The Balearic archipelago is on its way to reinventing tourism. Several laws passed in recent years and changes in the private sector are paving the way towards a model focused on achieving the same profitability with fewer tourists. The reduction of hotel beds in the archipelago is at the vertex of the objective and, although the authorities of the islands do not say it openly, what they are looking for in the end is that there are fewer tourists on the four islands, but that it be a tourism of more quality.
Last year 16 million tourists arrived in Mallorca, Menorca, Eivissa and Formentera. They have a population of 1.2 million inhabitants, but in the month of August there are more than two million people in the same day on the islands. For years, there has been an area of the Tramuntana mountains that is not allowed to be accessed by private car and in Formentera a limit has been set for cars that can arrive on the island daily during the summer months, something that also demands Ibiza.
The Balearic Islands were already a pioneer more than 20 years ago in the implementation of the first tourist tax and two decades later it is the first tourist territory that has frozen tourist places and will not give more licenses. The objective is to reduce the 450,000 places that currently exist with the reduction of the lower category ones.
“The sector can no longer grow in quantity; You have to set limits, and everyone understands that”, says the Minister of Economic Model and Tourism, Iago Negueruela. In this offensive to limit the offer, a Balearic delegation has met with representatives of the European Union to approve a European regulation that allows the platforms that advertise rentals that do not have a license to be fined. They want to remove from the market all the illegal supply that exists and that is not even accounted for.
Along with these limitations is the agreement so that there are only three cruise stopovers each day in the port of Palma, a measure that is only implemented in Dubrovnik, in addition to the announcement that the Government will buy obsolete hotels in mature areas to convert them into homes, as well as measures to limit excess tourism in some areas of the islands.
But this tourist reinvention is accompanied by actions to promote that, in addition to being an environmentally sustainable destination, the Balearic Islands are also socially sustainable. The new regulations approved incorporate measures to improve the quality of the work of housekeepers, with the obligation that hotels replace their 300,000 beds with other height-adjustable ones to improve working conditions. In addition, all hotels will be obliged to set a maximum number of rooms that the kellys must clean. A few days ago the methodology that must be followed to determine how many rooms can be made based on various parameters, such as the size of the room, its characteristics and the category of the establishment, was approved.
The third great leg of this paradigm shift is focused on environmental circularity. All hotels will have the obligation to make circularity plans so that they are sustainable. The executive vice-president of the Mallorca Hotel Federation, María José Aguiló, assures that the Administration's demands are good, but points out that the sector itself had already made progress and the large hotel chains have made an essential commitment to eliminating boilers from diesel, the use of water and the installation of clean energy.
"This demand that is made to the hotel sector should be made throughout the tourism value chain, not only in hotels," says Aguiló. He points out that the sector was also a pioneer a decade ago in the transformation of hotels and in the renovation of the entire plant. Thanks to that bet, two thirds of the members of the federation are four and five star hotels.
