Being For The Benefit Of The Hoteliers

So, CAEB, the Balearics Business Confederation, has announced that this year's bumper tourism season has only benefited the hoteliers. Talk about making a statement of the bleeding obvious. I have a question for CAEB. Why has it not previously been making a song and dance about the imbalances that exist within the island's tourism industry?

One reason may be because of the diverse range of business interests that CAEB represents. Go back to May of last year, as an example, and CAEB was in a state of internal strife, some associations within it backing the regional government's tourism law and others not.

This lack of unity says much for how tourism operates in Mallorca. There are competing groups with competing self-interests which find it hard to create a coherent and single voice to challenge the business voice which is heard with clarity and one purpose - that of the hoteliers. The tourism law, criticised for having been a law for the hoteliers, was exposed to all too little opposition because of the fragmented nature of what opposition there was.

It is only now that this fragmentation is beginning to coalesce into something like a powerful alternative voice. The association which represents attractions was another which had been largely disregarded until the director of Palma Aquarium assumed its leadership and began to push for a far more co-ordinated approach by businesses from the non-hotel complementary sector. CAEB's announcement, one made in fact by the head of its restaurant association, can be seen as further evidence of dissatisfaction belatedly being expressed by this sector. Other groups which have been saying similar things include the Chamber of Commerce and the islands' major retailers.

A current preoccupation with seasonality and the lack of winter tourism produces debate which is a diversion. Regardless of whatever solutions might or more likely would not be arrived at, would similar dynamics to those of the summer not be at play? Open up more hotels and what type of accommodation might be offered? Bring in more tourists off-season and what sort of spend will they have? Why would trends towards more all-inclusive packages and towards lower spend be any less relevant were there more winter tourism?

The winter tourism debate is a diversion away from the underlying weaknesses of summer tourism. There is no weakness in terms of numbers of tourists, and there is unlikely to ever be such a weakness, but the numbers obscure the real issues, something to which CAEB has now alluded when it questions tourism spending statistics. Why question them now? Why has a professional body for so long apparently failed to appreciate that these statistics are compiled for a particular purpose - in order to satisfy a Bank of Spain requirement for balance of payments measures - that does not correspond with the real tourism economy?

It has also taken an inordinately long time for professional, non-hotel bodies to wise up to the contribution that non-hotel tourism accommodation makes to the Mallorcan economy. The Chamber of Commerce produced very revealing research about the levels of such accommodation way back in 2006, but why does it seem that it took the change in the national tenancy law this summer to shake business associations into beginning to voice strong opposition to the government's pro-hotel stance?

For the good of Mallorca's tourism industry, one would hope that there might be a unified voice which expresses the needs of all the industry's sectors, but there seems little chance of such a hope being fulfilled. The tourism ministry, as with the government as a whole, doesn't do dialogue. Witness what happened when Carlos Delgado said he was looking for consensus with regard to holiday rentals in August. He got it, but from whom? Not the business associations but from town halls and island administrations beaten into submission.

The ministry cannot be totally blamed for there not being a unified voice and a unified view of Mallorca's tourism. In the lead-up to the passing of the tourism law, there was a truce between the hoteliers and the complementary sector, the latter hopeful of gaining from the law by presenting a solid front. It was a naïve hope, and the hoteliers and the complementary sector have been at each other's throats ever since, the complementary sector pausing only to try and wring the ministry's neck.

The sadness in all this is that these three agencies - government, hoteliers and complementary sector - should be sitting together in order to come to an understanding of and to create a vision of Mallorca's tourism over the next couple of decades. The tourism market is constantly evolving and developments can be expected to be more rapid, but where is the unity of purpose to facilitate an appreciation of and response to these developments? There isn't one.