Editorial: Wake up call

PICTURE the scene;a beautiful holiday resort with busy hotels and scores of empty bars and restaurants. It was rather depressing. You left your hotel where hundreds of people were staying and you walked up the high street to be greeted by empty terraces. The official figures will tell you that the resort was very busy with hotels enjoying an occupancy level of almost 80 percent, fantastic for Easter. The unofficial story is that all  the hotels were offering all inclusive holidays and the majority of tourists only left their hotel for a midmorning stroll.  This is the reality of tourism to Majorca in 2014. It must be a nightmare if you own a bar or a restaurant. You run a good restaurant offering good food and if circumstances were different your business would be packed. Unfortunately, you face the might of all inclusive holidays. The majority of people in the hotel where I was staying were Majorcan. They had booked their all inclusive deal online and were enjoying a bargain getaway weekend. If this trend continues I do believe that hundreds of bars and restaurants will go out of business.  There is no way forward. The hoteliers say that they have to offer all inclusive holidays to remain competitive but the scale is enormous. Unless the government comes up with a solution to deal with the problem thousands of people will lose their jobs and our resorts could become just hotels and a few shops. It is an alarming state of affairs.