Overcrowding - Mallorca's tourists' greatest concern

The Palma-based Gadeso Foundation is the only market research outfit that concerns itself with asking tourists on a regular basis what they think about aspects of tourism in Mallorca and the Balearics. The government and the Council of Mallorca aren’t market research bodies. Even so, why do they never ask tourists’ opinions? Hmm.

Anyway, the latest tourist opinion survey, carried out in July, involved 600 interviews. A confidence level of 95.5%, as is stated, and with a five per cent margin of error means that if the survey were conducted 100 times, the results would be the same within a certain percentage point - up to five per cent either way - in 95.5 of the surveys.

It’s not perfect, but this is how market research works, and the respondents do of course need to be random in order to attempt to get as broad a profile as possible. If one were to survey 600 people staying at a three-star all-inclusive in Mallorca, one would obtain very different results to those from 600 people at five-star boutique hotels in Palma. There are caveats, and one accepts there are, but as a general snapshot of opinion there is credibility, as the market research industry operates according to the kind of confidence level and margin of error that Gadeso states.

I mention all this by way of background to a survey which discovered that the principal motivation for tourists choosing Mallorca was not the sun and beach, it was price - 74% - and this was in fact up from 67.3% in 2022. Sun and beach, second in the ranking, was down from 74.2% in 2022 to 69.5%. How can this be, you may well ask. Aren’t prices supposed to be having a negative impact on tourism? Well, according to this part of the survey, they are not. In fact, compared to the Balearics as a whole, the price motivation for Mallorca is higher than a general 70.2% and the highest for all the four islands.

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This said, a different part of the survey asked about the price/quality ratios for hotel accommodation and for the complementary offer. Essentially, this is a perception of value for money. The ratio for Mallorca’s hotels in July 2023 was 6.1. In 2022 it was 6.5. For the complementary offer as a whole it was down from 5.5 to 4.9; this includes the likes of restaurants and shops.

So, does this mean that hotels and complementary offer are overpriced? One can draw this conclusion, but judgement as to the ratio is fairly subjective, more so than asking about motivations for holidaying in Mallorca. A ratio of 6.1 isn’t actually too bad, but 4.9 isn’t great; anything below five can be interpreted thus. The assessment of the restaurant offer, incidentally, is 4.2, although this has risen from 4.0 last year. And also incidentally, the general assessment of Mallorca’s hotels - a rating of 6.3 - was significantly higher than for all-inclusives specifically (3.9) and for holiday rentals (4.6).

The survey moved on to ask about environmental factors. One of these was ‘massification/saturation’; overcrowding, if one prefers. Having previously asked what had happened to all the reports about tourist saturation, there were duly reports of traffic collapse in and on the way to Soller when there was some rain a week or so ago, while the German Stern magazine popped up with its own negative report on the masses at Caló des Moro beach (hardly new). Had I gone too early on wondering why there hadn’t been saturation publicity? Not really. I suspected that once we were into August, a previous lack of attention would be addressed. And it has been, including the Gadeso findings. In Mallorca, there was a minus-4.9, a worse score than the minus-4.0 last year.

Again, this is just a perception, a subjective view. But this negative score does reinforce what tourists have previously implied - that their numbers are too great. On top of this is a low score for transport - 2.9 - while the loyalty index for Mallorca has dropped from 42.2% to 41.8%.

What do we conclude from all this? A conclusion may be that declining loyalty owes more to factors other than price, with overcrowding the greatest concern of all. We have a new government which has made clear that it will banish all talk of tourist decrease that there was under the previous government. But as overcrowding is viewed so negatively, shouldn’t the government at least pay attention to tourist opinion?

The tourism industry loves nothing more nowadays than marketing holiday “experiences”. Yes, but if the experience of the island is overcrowding, then this, more than anything else, may make them decide to go elsewhere.