Farmers to sit on tourist tax board

The recently formed tourism advisory board, created to decide how the funds raised buy the tourist tax will be spent, has been criticised by leading members of the tourist industry for failing to include tourism experts - yesterday the Balearic government announced that steps will be taken so that the Unió de Pagesos (Farmers' Union) will be represented on the board. Balearic leader Francesc Antich made the announcement yesterday, explaining that as the agricultural sector works “80 per cent of the countryside and is a principal industry for the Balearics” it should therefor have a say in how the tourist tax is spent. There are already 34 members on the advisory board, which according to the tourist industry lacks any experience in tourism, and all the delegates have been told by the Minister for Tourism, Celesti Alomar, to come up with the first set of projects for tourist tax funding within a month and to make the proposal good. Alomar wants the initial projects to show the Balearic people what is going to be done with the controversial tax and demonstrate to tourists what their tax payments will be helping to fund and that they, too, will benefit from the results.