'Quality' tourism or tourism for the rich? The new frontier of luxury in Mallorca

In the context of the debate about the need for a 'new tourism model', a good friend, in an opinion article, asked a few days ago 'what Mallorca do we want to explain to the world?' and then questioned whether we should continue promoting sun and beach tourism or if we should focus tourist promotion 'also on the landscape, culture, gastronomy, local produce, heritage, innovation, talent, and a Mediterranean way of life'. Personally, to be able to accept the proposal, I find the adverb 'also' superfluous and I need to know if the visitors we want to encourage to come and enjoy our 'local produce' will drive up prices and, as a consequence, raise the economic bar required to go to the restaurants we've been going to all our lives, in other words, if they will gentrify us. If that's the case, I say it now, I'd rather stick with 'traditional' mass tourism.

For many years we have heard a constant hammering insisting on the need to replace our tourism with another 'quality' one. This, without explicitly stating it, means gradually replacing low and middle-class tourists coming from Manchester, Liverpool, Hamburg or Rotterdam with super-rich people from all over the world who arrive by private jet, eat our Sóller prawns and have Iranian caviar brought to them to eat at sunset from mega-yachts. Quality tourism means tourism for the rich who, with their high capacity for super-luxury spending, drive up the prices of everything (restaurants, shops, housing...) and this affects all those who do not reach this same spending capacity, the vast majority of residents in the Archipelago. Someone might say that this has always happened, and indeed it has, but while the victims were the lower classes, few people complained about it, but when gentrifying saturation has begun to spread also to the middle classes, many more people have started to take to the streets to protest. Meanwhile, the oracles of the tourism and real estate business sarcastically respond with the well-known 'it's the economy, stupid'.

And of course, what the top executives (CEO in English) of companies and investment funds that steer the ships of tourism and the real estate sector are concerned about is achieving the objectives of their corporation's strategic plans in order to obtain the corresponding bonuses. This means earning, for their companies, more in Mallorca and Ibiza than what their theoretical colleagues, assigned to manage businesses in other regions of the world such as the Caribbean, the tourist areas of the Gulf oil-producing countries, and those of Southeast Asia, contribute to their company. If they achieve higher economic objectives, perhaps they will be able to manage more profitable tourist areas for them, with more bonuses and, in the long run, who knows if they will coordinate the top executives of the different regions where the company is deployed or, even better, change companies with notable improvements in their contracts. Well, none of this can be achieved with beer and hamburger tourism.

Classist background

The calls for quality tourism have an, at times unconscious, classist background. In the early days of mass tourism, businessmen from companies in Manchester or Hamburg, when going on vacation, were uncomfortable encountering the workers from their factories in England or Germany and having to share the beach with them. Let's consider that, initially, in all tourist areas, accommodations of different categories coincided, unlike now when tourist developments have been specializing in different price categories. And since an expensive hotel brings in more profit than a couple (Mallorcan) of cheap ones, it seems that super-rich tourism, 'quality' tourism, is advancing on the more modest with a kind of new frontier of luxury that encroaches on what was once more popular tourism. It's as if tourist gentrification were also unfolding within the tourism sector itself, not just on local residents, but also on tourists with less spending capacity. Perhaps this is why alternative and uncontrolled forms of cheaper tourism are proliferating, such as shared tourist use apartments, 'guiri refugee flats,' which are not only for immigrants. It seems as if we are facing a new invasion now led by different squadrons of private jets and that the new victims are both tourists and low and middle-class residents.

This business of quality tourism as an alternative to the current tourism model reminds me of the calls for owning homes under a rental regime when, before the explosion of the real estate bubble in 2008, it was invoked as the best option for the hell that mortgage debtors had to suffer. At that time, the example of Vienna always came up, a city without a housing emergency, although not everyone remembered that in the Austrian capital 60% of homes are public and, therefore, rental prices are also public. With a public/private distribution of 60%/40%, a large part of the 40% of private homes that are rented have no choice but to follow the prices set by the administration with which it establishes its 60%. In other words, the free market has to be equated to public prices or it remains without tenants. But now and here, with a predominantly private stock, with free rental prices and no cap, we have had to eat with potatoes that poorly thought-out recipe from the beginning of the century. I think something similar can happen to us if we continue to invoke quality tourism as an alternative to the current tourism model and applaud, without restraint, the arrival of more and more private jets coming to enjoy our 'local product'.