The Balearic Islands leave behind the tourist containment policies that they had begun to implement to stop the enormous saturation that the archipelago has suffered for years, most notably during the summer months. The political change in the Balearic Government, with the victory of the popular Marga Prohens in the regional elections on May 28, will bring with it the end of the moratorium on new tourist places that her predecessor in office, Francina Armengol, approved two years ago. .
It is the most direct turn that Prohens is preparing, but it will not be the only one. The new Balearic Minister of Tourism, Jaume Bauzà, announces far-reaching reforms that will affect the tourism brake law approved in the previous legislature. The law established a mechanism for the progressive elimination of hotel beds that will also disappear. The obsolete hotel beds will once again form part of a bag that can be acquired when new establishments are to be built. The new president will recover the model that was in force until now and that Armengol's team eliminated.
In the four Balearic Islands there are some 450,000 tourist places between hotel accommodation and vacation rentals for a population that on July 1 added 1.2 million inhabitants. In recent years, the voices calling for a tourist regulation that limits mass tourism to the islands have multiplied. Not only are environmental organizations asking for it, but even some large hoteliers, such as Gabriel Escarrer, from Melià, or Carmen Riu, from the chain that bears his name, have shown themselves in favor of limiting rooms so that the islands do not die of success, especially with regard to vacation rentals, the great competition of the hotel sector.
Prohens defends, however, that the policies of tourism decrease postulated by the left also suppose economic decrease, hence in this new tourist regulation announced by the Minister of Tourism, with "maximum institutional consensus", in addition to the suppression of the moratorium , there are two major changes. One of them provides for the possibility that tourist accommodation and the complementary offer can grow in places as long as the renovation involves an increase in category and the incorporation of energy efficiency measures.
The president of the Mallorca Hotel Federation, María Frontera, supports these measures which, according to her argument, will improve the quality of the entire sector. In any case, for Frontera, one of the priorities of the new Executive must be the fight against the illegal tourist offer, especially that which occurs through the platforms that offer tourist rentals.
In this proposal for the improvement and expansion of the hotel plant, the new Government is inspired by a similar regulation that was approved during the government of José Ramón Bauzá (2011-2015). It made it possible for most of the hotels in Platja de Palma, the main tourist enclave of the Balearic capital, to go up two storeys in a renovation process that, in parallel, led them to go up in category to four and five stars.
Another change that Prohens is preparing has to do with tourist rental places: it has announced that it will allow some 90,000 that remain in a legal limbo to surface, since they were created before there was a specific regulation and they had to disappear and not enter the stock market. of places when they were discharged.
In this transformation of the tourist model that began the pact of the left, there is another element: the cruises. The port of Palma is, together with that of Dubrovnik, the only one in the entire Mediterranean in which a limitation on the daily number of ships has been established. Only three can dock a day and only one that is considered a mega-cruise with more than 10,000 passengers. The main streets of Palma overflow every time a cruise ship disembarks, but the small merchants believe that the limitation is detrimental to them and they ask the new Government to put an end to it. The Minister of Tourism assures that he is willing to listen to them, but specifies that any change will not be adopted before 2025 since for the moment the agreement with the shipping companies will be maintained to limit arrivals during 2024, the date on which the agreed limitations end.
The change of government in the Balearic Islands, which will mean a profound transformation in the tourist containment policies, is announced with the islands full of vacationers in a month of August with hotels at 90% and the airports of Palma, Maó and Eivissa with a record of arrivals: during this bridge, one of the busiest of the year, 7,482 flights are expected on the islands, almost one arrival or departure every minute.
