Hoteliers deny Mallorca is a crowded destination
The president of the Mallorca Hotel Federation (FEHM), Javier Vich, has said that it “utterly false” that Mallorca is an overcrowded destination and has predicted that the coming tourist season will be similar to last year’s. He made the comments on Wednesday at the ITB tourism fair in Berlin after holding meetings with various German tour operators, to whom he stressed that Mallorca “is not an overcrowded, saturated or collapsed destination”.
“We have, like any destination in the world, specific places where we do have a tourist influx due to the popularity of the place. But we have to send a message that it is not possible to generalise when we talk about overcrowding, because it is not the reality, it is categorically false,” he said. The tour operators, he said, have not expressed their concern about saturation, which, he insisted, is limited to “four, five or six areas that do have a large influx of tourists”.
A little earlier he had pointed out that this feeling of overcrowding is only perceived in “certain streets, not to say four streets in the city of Palma”, in the same way as when visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris or Central Park in New York. “We cannot deny that,” he conceded, and proposed to solve these specific problems with “management” and the use of technologies, as is already being done in other tourist destinations.
He admitted that there is a feeling of “fatigue” among hoteliers due to the fact that saturation has become part of the political debate. “It is important that with our main industry - which last year made 22.4 billion euros, he qualified - we are very cautious with messages that do not correspond to reality,” he insisted.