One does have to be careful with anecdotal evidence. There's plenty of it around. It is of the things-are-so-quiet variety; the never-known-it-like-this sort (in a negative way).
The season is drawing towards its official close. Over the past few weeks, from September onwards there has been this evidence. But it can depend. Let me supply my own contrary evidence. In Alcudia on Tuesday last week I observed how busy things were. It was hard to remember there having been so many coaches this late in the season. There was agreement, one response having to do with the ongoing problem of parking: there were just so many cars around.
A day or so later there was a post on Facebook. It came from a bar. Other bar owners chipped in. They couldn't recall a busier October. These weren't "newbie" bar owners. They've been in Alcudia for years. They've known the very best and the very worst of times. Moreover, they are bars in the main tourism centre, where all-inclusive dominates. What was going on, someone asked. Something must be right for there to be this many people, for business to be as brisk in mid to late October.
A further piece of evidence was at Bellevue, the giant complex of economy-class, overwhelmingly but not exclusively all-inclusive offer. With the capacity for up to 5,000 guests, it isn't necessary to keep all the seventeen blocks open as the season winds down. Yet they only started closing them a week or so back. They would normally have been closed earlier. The solitary bar that serves the outlying part of Bellevue, which is shut down before any other parts, only closed a few days ago. It was a long season for the bar. Uncommonly so.
Two weeks ago there was a report with a headline which referred to a bad end to the season. Evidence was supplied by the Mallorca restaurants association and by one of the associations which represents smaller retailers. Of the two I'm more inclined to listen to the former. The retailers bleat so often that their words are lost amidst their constant complaints and their unwillingness to admit that there is oversupply of non-differentiated offer and fierce market dynamics of the internet and shopping malls. I've all but given up with them. The restaurants, on the other hand, are worthy of attention. Business from September onwards was down ten per cent.
Yet this same report said that in early season - March to May - there had been increases in turnover of up to ten per cent. How does one explain the apparent difference, as explained by these associations, with September and October? September, in particular, is a month always anticipated by businesses. The tourist profile changes from the predominantly family one of August, which isn't typically a high-spending segment. As far as the associations are concerned, the main reason was the lack of tourist spending power. Are tourists in September and October that different to those in April and May that they can mean a yo-yo of up ten and down ten per cent? Generally speaking, they are not.
Lower tourist spending has become the accepted excuse for when things aren't as good as might be hoped. This lower spending can be related to all-inclusive or not. But something happened between spring and autumn which may offer more light on the swing in spending - the holiday rentals' legislation.
One again relies on mostly anecdotal evidence, but there is plenty which suggests that the legislation has had a dramatic impact. With apartments being pulled from the market, it would seem that a good deal of business has dried up, or at least this is the impression formed in those areas with a high reliance on rentals, such as Puerto Pollensa and even Palma.
It is useful to note that Alcudia ranks only three places below Pollensa in a national analysis of the proliferation of holiday rentals per head of population. Alcudia has the fourth highest level in the whole of Spain. But on the basis of what one sees and hears (and even now, closer to the end of the month, things still seem unusually busy), Alcudia is doing well where Pollensa is not.
The number of hotel places is markedly different, yet so many of these places are all-inclusive. So, what gives? Once more, it may well all depend, and much will depend on the sheer level of demand. Where hotel occupancy remains comparatively high right up to the end of the season, general business is ok, regardless of all-inclusive. The other part of the equation must be holiday rentals, and one really does begin to wonder what effect there will be next year. There was a mid-season shock in the form of the legislation. Will that shock persist next year and right through the season?
Showing posts with label Tourism season. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tourism season. Show all posts
Friday, October 27, 2017
Monday, April 07, 2014
The Tourism Season: It's just not cricket
Who said that the season is getting shorter? Quite the opposite. It is getting longer. Fact. In 1964 it started on 2 May. This year it started on 6 April. Ok, some explanation is needed. The season - the tourism season - is underway (sort of), a number of places having opened over the first week of the month, but I'm not referring to the tourism season. The English county cricket season started on Sunday.
Fifty years ago, resident and tourist alike would not just have had to wait until what has become the official start of the tourism season - May - to catch up with the county scores. They would have to have waited for as long as it took for a British newspaper to find its way on to a newsstand. It seems remarkable now, when scores are available in real time, that this delay was still with us until relatively recently, a delay which, before printing in Europe, typically meant that a paper was read a day late. In the good old days of early tourism, it would have been a longer delay. Matches would have finished by the time it was possible to pore over the scorecards for the first day's play.
Had you been a tourist or resident desperate to know the scores from the first matches of the 1964 season, you would have been engrossed by the passage of play of the first two games of that season. They were slow, painfully slow. This was, after all, the era of the young Geoffrey Boycott and the year when the most mind-numbingly dull test match of all time was played - England v. Australia at Old Trafford. Simpson batted into the third day in scoring 300, and Barrington spent most of the rest of the match making 250. The result? It was a foregone conclusion from the first ball. A very bore draw.
Oddly enough, and despite the sheer tedium that was most cricket in the early 1960s, it still had a hold over the nation's sporting affections (the nation largely of course having been England). But then we didn't really know any different. There was a tradition, and this tradition demanded lack of excitement and staidness. It wasn't just cricket. This was British society fifty years ago, one that was right on the cusp of being shaken out of its traditional stuffiness, stiffness and dullness.
For the tourist (British, that is) in search of the cricket scores in 1964, he encountered something that was anything but dull. This was the new world. Yet for all that there was sun, sea and sombreros, British customs demanded that some traditions were transported south. In compiling the history of the last 50 years of Mallorcan tourism for the "Majorca Daily Bulletin" last year, I was struck by how pervasive this export was. Local hotels had to adapt to different tastes, and local bar owners had to learn how to make a proper cuppa.
Cricket, in its longer form, persists with its bizarre ritual of the "tea break". It is doubtful that much tea is now drunk, as the break is a period for a brief encounter with the masseur and for the quaffing of bananas, but it is a relic of a bygone era, when tea was taken around four o'clock: by cricketers and by the rest of Britain. The tourist would have wanted his or her afternoon cuppa as well until he or she came to appreciate that there were alternatives and they were available in industrial quantities at dirt cheap prices.
What any cricket-loving from the early 1960s tourist would have been unable to indulge in would have been a decent game of beach cricket. I don't know if there has ever been any worthy research into the subject, but I would suggest that the rise of the holiday to Mallorca (and other destinations), where beaches are unlike Weston-super-Mare's, had something to do with the decline in cricket's popularity. Football can, after all, be played on soft sand.
For all that it was new and exciting, the Mallorcan holiday back then held true to traditions that were not Mallorca's but were those of other nations, the British in particular. The first phase of tourism was, in a sense, akin to the rituals and norms of English county cricket. Predictability was demanded, but in pandering to this predictability, Mallorca fell foul of the stodginess that typified cricket.
The holiday to Mallorca became, inadvertently therefore, a tradition with the trappings of an imported culture. It required shocks to wake the island out of the stupor that this created, just as it needed shocks to shake cricket out of its torpor. Kerry Packer and the World Series were cricket's equivalent of the oil crisis. And much closer to the present day, the emergence of fast and furious competitors in distant lands - Egypt, Turkey and so on - is like IPL and T20, with the axis of cricket power having been tilted.
Cricket has had to adapt. Its county season starts a month earlier in order to accommodate the brashness of the 20-over thrash. A traditional sport, shaken to its roots, has been able to move with the times. For Mallorca, the most traditional of holiday destinations, the season hasn't truly started. It has typically got later and shorter.
Fifty years ago, resident and tourist alike would not just have had to wait until what has become the official start of the tourism season - May - to catch up with the county scores. They would have to have waited for as long as it took for a British newspaper to find its way on to a newsstand. It seems remarkable now, when scores are available in real time, that this delay was still with us until relatively recently, a delay which, before printing in Europe, typically meant that a paper was read a day late. In the good old days of early tourism, it would have been a longer delay. Matches would have finished by the time it was possible to pore over the scorecards for the first day's play.
Had you been a tourist or resident desperate to know the scores from the first matches of the 1964 season, you would have been engrossed by the passage of play of the first two games of that season. They were slow, painfully slow. This was, after all, the era of the young Geoffrey Boycott and the year when the most mind-numbingly dull test match of all time was played - England v. Australia at Old Trafford. Simpson batted into the third day in scoring 300, and Barrington spent most of the rest of the match making 250. The result? It was a foregone conclusion from the first ball. A very bore draw.
Oddly enough, and despite the sheer tedium that was most cricket in the early 1960s, it still had a hold over the nation's sporting affections (the nation largely of course having been England). But then we didn't really know any different. There was a tradition, and this tradition demanded lack of excitement and staidness. It wasn't just cricket. This was British society fifty years ago, one that was right on the cusp of being shaken out of its traditional stuffiness, stiffness and dullness.
For the tourist (British, that is) in search of the cricket scores in 1964, he encountered something that was anything but dull. This was the new world. Yet for all that there was sun, sea and sombreros, British customs demanded that some traditions were transported south. In compiling the history of the last 50 years of Mallorcan tourism for the "Majorca Daily Bulletin" last year, I was struck by how pervasive this export was. Local hotels had to adapt to different tastes, and local bar owners had to learn how to make a proper cuppa.
Cricket, in its longer form, persists with its bizarre ritual of the "tea break". It is doubtful that much tea is now drunk, as the break is a period for a brief encounter with the masseur and for the quaffing of bananas, but it is a relic of a bygone era, when tea was taken around four o'clock: by cricketers and by the rest of Britain. The tourist would have wanted his or her afternoon cuppa as well until he or she came to appreciate that there were alternatives and they were available in industrial quantities at dirt cheap prices.
What any cricket-loving from the early 1960s tourist would have been unable to indulge in would have been a decent game of beach cricket. I don't know if there has ever been any worthy research into the subject, but I would suggest that the rise of the holiday to Mallorca (and other destinations), where beaches are unlike Weston-super-Mare's, had something to do with the decline in cricket's popularity. Football can, after all, be played on soft sand.
For all that it was new and exciting, the Mallorcan holiday back then held true to traditions that were not Mallorca's but were those of other nations, the British in particular. The first phase of tourism was, in a sense, akin to the rituals and norms of English county cricket. Predictability was demanded, but in pandering to this predictability, Mallorca fell foul of the stodginess that typified cricket.
The holiday to Mallorca became, inadvertently therefore, a tradition with the trappings of an imported culture. It required shocks to wake the island out of the stupor that this created, just as it needed shocks to shake cricket out of its torpor. Kerry Packer and the World Series were cricket's equivalent of the oil crisis. And much closer to the present day, the emergence of fast and furious competitors in distant lands - Egypt, Turkey and so on - is like IPL and T20, with the axis of cricket power having been tilted.
Cricket has had to adapt. Its county season starts a month earlier in order to accommodate the brashness of the 20-over thrash. A traditional sport, shaken to its roots, has been able to move with the times. For Mallorca, the most traditional of holiday destinations, the season hasn't truly started. It has typically got later and shorter.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
MALLORCA TODAY - Threat of strike in tourism season increases
The UGT general workers union in the Balearics has issued a further threat that it will take strike action during the tourism season if negotiations with the hotel and restaurant sector over pay and conditions this summer do not go to its satisfaction. The union is demanding, among other things, a 3% rise in salaries and a 35-hour working week.
See more: El Mundo
See more: El Mundo
Friday, April 13, 2012
MALLORCA TODAY - Unions demand 3% higher wages from hotels and restaurants
The negotiations between unions and businesses that are threatening to cause disruption to the tourism season if they don't go the way the unions want them are still dragging on, the unions making it clear that they expect a 3% wage rise from hoteliers and the restaurant sector as well as a reduction in the working week to 35 hours.
See more: Diario de Mallorca
See more: Diario de Mallorca
Saturday, June 25, 2011
On The Road Again: Road and building works
It will come as a surprise to you, I realise, but there are some things I don't know about. And there are some things that are so terminally dull that I have absolutely zero desire to find out about them. In the normal course of journalistic events, I might be prepared to research, but when it comes to the science of surfacing roads, I'm sorry but I'm going to have to disappoint you.
This said, I do seem to recall that when there was some disgruntlement with road surfacing occurring in Palma that wasn't taking place in winter, the argument went that the work needed to be done when the weather was warm, or indeed stinking hot. Is there some scientific sense to this argument? Quite possibly there is, and as I haven't a clue what I'm talking about when it comes to road surfacing I'm not about to say it's rubbish, except to wonder why some road surfacing is therefore done when it isn't stinking hot.
All this leads me, or would do, had I been able to get along the roads leading to them, to Alcanada and Barcarès in Alcúdia. I was able to get into the bustling heartland of Alcanada the other day, but only by taking a detour through the narrow and twisty lanes that pass for roads that aren't the main road, which was being resurfaced. Fortunately, Alcanada is that far off the beaten track that it has only one hotel and a couple of apartments complexes, which means only the occasional coach. Unfortunately, I encountered it. On the narrow and twisty lanes.
Despite recalling the it-must-be-hot-to-resurface-roads propaganda, it did occur to me to wonder why they were doing this just as the summer really hots up and more tourists arrive. I wondered the same thing when I found the road to Barcarès blocked by the huge leviathans that are road-resurfacing machines. Unlike Alcanada, there isn't really an alternative route, so I gave up. It can wait for another day, or year.
Much work in tourist areas is verboten during the tourist season, except, it would appear, road works. Building work is meant to cease. But it doesn't always cease. Special dispensation can be granted to extend it to mid-June. This was, for example, the town hall's fallback position in Puerto Pollensa when for a time it looked as though work on the church square and roads off might indeed stretch well into the season.
Now beyond mid-June, the poor people of Portocolom have discovered that building works, with the attendant noise and mess, are continuing. Despite being verboten, the town hall has seen fit to stop only one of some ten separate works.
Along the coast from Portocolom, in Porto Cristo they are about to prove that whereas putting things up in summer might be outlawed pulling them down isn't. The Balearics Supreme Court has decreed, in its infinite wisdom and once and for all, that the Riuet bridge must be demolished. As in, well, any time now. The "indignados" of Porto Cristo, many of its population, have had a day out to Palma in order to protest outside the court building. Demolition is a bridge too far. The bridge over the river why (now).
Demolishing the bridge now is about as absurd as having closed it for the summer. It was after all built in the first place in order to counter the traffic chaos in Porto Cristo, so now they've decided to add to it even further. One suspects that members of the Supreme Court have weekend holiday homes elsewhere, such as in Andratx or Soller, i.e. about as far from Porto Cristo as you can get in Mallorca.
Though knocking the bridge down now is plainly daft, I do have some sympathy for building things up in summer, so long of course as it's nowhere near my backyard. Suspending work for six months at a stretch seems like an incredibly inefficient thing to do, to say nothing of the complications it can cause in terms of employment and financing.
But the suspension of works encapsulates, as do road works in summer, the dilemma of tourist areas in Mallorca - that of attempting to reconcile tourism with the normal course of infrastructure development and construction. Tourists, quite naturally, have no wish to listen to drilling or to watch a bridge falling down, but much of this work is done because of tourism. It is the endless quandary; that of balancing the needs of the temporary visitor with the requirements of working towns. It is the latter that the tourist is perhaps too often unaware of; that where they stay are towns, just like the ones they live in.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
This said, I do seem to recall that when there was some disgruntlement with road surfacing occurring in Palma that wasn't taking place in winter, the argument went that the work needed to be done when the weather was warm, or indeed stinking hot. Is there some scientific sense to this argument? Quite possibly there is, and as I haven't a clue what I'm talking about when it comes to road surfacing I'm not about to say it's rubbish, except to wonder why some road surfacing is therefore done when it isn't stinking hot.
All this leads me, or would do, had I been able to get along the roads leading to them, to Alcanada and Barcarès in Alcúdia. I was able to get into the bustling heartland of Alcanada the other day, but only by taking a detour through the narrow and twisty lanes that pass for roads that aren't the main road, which was being resurfaced. Fortunately, Alcanada is that far off the beaten track that it has only one hotel and a couple of apartments complexes, which means only the occasional coach. Unfortunately, I encountered it. On the narrow and twisty lanes.
Despite recalling the it-must-be-hot-to-resurface-roads propaganda, it did occur to me to wonder why they were doing this just as the summer really hots up and more tourists arrive. I wondered the same thing when I found the road to Barcarès blocked by the huge leviathans that are road-resurfacing machines. Unlike Alcanada, there isn't really an alternative route, so I gave up. It can wait for another day, or year.
Much work in tourist areas is verboten during the tourist season, except, it would appear, road works. Building work is meant to cease. But it doesn't always cease. Special dispensation can be granted to extend it to mid-June. This was, for example, the town hall's fallback position in Puerto Pollensa when for a time it looked as though work on the church square and roads off might indeed stretch well into the season.
Now beyond mid-June, the poor people of Portocolom have discovered that building works, with the attendant noise and mess, are continuing. Despite being verboten, the town hall has seen fit to stop only one of some ten separate works.
Along the coast from Portocolom, in Porto Cristo they are about to prove that whereas putting things up in summer might be outlawed pulling them down isn't. The Balearics Supreme Court has decreed, in its infinite wisdom and once and for all, that the Riuet bridge must be demolished. As in, well, any time now. The "indignados" of Porto Cristo, many of its population, have had a day out to Palma in order to protest outside the court building. Demolition is a bridge too far. The bridge over the river why (now).
Demolishing the bridge now is about as absurd as having closed it for the summer. It was after all built in the first place in order to counter the traffic chaos in Porto Cristo, so now they've decided to add to it even further. One suspects that members of the Supreme Court have weekend holiday homes elsewhere, such as in Andratx or Soller, i.e. about as far from Porto Cristo as you can get in Mallorca.
Though knocking the bridge down now is plainly daft, I do have some sympathy for building things up in summer, so long of course as it's nowhere near my backyard. Suspending work for six months at a stretch seems like an incredibly inefficient thing to do, to say nothing of the complications it can cause in terms of employment and financing.
But the suspension of works encapsulates, as do road works in summer, the dilemma of tourist areas in Mallorca - that of attempting to reconcile tourism with the normal course of infrastructure development and construction. Tourists, quite naturally, have no wish to listen to drilling or to watch a bridge falling down, but much of this work is done because of tourism. It is the endless quandary; that of balancing the needs of the temporary visitor with the requirements of working towns. It is the latter that the tourist is perhaps too often unaware of; that where they stay are towns, just like the ones they live in.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Thursday, May 05, 2011
MALLORCA TODAY - Balearics show fall in unemployment
The arrival of the tourism season has led to the Balearics registering a fall in the number of unemployed. The total, in April, was 82,626, but down by 6.2% over March and the largest drop in Spain.
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