The Battles For Mallorca's Tourism

Pre-election skirmishes they may be, but battle lines are nevertheless being drawn in the velvety white sands of Mallorca's tourism. Following the revelation (one that was not in the least bit surprising) of the eco-tax being revived by a pact of parties on the left, the Mallorca Hotel Party (aka Federation) and its presidential candidate, Inma de Benito, came out all guns blazing, seeking to shoot down eco-tax revivalism before it has any chance of being truly re-born. There was as little surprise at the hoteliers' objections as there had been at the left's rediscovered love affair with the tax. Meanwhile, Tourism Public Enemy Number One, the secretary-general of Podemos in the Balearics, Alberto Jarabo, had raised hackles sufficiently well for Calvia's Partido Popular to go into full anti-Podemos mode. At the council meeting, Jarabo's "threats" to the hotels were being condemned by PP-ites, desperately worried that they might be out of jobs come May.

Jarabo had of course riled some within the ranks of Podemos itself, and reactions like those of the Calvia PP might be said to give too much prominence to someone whose grasp on tourism may not be all that it seems. When Jarabo was justifying the return of the eco-tax, he referred to its implementation in Catalonia and Madrid. He was right on Catalonia but he was wrong about Madrid (and this, despite the fact that he comes from Madrid). There is no tourist tax in Madrid. Still, we have become used to Majorcan politicians having only limited knowledge of tourism matters. Bauzá once suggested that the Baltic countries were competitors to Mallorca's summer tourism. Prior to this assertion, no one else had ever made such a claim, and they certainly haven't done so since.


Someone who does have intimate understanding of Mallorca's tourism is Calvia town hall veteran Jaime Martínez. The larger than your average tourism minister bear has such deep knowledge that it is produced in a 50-page document replete with many-coloured graphs and pie charts, statistics and percentages. The "balance" of Balearics tourism in 2014 was presented for us all to see, and we could only but admire a ministerial ability to use presentation software. Before publishing this consultants' dream of a document, Jaime had been telling us how positive January's tourism had been. He stopped short of describing it as "historic" (one of his favoured adjectives) but a 21% increase in January's international tourism was cause for celebration and for confirming that the ministry's paltry promotional spend on travel fairs and blogger trips was paying off. However, when one considered the numbers for all of January's tourism, it became apparent that half of it was made up Spanish pensionistas, whose spend is just a fraction above zero, while state-subsidised pensioners from countries like Denmark were also in the mix (and they spend only a fraction more than their Spanish counterparts) as were - because tourist arrival statistics do not discriminate - all the various cycling teams, such as Sky and their entourages.