when conferences were two a penny. One week New Orleans, the next Milan. New Orleans, in between Henry Kissinger asking me what I was doing having come from England to attend a management conference in Louisiana, was a fine excuse for hitting the blues and jazz bars of Bourbon Street. Milan involved a do at Armani's gaffe. Not his house as such, but the Armani HQ emporium. And there was the great man himself, who wasn't so great as he is a shorthouse, who insisted on making a gift to all attendees at his special dinner of a bottle of the Armani house liqueur, a truly revolting and undrinkable concoction made out of rose petals.
But those were in the days before we we had ever heard of carbon footprints and before the technology arrived that was meant to put an end to all the need to jump on BA and hack across the Atlantic or to climb aboard the O'Leary Express and hop off to Palma. Despite the technology, it still happens, and can be put down to one thing - the industry that is MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions). If it weren't to exist, then Palma's brand new (if and when it's completed) Palacio de Congresos would be an even greater waste of money than it will prove to be anyway.
Though ABTA's convention seemed primarily to be a junket for members of the media and for the new-age travel service providers of the internet (and of course smartphones), it would be a curious thing were there not to be a convention that involved some travel. This is what ABTA does, or at least what its members facilitate. A travel association that didn't actually travel anywhere would be setting a bad example to all those who really need to, as in holidaymakers.
You have to conclude, therefore, that this, over and above the jolly, is the main point of it all. The travel itself. We are a travel association, therefore we travel. All aboard the ABTA Airbus and off we go, a band not of Traveling Wilburys but of Travelling Blackberries; have smartphone, will travel.
All the technology, Google's "Goggles", social networking (that word again) with crazed movements of thumbs and fingers on a small phone keyboard, uploading and sharing every waking moment; it makes you wonder if the day of the virtual tourist is nearly upon us. You will never need to leave the house in order to experience the holiday experience; all that's missing is something like Aldous Huxley's "feelies". They'll be here, though. One day. And then we really wouldn't need to go on holiday and never need to travel. But I tell you something, there would still be a convention in order that we can all talk about it.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Given the uneven distribution in terms of those who do and those who don't do - arranging holidays or travel, that is - what is the point of it all? There is of course the "networking" defence, sometimes known as getting to know people, and this getting to know tends to involve excruciating conversations littered with business newspeak. "We can envision synergetic windows of opportunity going forward" or some such tosh.
There is the chance to learn new jargon in this newspeak world. I noted down the term "disintermediating". I haven't a clue what it means, but I intend to use it regularly in future; you've been warned.
But a more important point of it all is, as has been the case ever since the conference or convention (call it as you wish) was hit upon as being a "good idea", that it's a bit of a jolly. Even in economically-straitened times, and by God, didn't we hear about how straitened these times have become and will become, there has to be an opportunity for the travel community to let its hair down and to fire off images of it doing so thanks to the latest gadgetry.
I well remember the jolly and the times when conferences were two a penny. One week New Orleans, the next Milan. New Orleans, in between Henry Kissinger asking me what I was doing having come from England to attend a management conference in Louisiana, was a fine excuse for hitting the blues and jazz bars of Bourbon Street. Milan involved a do at Armani's gaffe. Not his house as such, but the Armani HQ emporium. And there was the great man himself, who wasn't so great as he is a shorthouse, who insisted on making a gift to all attendees at his special dinner of a bottle of the Armani house liqueur, a truly revolting and undrinkable concoction made out of rose petals.
But those were in the days before we we had ever heard of carbon footprints and before the technology arrived that was meant to put an end to all the need to jump on BA and hack across the Atlantic or to climb aboard the O'Leary Express and hop off to Palma. Despite the technology, it still happens, and can be put down to one thing - the industry that is MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions). If it weren't to exist, then Palma's brand new (if and when it's completed) Palacio de Congresos would be an even greater waste of money than it will prove to be anyway.
Though ABTA's convention seemed primarily to be a junket for members of the media and for the new-age travel service providers of the internet (and of course smartphones), it would be a curious thing were there not to be a convention that involved some travel. This is what ABTA does, or at least what its members facilitate. A travel association that didn't actually travel anywhere would be setting a bad example to all those who really need to, as in holidaymakers.
You have to conclude, therefore, that this, over and above the jolly, is the main point of it all. The travel itself. We are a travel association, therefore we travel. All aboard the ABTA Airbus and off we go, a band not of Traveling Wilburys but of Travelling Blackberries; have smartphone, will travel.
All the technology, Google's "Goggles", social networking (that word again) with crazed movements of thumbs and fingers on a small phone keyboard, uploading and sharing every waking moment; it makes you wonder if the day of the virtual tourist is nearly upon us. You will never need to leave the house in order to experience the holiday experience; all that's missing is something like Aldous Huxley's "feelies". They'll be here, though. One day. And then we really wouldn't need to go on holiday and never need to travel. But I tell you something, there would still be a convention in order that we can all talk about it.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Mapping Mallorca's Imagination
Cartographic precociousness has left its impression on me. When a child, I drew a map of our village. It hadn't occurred to me at the time - it wouldn't have, as I wasn't cognizant of such politico-arcanum - that I had created a socio-geographic representation. The higher land of the village, to its southerly side, was more than just topographically elevated. It was the domain of the grand, the villa, the church, the upper-class landowning caste.
This affluent scarp on the Surrey landscape towered over the commercial centre of the village, the High Street in other words, and the modern estate of engineers and teachers, an agglomeration of the aspirational lower to middle class with its pretensions to the acquisitiveness of late 1950s and early 1960s new consumerism.
To the northerly end, and on the wrong side of the tracks, thanks to the Aldershot to Waterloo line that sliced through the village, was the council estate, a post-war south London spillover and a place of cars jacked up on bricks and the occasional gypsy encampment.
My map showed all this. Importantly, it wasn't simply a representation, it was a social document, one that was the basis for stories, most of them outrageous fibs of course, that I invented for the people of my village.
Maps, as maps used to be, were acts of faith. You trusted in their accuracy, as you had no way of verifying them. You could see a map, but you couldn't see the truth of it for yourself. Maps were virtual reality before the term was invented. More than this, because maps were shorn of intimacy, they were templates for invention and imagination. They hid stories and histories.
The map, therefore, has served a dual purpose, that of practicality and that of interpretation. The imagination that was released by maps has, however, become dulled. A trend towards three-dimensionalism hastened the emergence of technologies such as exist today, the most extreme removal of imagination being the obscenity of Google Street View.
Such intimacy, such real reality makes archaic some of the most fabulous creations of the cartographer. It would be impossible for Beck to diagrammatically show the London Underground nowadays. He would be considered an idiot. Yet he achieved what should have been an impossibility - functionalism made from the abstract. And in so doing, his map added power to one of London's most enduring stories, that of the mystery of its old tube stations and lines.
Technology has not, however, replaced the map. It has digitalised it, put it onto mobile phones, zoomed into it and out of it, but the map remains, even in its basic, non-intimate state.
The tourist coming to Mallorca is confronted with map after map after map. It is the single most useful piece of information the tourist can have. Some may indeed app a map, but most don't. They seek the utility of something that never folds properly and that flaps in a breeze. Utility is the key, so much so that a tour operator rep once told me that he and colleagues used to have to clean up transfer coaches on which adverts that had surrounded maps handed out to the newly arrived had been discarded. The tourists would tear the ads off and keep the map. Why? Who knows.
For tourists who don't vandalise their maps, utility is served by being able to locate Bar Brit and its steak and chips and Sky TV on the corner of Calle Ikis and Calle E-griega. An advert without a means of locating an establishment for the unknowledgeable tourist isn't a great deal of use, yet many businesses persist in using media that fail to impart such knowledge.
The local maps, of the resorts and towns, and the maps of Mallorca are almost exclusively only used in a functional way. The other purpose of the map, the interpretation, is rarely deployed you would think. Yet take a look at a map of Mallorca and you see all manner of strangeness. The name places themselves are strange. They should conjure up enquiry, but how many do actually enquire? What is it with, say, Biniali or Bunyola or the innuendo of Búger? What are their stories?
Maps should map the imagination. A map of Mallorca should be a map of Mallorca's imagination.
You may remember a time when maps would be put up on walls and pins would be placed on them to denote this or that. You can still stick a pin in a map. Shut your eyes, and when you've stuck the pin in, off you go. To wherever it might be and to whatever story the place on your map is hiding.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
This affluent scarp on the Surrey landscape towered over the commercial centre of the village, the High Street in other words, and the modern estate of engineers and teachers, an agglomeration of the aspirational lower to middle class with its pretensions to the acquisitiveness of late 1950s and early 1960s new consumerism.
To the northerly end, and on the wrong side of the tracks, thanks to the Aldershot to Waterloo line that sliced through the village, was the council estate, a post-war south London spillover and a place of cars jacked up on bricks and the occasional gypsy encampment.
My map showed all this. Importantly, it wasn't simply a representation, it was a social document, one that was the basis for stories, most of them outrageous fibs of course, that I invented for the people of my village.
Maps, as maps used to be, were acts of faith. You trusted in their accuracy, as you had no way of verifying them. You could see a map, but you couldn't see the truth of it for yourself. Maps were virtual reality before the term was invented. More than this, because maps were shorn of intimacy, they were templates for invention and imagination. They hid stories and histories.
The map, therefore, has served a dual purpose, that of practicality and that of interpretation. The imagination that was released by maps has, however, become dulled. A trend towards three-dimensionalism hastened the emergence of technologies such as exist today, the most extreme removal of imagination being the obscenity of Google Street View.
Such intimacy, such real reality makes archaic some of the most fabulous creations of the cartographer. It would be impossible for Beck to diagrammatically show the London Underground nowadays. He would be considered an idiot. Yet he achieved what should have been an impossibility - functionalism made from the abstract. And in so doing, his map added power to one of London's most enduring stories, that of the mystery of its old tube stations and lines.
Technology has not, however, replaced the map. It has digitalised it, put it onto mobile phones, zoomed into it and out of it, but the map remains, even in its basic, non-intimate state.
The tourist coming to Mallorca is confronted with map after map after map. It is the single most useful piece of information the tourist can have. Some may indeed app a map, but most don't. They seek the utility of something that never folds properly and that flaps in a breeze. Utility is the key, so much so that a tour operator rep once told me that he and colleagues used to have to clean up transfer coaches on which adverts that had surrounded maps handed out to the newly arrived had been discarded. The tourists would tear the ads off and keep the map. Why? Who knows.
For tourists who don't vandalise their maps, utility is served by being able to locate Bar Brit and its steak and chips and Sky TV on the corner of Calle Ikis and Calle E-griega. An advert without a means of locating an establishment for the unknowledgeable tourist isn't a great deal of use, yet many businesses persist in using media that fail to impart such knowledge.
The local maps, of the resorts and towns, and the maps of Mallorca are almost exclusively only used in a functional way. The other purpose of the map, the interpretation, is rarely deployed you would think. Yet take a look at a map of Mallorca and you see all manner of strangeness. The name places themselves are strange. They should conjure up enquiry, but how many do actually enquire? What is it with, say, Biniali or Bunyola or the innuendo of Búger? What are their stories?
Maps should map the imagination. A map of Mallorca should be a map of Mallorca's imagination.
You may remember a time when maps would be put up on walls and pins would be placed on them to denote this or that. You can still stick a pin in a map. Shut your eyes, and when you've stuck the pin in, off you go. To wherever it might be and to whatever story the place on your map is hiding.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Twenty-Twenty: Mallorca's innovation boundary
A contactless bank card that is just waved over a terminal. A fixed solar heating system that will warm water to up to 200 degrees. Mini wind turbines for generating electricity.
None of these are revolutionary, but they are all innovative. La Caixa has introduced, with the help of Visa, a card that doesn't require swiping; it is said to be the first of its type in a European region. Engineers and scientists from the Universitat de les Illes Balears in Palma have developed a solar energy system, ideal for hotels and being trialled at one in Montuïri, that remains fixed and doesn't require movable machinery to incline panels towards the sun. The wind turbines of Vent Illes in Inca, specifically designed with limited land resource and also limited wind in mind, are in production.
These are examples of innovation that are coming out of Mallorca. They are examples of what you all too rarely hear about; the tapping of local engineering, scientific and technological wherewithal that will, it should be hoped, lead the island towards a more diverse industrial economy.
At the start of his administration, President Antich made much of two plans going forward to 2020. One was the "Plan Turismo", under which were envisaged fewer tourists but greater revenues. The other was for innovation and development (I&D). The two go hand in hand. As the island becomes less dependent upon tourism, so it increases its reliance upon new technologies.
This, at least, is the theory. We still hear murmurs about I&D, but very little, if anything, about the tourism plan.
While there are examples of technological innovation, and tangible benefits being produced, the actual investment in I&D paints a rather different picture. In 2009, the amount invested in the Balearics fell to around 55 million euros. In 2005, before the Antich administration, the figure had been 183 million. The slump may well be attributable to economic circumstances, but a fall in investment to the tune of a third between 2008 and 2009 alone was not mirrored in many other regions of Spain where there were in fact healthy increases: 25% in Madrid, 12% in Aragon as examples.
The total level of I&D investment has thus fallen to under 1% of total GDP in the Balearics; the highest level in Spain is in fact in Navarre at 2.13%. The difference may not sound great, but it is troubling, nonetheless. What is also troubling is the fact that even the poorest regions of the Spain, the two African autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, have managed a major increase in I&D intensity.
Most of the innovation spend is coming from smaller businesses, those with fewer than 250 employees. This may indicate an entrepreneurial spirit, so is to be welcomed, but larger businesses have all but stopped their investments.
If one contrasts the percentage of local GDP devoted to I&D with that derived from tourism (80%, give or take the odd percentage point), one gets some perspective as to the gap which exists between the present of tourism and the future of greater technology. The contrast doesn't give an exact picture of the relative sizes of particular industrial sectors, but it does give an indication as to the difference between the hope for technology and the reality. As Mallorca is, effectively, a one-product island, the need for more intense development is pressing, and 2020 is now an awful lot closer than it was when Antich came into government in 2007.
The political agenda, overshadowed as it is by issues not central to the economic future of Mallorca, needs to sharpen up. The discourse ahead of coming local elections will doubtless be dragged down by discussions of corruption, language and other such side-shows when it should be one in which the parties engage in clear visions of the future. A party that is willing to establish the right framework, in terms of incentives and funding, that can facilitate a more diverse economy would be one well worth listening to.
Mallorca has shown that it has the skills, the people and the appetite for innovation. All it needs is a real political will and not just the spin that was spun in 2007. If it gets it, then 2020 may yet become a reality.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
None of these are revolutionary, but they are all innovative. La Caixa has introduced, with the help of Visa, a card that doesn't require swiping; it is said to be the first of its type in a European region. Engineers and scientists from the Universitat de les Illes Balears in Palma have developed a solar energy system, ideal for hotels and being trialled at one in Montuïri, that remains fixed and doesn't require movable machinery to incline panels towards the sun. The wind turbines of Vent Illes in Inca, specifically designed with limited land resource and also limited wind in mind, are in production.
These are examples of innovation that are coming out of Mallorca. They are examples of what you all too rarely hear about; the tapping of local engineering, scientific and technological wherewithal that will, it should be hoped, lead the island towards a more diverse industrial economy.
At the start of his administration, President Antich made much of two plans going forward to 2020. One was the "Plan Turismo", under which were envisaged fewer tourists but greater revenues. The other was for innovation and development (I&D). The two go hand in hand. As the island becomes less dependent upon tourism, so it increases its reliance upon new technologies.
This, at least, is the theory. We still hear murmurs about I&D, but very little, if anything, about the tourism plan.
While there are examples of technological innovation, and tangible benefits being produced, the actual investment in I&D paints a rather different picture. In 2009, the amount invested in the Balearics fell to around 55 million euros. In 2005, before the Antich administration, the figure had been 183 million. The slump may well be attributable to economic circumstances, but a fall in investment to the tune of a third between 2008 and 2009 alone was not mirrored in many other regions of Spain where there were in fact healthy increases: 25% in Madrid, 12% in Aragon as examples.
The total level of I&D investment has thus fallen to under 1% of total GDP in the Balearics; the highest level in Spain is in fact in Navarre at 2.13%. The difference may not sound great, but it is troubling, nonetheless. What is also troubling is the fact that even the poorest regions of the Spain, the two African autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, have managed a major increase in I&D intensity.
Most of the innovation spend is coming from smaller businesses, those with fewer than 250 employees. This may indicate an entrepreneurial spirit, so is to be welcomed, but larger businesses have all but stopped their investments.
If one contrasts the percentage of local GDP devoted to I&D with that derived from tourism (80%, give or take the odd percentage point), one gets some perspective as to the gap which exists between the present of tourism and the future of greater technology. The contrast doesn't give an exact picture of the relative sizes of particular industrial sectors, but it does give an indication as to the difference between the hope for technology and the reality. As Mallorca is, effectively, a one-product island, the need for more intense development is pressing, and 2020 is now an awful lot closer than it was when Antich came into government in 2007.
The political agenda, overshadowed as it is by issues not central to the economic future of Mallorca, needs to sharpen up. The discourse ahead of coming local elections will doubtless be dragged down by discussions of corruption, language and other such side-shows when it should be one in which the parties engage in clear visions of the future. A party that is willing to establish the right framework, in terms of incentives and funding, that can facilitate a more diverse economy would be one well worth listening to.
Mallorca has shown that it has the skills, the people and the appetite for innovation. All it needs is a real political will and not just the spin that was spun in 2007. If it gets it, then 2020 may yet become a reality.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
A Christmas Carol: Mallorca's tourism funding
Father Christmas, in the form of the national tourism secretary, Joan Mesquida, has filled the stocking of the Tiny Tim, impoverished tourism coffers of Mallorca and the islands. The Scrooges of central government have been visited by the ghost of tourism past and been reminded as to how things once were and by the ghost of tourism future to show how things might be, were they not to mend their miserly ways.
Well, something like this anyway. The new compassion will see President Cratchit and his starving regional family tucking into a turkey of 54 million euros of tourism money in 2011. For now, they can eat well on the plump bird, but will it turn out to be a turkey of a different variety? What's the money to be spent on?
The breast will go towards the Playa de Palma and Palacio de Congresos projects and towards something called the "Plataforma Digital Turística"; the legs (around 20 million euros) will go on promoting "alternative" tourism, i.e. that designed to cope with the problems caused by seasonality. One gets an awful sinking feeling and an awful vision of Marley's ghost taunting President Cratchit that this might not be the tourism future he would hope for.
Playa de Palma and its failings we know about. The Palacio de Congresos, notwithstanding Mesquida's Christmas bonus, is short of at least 30 million euros to enable the project to advance. The money will be welcome, but will it guarantee that the project is completed any time soon?
Then there is this "Plataforma". This was heralded with much fanfare during the ITB fair in Berlin in March. The trumpets were blown, but the marching band was nowhere to be seen or heard. Where was the money to pay for it? Microsoft had agreed to write the score, but Bill Gates' largesse and philanthropy do not extend to governmental projects being undertaken for nothing. There is no such thing as a free launch of a new technology initiative.
What is the "Plataforma" exactly? Peio Oiz of Microsoft has said that it isn't a website so much as a "unique store" or interconnected digital warehouse if you like, the main advantage of which will be to bring together technology systems of tour operators, travel agencies, hotels, the complementary sector (restaurants and so on) and others. It will bring pretty much everything to do with tourism together in one place, but as a system for business efficiency as opposed to one that actively promotes to the wider tourism world.
What it really means in practice, however, remains to be seen. We should find out by April next year. Thereafter, we might also discover what sort of benefits it brings. It is, though, further evidence of the type of thing Mallorca does well, which is the development of technologies for tourism purposes. The investment seems sound enough.
Finally, there is the 20 million for "alternative tourism". Not for the first time, you do have to wonder as to where responsibilities lie. Only a couple of days before the announcement of the 54 million euros windfall, the Council of Mallorca was saying that the Mallorca Tourism Foundation would be spending 3.6 million euros next year on its promotion.
You lose track of who does what and indeed of what promotional bodies there are. The Foundation will, though, be concentrating on what it calls "product clubs" - film, conventions, golf, hiking, cycling, yachting, culture and emerging markets. This does at least seem to chime with the 20 million euros that are being earmarked from central government's funds. But, as has been asked before, why are there different agencies doing essentially the same things?
The best you can say is that they do at least sing from the same hymn sheet, but perhaps this is also indicative of a problem that besets tourism decision-making. It is group thought, predicated on these "product clubs", some of which seem tenuous in terms of benefits they might actually deliver. But it is unchallenged groupthink. It is taken as gospel, and the choirs sing the same hymn over and over to little effect.
The Christmas present is not one to be rejected and placed on eBay, but before we start mistaking it too much as the cheer of the ghost of Christmas present, it should be noted that nowhere is there any mention of the bread and butter of mainstream summer tourism and its promotion. The money from central government will come in handy, but let's not forget that the tourism ministry is in debt. What the funding for promotion in 2011 is to be is not clear.
Sadly, one also has to be sceptical about many of the announcements that are made about tourism. Go back to the fair in Berlin in March and the tourism minister, Joana Barceló, was adding to the news about the "Plataforma" by saying that there was to be a "total union" of all those in the tourist sector, a kind of grand meeting to address competitiveness. It was going to take place in September. So where the Dickens was it?
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Well, something like this anyway. The new compassion will see President Cratchit and his starving regional family tucking into a turkey of 54 million euros of tourism money in 2011. For now, they can eat well on the plump bird, but will it turn out to be a turkey of a different variety? What's the money to be spent on?
The breast will go towards the Playa de Palma and Palacio de Congresos projects and towards something called the "Plataforma Digital Turística"; the legs (around 20 million euros) will go on promoting "alternative" tourism, i.e. that designed to cope with the problems caused by seasonality. One gets an awful sinking feeling and an awful vision of Marley's ghost taunting President Cratchit that this might not be the tourism future he would hope for.
Playa de Palma and its failings we know about. The Palacio de Congresos, notwithstanding Mesquida's Christmas bonus, is short of at least 30 million euros to enable the project to advance. The money will be welcome, but will it guarantee that the project is completed any time soon?
Then there is this "Plataforma". This was heralded with much fanfare during the ITB fair in Berlin in March. The trumpets were blown, but the marching band was nowhere to be seen or heard. Where was the money to pay for it? Microsoft had agreed to write the score, but Bill Gates' largesse and philanthropy do not extend to governmental projects being undertaken for nothing. There is no such thing as a free launch of a new technology initiative.
What is the "Plataforma" exactly? Peio Oiz of Microsoft has said that it isn't a website so much as a "unique store" or interconnected digital warehouse if you like, the main advantage of which will be to bring together technology systems of tour operators, travel agencies, hotels, the complementary sector (restaurants and so on) and others. It will bring pretty much everything to do with tourism together in one place, but as a system for business efficiency as opposed to one that actively promotes to the wider tourism world.
What it really means in practice, however, remains to be seen. We should find out by April next year. Thereafter, we might also discover what sort of benefits it brings. It is, though, further evidence of the type of thing Mallorca does well, which is the development of technologies for tourism purposes. The investment seems sound enough.
Finally, there is the 20 million for "alternative tourism". Not for the first time, you do have to wonder as to where responsibilities lie. Only a couple of days before the announcement of the 54 million euros windfall, the Council of Mallorca was saying that the Mallorca Tourism Foundation would be spending 3.6 million euros next year on its promotion.
You lose track of who does what and indeed of what promotional bodies there are. The Foundation will, though, be concentrating on what it calls "product clubs" - film, conventions, golf, hiking, cycling, yachting, culture and emerging markets. This does at least seem to chime with the 20 million euros that are being earmarked from central government's funds. But, as has been asked before, why are there different agencies doing essentially the same things?
The best you can say is that they do at least sing from the same hymn sheet, but perhaps this is also indicative of a problem that besets tourism decision-making. It is group thought, predicated on these "product clubs", some of which seem tenuous in terms of benefits they might actually deliver. But it is unchallenged groupthink. It is taken as gospel, and the choirs sing the same hymn over and over to little effect.
The Christmas present is not one to be rejected and placed on eBay, but before we start mistaking it too much as the cheer of the ghost of Christmas present, it should be noted that nowhere is there any mention of the bread and butter of mainstream summer tourism and its promotion. The money from central government will come in handy, but let's not forget that the tourism ministry is in debt. What the funding for promotion in 2011 is to be is not clear.
Sadly, one also has to be sceptical about many of the announcements that are made about tourism. Go back to the fair in Berlin in March and the tourism minister, Joana Barceló, was adding to the news about the "Plataforma" by saying that there was to be a "total union" of all those in the tourist sector, a kind of grand meeting to address competitiveness. It was going to take place in September. So where the Dickens was it?
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
White Heat Of Technology: Mallorca's future
There are thirteen new commercial projects in Mallorca, the consequence of the raising of the moratorium on their building. Let's all celebrate. Evidence of recovery, evidence of confidence in Mallorca as a place to invest. If only.
What are these projects? They are ones being undertaken by Mercadona and Lidl. Ever more supermarkets. The others are a commercial centre and a Chinese-bazar hypermarket. Why not add a few more? All McDonald's, and then the picture would be complete and appropriate. "McJob", low-paid employment and short-term construction work on commercial buildings that rise up quickly. The new projects are not evidence of a suddenly reinvigorated economy. They are the opposite: a response to the economic crisis-led demand for lower prices.
The director-general of trade at the Balearic Government's trade and industry ministry believes that these projects represent a "good rhythm" of investment. They are not unwelcome, but equally they are not diversification or wealth-generation. Their arrival has more to do with the ending of the moratorium than with real investment. Moreover, they can be seen in the context of what has been happening to the island's industrial estates. New ones come along, and are under-utilised, while old ones are abandoned by smaller businesses because of high rents or are given over to car showrooms and entertainment centres. Mallorca's industrial, manufacturing and skills base is marginalised in favour of the unnecessary and frivolous.
The trade and industry ministry should be looking for investments beating to an entirely different rhythm to those of groceries and the fish and meat counter. The need for diversification away from the unsustainable tourism-centred economic model of Mallorca is, to be fair to the ministry and to the government, understood. A strategy for innovation and development is reaping some benefit, as evidenced by the number of businesses that have sprung up on Palma's ParcBit technology park. Taken as a whole, they offer new employment opportunities and the prospect of business growth. Mallorca's hopes of becoming a Silicon Valley or a silicon beach are fanciful, but this is not a reason not to follow a technological future.
The quest for an economy in Mallorca not so dangerously dependent upon tourism has been too long in the starting. The seduction of tourism has been understandable, but it has been proven to be built on the sands of shifting tourist demand and international competition. Its dominance has also reinforced the hugely unsatisfactory six-months-on, six-months-off work culture, itself unsustainable. The service model, based on tourism, supermarkets, the plethora of lawyers and architects and any number of unproductive public-sector pen-pushers, is not a solution for the long-term. A far greater mix with technology and industry founded on new technologies has to be the way forward for Mallorca.
To this end, there is some good news. In Inca, a company called Vent Illes is due to start production of wind turbines for the generation of electricity. It will create thirty jobs. Not a huge number, but it's something. It is also indicative of the development of technology founded on local resources and know-how. Wind is very much a resource, but the Vent Illes turbines require very little wind. They are designed with the constraints caused by a limited resource - land - in mind. They are practical for locations where colossal wind farms would be untenable: other islands, for instance. It is the one eye on export possibilities that makes the Vent Illes scheme particularly interesting.
The home market, that in Mallorca, is too limited to offer local technology companies the scope for expansion and for creating significant employment opportunities. They need to be export-driven, just like Mallorca's most successful businesses, its world-class hotel chains, have, irony of ironies, exported tourism know-how to competitor destinations.
The hope is that the incubation of new-technology businesses in ParcBit, together with the likes of Vent Illes, creates a momentum towards the clustering of further businesses, thus establishing a dynamic which, while it will not completely transform the economy, will at least send it down the road to a more diverse future. It will be one predicated on what Mallorca can do well, such as marine technology and its export, and it will mean far more than the few months of tourism employment or being a shelf-stacker at a new commercial project.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
What are these projects? They are ones being undertaken by Mercadona and Lidl. Ever more supermarkets. The others are a commercial centre and a Chinese-bazar hypermarket. Why not add a few more? All McDonald's, and then the picture would be complete and appropriate. "McJob", low-paid employment and short-term construction work on commercial buildings that rise up quickly. The new projects are not evidence of a suddenly reinvigorated economy. They are the opposite: a response to the economic crisis-led demand for lower prices.
The director-general of trade at the Balearic Government's trade and industry ministry believes that these projects represent a "good rhythm" of investment. They are not unwelcome, but equally they are not diversification or wealth-generation. Their arrival has more to do with the ending of the moratorium than with real investment. Moreover, they can be seen in the context of what has been happening to the island's industrial estates. New ones come along, and are under-utilised, while old ones are abandoned by smaller businesses because of high rents or are given over to car showrooms and entertainment centres. Mallorca's industrial, manufacturing and skills base is marginalised in favour of the unnecessary and frivolous.
The trade and industry ministry should be looking for investments beating to an entirely different rhythm to those of groceries and the fish and meat counter. The need for diversification away from the unsustainable tourism-centred economic model of Mallorca is, to be fair to the ministry and to the government, understood. A strategy for innovation and development is reaping some benefit, as evidenced by the number of businesses that have sprung up on Palma's ParcBit technology park. Taken as a whole, they offer new employment opportunities and the prospect of business growth. Mallorca's hopes of becoming a Silicon Valley or a silicon beach are fanciful, but this is not a reason not to follow a technological future.
The quest for an economy in Mallorca not so dangerously dependent upon tourism has been too long in the starting. The seduction of tourism has been understandable, but it has been proven to be built on the sands of shifting tourist demand and international competition. Its dominance has also reinforced the hugely unsatisfactory six-months-on, six-months-off work culture, itself unsustainable. The service model, based on tourism, supermarkets, the plethora of lawyers and architects and any number of unproductive public-sector pen-pushers, is not a solution for the long-term. A far greater mix with technology and industry founded on new technologies has to be the way forward for Mallorca.
To this end, there is some good news. In Inca, a company called Vent Illes is due to start production of wind turbines for the generation of electricity. It will create thirty jobs. Not a huge number, but it's something. It is also indicative of the development of technology founded on local resources and know-how. Wind is very much a resource, but the Vent Illes turbines require very little wind. They are designed with the constraints caused by a limited resource - land - in mind. They are practical for locations where colossal wind farms would be untenable: other islands, for instance. It is the one eye on export possibilities that makes the Vent Illes scheme particularly interesting.
The home market, that in Mallorca, is too limited to offer local technology companies the scope for expansion and for creating significant employment opportunities. They need to be export-driven, just like Mallorca's most successful businesses, its world-class hotel chains, have, irony of ironies, exported tourism know-how to competitor destinations.
The hope is that the incubation of new-technology businesses in ParcBit, together with the likes of Vent Illes, creates a momentum towards the clustering of further businesses, thus establishing a dynamic which, while it will not completely transform the economy, will at least send it down the road to a more diverse future. It will be one predicated on what Mallorca can do well, such as marine technology and its export, and it will mean far more than the few months of tourism employment or being a shelf-stacker at a new commercial project.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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