The 'overbooking' of the 'overbooking': 'Game Over'

When a year before the pandemic, the friend Àlex Dioscórides directed the magnificent documentary ‘Overbooking’, which already highlighted some of the indicators that make us a collapsed island, I believe that neither he nor all the people who saw it were able to imagine that a day would come, just like this start of the season, where not only would politicians have done nothing to reverse the situation, but we would find ourselves with a situation of overbooking of overbooking.If the concept of overbooking refers to overbooking of overbooking I mean the conversion of this over-selling into a permanent strategy, thanks to which collapse is no longer the exception, but the norm, even beyond the high season, as these days. We are not only talking about airlines or hotels, where business overbooking used to occur, but also about tourist rental houses, car rentals and a long etcetera of tourist services and products – also cycle tourism, and how! –, which indirectly generate saturation in the services that we residents need – and pay for –: roads, public transport and, indirectly, health and education, pressured by the population growth that the overbooking of overbooking.That the overbooking of overbooking goes beyond the “sensations” or “caprice” of residents was recently confirmed by the Government itself, when the Forum of Civil Society forced it to make public the results of the resident opinion poll, which indicates that the satisfaction level with tourism had fallen from 71% in 2018 to only 42% in 2024. For the first time, the overbooking of overbooking is causing a more than significant critical mass that is beginning to question the idea of ‘tourism is untouchable, because it's what feeds us’… 77.2% of residents directly blame tourism for the increase in housing prices; 55.4% for the rise in the cost of basic goods and services; 65.5% perceive an excessive saturation of streets, shops, and public transport; 62.3% believe that tourism degrades natural resources and the landscape.A few days ago, on a trip to Sóller, I was able to experience firsthand an overbooking that has been exceeded for some time, where the recipes of politicians, both local and regional, are limited to wanting to "manage better" the flow of cars, but without anyone daring to say that what needs to be done is to reduce, limit, decrease... Sóller is the metaphor for the overbooking of overbooking: living in a postcard town and not being able to leave your home. I would like to see in a few years studies on the increase in respiratory illnesses due to the increase in vehicle traffic, as it is quite evident that this must already be affecting the inhabitants of the municipality in terms of public health, as well as other daily headaches.

In 10 years we will have almost doubled –doubled!– the number of visitors, from 10.9 million in 2016 to probably more than 20 this year. A success, this dying of success. While statistics insist on celebrating new visitor records, we residents feel that the game is about to end. Because when the territory reaches the overbooking of emotional, social and environmental overbooking, the system cannot offer a new round. On an island of finite resources, the excesses we suffer are the last screen before Game Over.The peak of it all is that those who have bet most heavily on overbooking in the name of growth and freedom of enterprise are the ones who most actively oppose regularizing the situation of the people that in recent years the economic system they themselves have created has called to work on our Islands. To work, yes, under conditions of slavery if necessary... But to bring your family, to contribute, or to use healthcare, no... This is also a moral Game Over that will cost us dearly as a society, because, as I have insisted many times, immigration in the Balearic Islands is not a UFO, but a phenomenon that defines us, also, as a people.The height of it all is that the one who has bet the most strongly on the