Mallorca's New Model Tourism

It was over forty years ago. On the ferry to Mykonos I met two girls. There was a gaggle of locals at the harbour. One of them offered us accommodation. When we got there, he showed us a room with two beds. Then he pulled a third bed down from the wall. Three in a room.

I don't suppose that the owner for one moment considered declaring the drachma for tax. Equally, did he give any consideration to insurance, health and safety, overcrowding implications of the room? Who did? Travel was an adventure. Surprise and discovery were constant companions.

This was in 1972. A year later, Mykonos, like Mallorca and everywhere else, was caught up in the oil crisis. It was a watershed. The oil crisis caused a psychological upheaval as much as it did an economic one. For tourism destinations it was a time to cast off childish things, to grow up. Tourism had, until then, been an industry in search of a model. It had happened as opposed to having been designed. Yes, there had been Spain's Stabilisation Plan, one which had decreed the essential need for foreign exchange, with tourism the principal provider. But the rest ... ?

It did of course help that Franco died. The transition, allied to the fallout from the oil crisis, created the means for an assessment, and the analysis was not altogether positive. There was increased wealth, increased employment, but at what costs? Cultures had been left in tatters, a consequence of migration. The environment had been vandalised and abused. Workers had been exploited and left to hunt for building work in winter. Wealth was uneven. Some had grown fat and they were growing fatter with every bulldozing of dunes to make way for coastal development. There's a word for it: Balearisation.

As with Mykonos there were locals who had rooms. No one was bothered with standards and certainly not with tax. But it (and so the renting of private accommodation), as with the environment, culture, workers' rights, were to become key ingredients of democratic government and legislation. A model of tourism, a coherent one, was supposedly being created, one that also took account of the massive vulnerability that the oil crisis had exposed: a dependency on foreign tour operators.

If one comes forward to today, what has changed? Whatever is said to the contrary, environmental controls are great. The abuses of the 1960s and 1970s cannot happen again. The restoration of culture has been a triumph. But the model has failed to address the rest. Indeed, over the decades the model has made more acute the inherent vulnerability of the economy. It became a case of dependency on tourism per se and not just on the providers of this tourism.

Accommodation, issues of overcrowding, seasonality, pay and conditions; there is nothing essentially new about any of them. A novelty now lies with a style of politics, one antagonistic to the diktats of Big Tourism. The new model that is alluded to by the likes of Biel Barceló is one of empowerment of the islands and control of their tourism affairs, but they said this after the oil crisis without the aid of eco-nationalist, left-wing politicians.

It is a model to generate wider distribution of wealth, to eat into harmful seasonality, to create increased job security and higher wages. It is a model to also bring about greater diversification of the economy, and so is a model that is laudable in each and every one of its aims. But.

Tourism has created its own unstoppable realities, such as pleasure domes unrecognisable to a time traveller from the 1970s. It provides a parallel universe of human occupation in the lands that it craves, such as Mallorca: it is the most peculiar of industries. But it is a global one, some players in which are Mallorcan. No island is an island in the global tourism market. Yet Mallorcan politicians - some of them - appear to believe that it is. They take aim at the hoteliers in espousing the new model, while avoiding the real global powers: the same ones of the oil crisis.

Much as there is talk of a new model, they can't define it. Which is why there is a grand debate with the aim of working out what it is and what it will mean, for example, for the chap with his room (apartment) to rent out. It is a model that demands sophisticated analysis. Tourism itself has advanced massively in terms of its sophistication, but the politicians don't all give the same impression. They prefer insults and triumphalism, as in having pulled off the tourist tax to the fury of most of the industry.

To achieve this model, though, requires making all players part of the design and the solutions not perceived destroyers and villains. If they are, then finally there might be a true model of tourism.

Don't Go Near The Balearics Stand

Who would be King Felipe and Queen Letizia when you innocently get caught up in a political spat? Following the gathering of the great and good at the Fitur travel/tourism fair in Madrid, the media enjoy offering various Fitur perspectives - expectations for the coming season as revealed at the fair, general tendencies in the tourism industry, this type of thing. And there are also perspectives on who did what or who didn't do what, which is where the royals come in. Felipe and Letizia, regular holidaymakers in Mallorca, didn't drop by the Balearics stand at Fitur. This had never happened before: the Balearics pavilion is always graced with the presence of royalty. Cue, talk of some type of conspiracy.

As it turns out, there was another stand which the royals didn't go to, that for the Canary Islands. Two and two have been put together and the sum of four is that the royals had received orders from the ministry for industry, energy and tourism, José Manuel Soria, for them to not go to either of the stands. Orders!? A minister ordering the royals? Far-fetched though this might seem, a breaking with royal tradition had to be explained somehow. Hence, the Soria theory. And why would he be issuing "orders" to the royals? Because he wanted to punish both the Balearics and the Canaries owing to their opposition to oil prospecting. Remember that Soria does head a vast ministry with occasionally competing interests, such as oil and energy on the one hand and tourism where the waters are crystal clear and the horizons should never be sullied with the sights of oil platforms on the other.

In the Balearic parliament they were engaging in their own post-Fitur debrief (aka slanging match). Spokespeople from Més were convinced that there was no other explanation for the royals' apparent snub of the Balearics stand than the lousy relations between President Bauzá and Soria (indeed it had been reported that Bauzá was "furious" about the alleged veto of the Balearics stand). Clashes over oil prospecting aside, it was being suggested a year or so ago that Bauzá was after Soria's job, and they have studiously managed to avoid being photographed together ever since or even having to meet, as was the case at the large Berlin travel fair in March last year. Both managed to succumb at the same time to a dose of the flu which prevented their travelling.

Does it really matter if the royals give the stand a miss once in a while? Does it even mean a great deal for them to go to the stand? It probably does matter, especially for Balearics' promotion to the domestic tourist market, which is more likely to see photographic evidence of the visit than the international one. These little things might seem just that - little - but they do all add up. Moreover, it needs stressing that the Balearics and the Canaries combine with Catalonia in contributing 60% of all Spain's tourism. This is something which is deserving of royal acknowledgement and should indeed be deserving of political praise, but at present there is a tourism minister, Soria, who has fallen out with the Balearics and with his home islands of the Canaries, while there is a region - Catalonia - about which we are fully aware of governmental tensions. It isn't a terribly healthy state of tourism affairs.

Given that soundings off the Canaries, if not the Balearics as yet, have led Repsol to decide to discontinue exploration - the oil and gas is of insufficient quality to warrant actual drilling - it seems churlish that Soria might still harbour a grudge against the Canaries, one strong enough to issue instructions to the King as regards which stands he should visit or shouldn't. But then, who knows how far petty political vendettas might extend? Certainly not as far as the Canaries' largest hotel chain, Lopesan, which did receive the royals at its stand. And it was the large hotel chains in Mallorca to which Més also turned its parliamentary attention. These large groups dictate government policy on tourism, it was claimed, and so there needs to be a new "tourism model" for the islands. It is hard to disagree with the claim regarding hotelier power, but as for a new model of tourism, was this Més seeking to claim bragging rights on a change in direction after the next election?

They are lining up on the left of centre to be the initiators of such a change, whatever this might be. Should the large hoteliers be concerned? Not really, given the amount they invest in other parts of the globe. By Fitur 2016, will any change have been effected? Doubtful. But by 2017, you never know, Podemos might have scrapped the monarchy. Then no one could argue about which stands are being visited or not.