Oh Happy Day - Mallorca tourism promotion

How to win tourists and influence people. Smiling, happy people having fun. It starts at the top of the tourism trade and filters down, reminiscent of days when there was so much more of a personal touch, barbecues on beaches and even the local Guardia coming along and joining in. So recalls ... . So recalls someone who needs to win tourists and influence people. Smiling, happy person. There, on the front page of yesterday's "Bulletin". Like a sullen Frank Langella as Nixon. No, this is the head of the Majorca tourist board. Smiling happy person, winning tourists and influencing people. Why oh why use a photo of someone who looks so terminally hacked off?

Pedro Iriondo, president of the Balearics travel agents association and founder of the agency Viajes Kontiki in 1974, became head of the tourism board at the end of last year. He has been a member of the board's ruling committee for several years and had been its vice-president since 2005. Here he was, granting an interview, which unfortunately says little that we don't already know: why don't the shops open in Palma on a Sunday; the competition that is Turkey and Egypt; the reliance upon tourism in Majorca; the need to exploit golf and other niches, such as nautical tourism; and the need to work closely with tour operators. I'm sure that Sr. Iriondo has some fine ideas, but the interview was thoroughly depressing; a re-hash of what we know to be the case and a distinct sense of the impotent. Take all-inclusives. He doesn't approve, but accepts that there has been a market change. What we already know, and what we already know cannot be put back into the bottle. What we already know, that it is the tour operators who hold the whip-hand.

Iriondo has taken over from Alvaro Middelmann as president of what is known as the Fomento del Turismo. While referred to as the Majorca Tourist Board, it is a private, non-governmental body. The promotion of Majorca and the Balearics, via the government, is handled by the tourism institute IBATUR. The board is thus, as it says on its website, "a forum where everyone in tourism on the island can come and debate important issues, policies and decide on a future tourism strategy". It continues by referring to the need for "forward thinking, consensual solutions for our future", and by "our" one takes this to mean the island's whole tourism industry. The Fomento can lay claim to being the oldest tourist board in Europe. It is, therefore, a body of some not inconsiderable significance and influence. But in its, if you like, mission statement, one comes back to an issue regarding who or which bodies actually drive "future tourism strategy". Is it the government or the private sector? And if it is the latter, then which parts of it?

At the conclusion of the interview, Iriondo says that "we've go to sort out our prices, provide better quality and revive the personal touch". Fine. But where does the impulse come from to do so and how can these things be done? In the interview, he refers to the fact that it is difficult to provide good product at low cost, unlike some competitor countries, to the fact that the personal touch has been lost because of the expansion in size of hotels, and to the know-how of Majorca's hotel groups - several of which can be credited with having high quality, yet which are also, through the export of know-how and their own international ambitions, contributing to the development of competitor destinations. Take a look, for instance, at the Iberostar site and its five-star Bellis complex in Turkey. But to come back to where that impulse might come from, it is worth taking account of the composition of the tourism board's ruling body - three major hotel chains as well as the association of hotel chains, the associations for yacht clubs, golf courses and restaurants, a bank, a car-hire firm ... one could go on. If that lot can't sort something out, then who can.

Majorca, and the Balearics, have experienced difficult times in the past, and the Fomento has acted in the past to revive the island's tourism at times of recession. So it has something of a track record, but Sr. Iriondo believes that the current recession is "different" to previous ones, impacting hard on employment and the tourism industry as a whole and highlighting the economic reliance on tourism. He sees the need for more and more promotion, yet the promotional budget - the government's - has been reduced.

It all, I'm afraid, does add to that rather depressing image. Forward thinking, consensual strategies. Indeed. But rather than an appraisal of what we know, it might be nice to learn what we don't - those strategies in other words, and who exactly is going to implement them.

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