The curious case of the Fodor’s ‘No List’

The business of guides’ publishing has changed fundamentally over the decades. It has had to in order to reflect a global travel market and a traveller interest in the whole world. The guides offer way more than they once used to. And for any media business nowadays, there is the importance of web traffic. There have long been lists for this, that and the next thing, but lists are now a stock in trade, as lists command attention and so generate traffic. They also require publicising, which isn’t difficult to obtain, such is the massive consumer interest in travel and the vastness of sources only too happy to use publicity as content.

I say all this as a preamble to what has happened with the Fodor’s No List 2025. This appeared on the Fodor’s website on November 13, 2024. Gradually, this list attracted attention. It did so in Mallorca some six weeks later. On December 23, there was an item on the Bulletin website headlined ‘Britons told to reconsider Mallorca’. A second item appeared on January 2. It had also been mentioned in the Spanish press.

Some online discussion ensued, although not a great deal, and the story was inevitably picked up by elements of the British media who are never slow to run a Mallorca story. But it passed, as these things do; just another Mallorca overtourism yarn. However, on January 8 the Fodor’s article made the front page of one particular Spanish newspaper. By now, one might have thought it was old news. But no, and cue the scrambling for reactions from the Balearic Government, the Council of Mallorca and the Palma 365 Tourism Foundation.

“Maximum respect” was expressed for, inter alia, the assessments that any publication can make about Mallorca. The Council meanwhile noted that Lonely Planet had just included Palma among its top ten cities to visit in 2025. Another list therefore, and with all the possibilities for publicity that this entailed.

While British redtops had alighted on the story with their normal alacrity, Fodor’s was being quoted much wider; Argentina, for instance. And the essence was much the same. Mallorca was on the No List. As Mallorca had previously been, which everyone seemed to ignore, in 2019. This note, contained in the Fodor’s report, was the second mention of Mallorca in the entire report, the only other one having been in the following paragraph:

“This summer, tensions boiled over as protests erupted across the continent. In Spain, Barcelona locals sprayed unsuspecting visitors with water pistols while tens of thousands gathered on beaches in Mallorca and the Canary Islands holding signs that read ‘Your luxury, our misery’ and ‘The Canaries have a limit’. In Venice, crowds gathered at the Piazzale Roma to protest the futility (as they see it) of a new day-trippers entry fee.”

So, this was the extent of the mention of Mallorca, and the report had actually got it wrong, having mistaken beaches for the streets of Palma on two occasions (in May and July). For the thousands on the beaches, read (for instance) the laughable twenty or so on Sa Rapita beach in early June.

But what was this No List? Fodor’s was unequivocal in making clear that it was not advocating travel boycotts. “They harm local economies and fail to bring about meaningful change. But we do believe that the first step in alleviating a problem is recognising there is one. The No List serves to highlight destinations where tourism is placing unsustainable pressures on the land and local communities. And these stresses need to be addressed. That way, the world’s favourite destinations can stay that way for the next generation.”

In other words, Fodor’s was drawing attention to precisely what we will all know (or I hope we all know) to be the pressures and stresses in Mallorca; precisely what has been the subject of so much navel-gazing for months. There was absolutely nothing new, but somehow the treatment of the list rumbled on for a couple of weeks or more, thus affording it ever greater exposure.

Ultimately, though, will it make any difference? That is most unlikely, except conceivably among an American market so coveted by Mallorca’s tourism authorities. Even then one doubts it, and this is for the reason that the issue of tourism sustainability applies so broadly. Mallorca is just one destination. Travellers know there are issues. They can’t avoid knowing them, because there’s always a list to inform them or indeed to entice them.

Of course, one can argue that if the same points are made often enough, travellers will opt not to go to a particular destination. Yes, or maybe they become so accustomed to hearing the same points that they just ignore them.