Club de Producto náutico

How many organisations devoted to tourism promotion are needed to market an island? The answer is probably one, but that would be far too simple an answer. It's more like 500. Or that can be how it seems. The town halls, the Council of Majorca's tourism promotion set-up and own department, the same at the regional government, the central government's ministry and promotional outfit, numerous talking-shops of a general tourism nature and then some more specific bodies. Take, for instance, nautical tourism. This alone has a whole raft (sic) of different groups, associations and whatever - those for diving, for yacht hire, for the various yacht (or nautical, if you must) clubs. Then there are the ports authority, the chamber of commerce and its nautical wing, the yacht clubs themselves ... the list goes on, a flotilla of different organisations bobbing on the water of let's try and grab as much well-minted yachtie and boatie-type tourism that's going.

The tourism ministry has now gone and created something called the "Club de Producto náutico". I think you can probably figure out what this means. This "Club", which is not a physical club of course but an abstract one, comprises many of the above and many not even mentioned, one more being the "Estaciones Náuticas de Baleares", of which Alcúdia is one. And no, I don't know what's happened to that either, despite the blaze of publicity earlier this year.

I suppose if you can get all the groups and associations pulling and veering in the right direction, all going starboard rather than some going to port (or should that be the other way round?), then this may be a good idea, but one does wonder at the sheer number and what they actually all do. We can at least be reassured that the Club is part of the whole Marketing Plan being developed, apparently, by Ibatur, which is the regional government's tourism marketing operation. One says reassured as quite how effective the "more than golf" etc message has been and quite how effective the money spent on the Nadal promotions will ever be, who can tell.

I have an aversion to anything that monikers itself "Club" or "Team". Both words are meaningless, bandied about as evidence of either prestige (Club) or of everyone sharing the same goals (Team) when neither is necessarily the case. They are marketing-speak, often a way of giving an impression of something positive being done, when in fact nothing much occurs. Still, maybe this particular Club will work, and it should, as Majorca does have a lot going for it in terms of nautical tourism. If they could only ever agree on moorings and marina developments and ...

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