By Jason Moore
I think it is quite outrageous that the Chairman of a major German travel company has to underline the fact that the Balearics should make tourists welcome. The handful of people who had the necessary foresight 35 years ago to transform Majorca into a holiday paradise must be thinking where did it all go wrong. But the problem is that the Balearics has been a victim of its own success. In otherwords some segments of the industry have become complacent and have started to take tourists for granted. When you have an estimated five million tourists a year this is not unusual. A considerable number of people in the service sector have forgotten that no tourists equals no money. The Spanish have a good word for people in this category simply quemado (which means burnt-out). Every year thousands of seasonal workers still head to the Balearics to work in hotels, bars and restaurants. Many have been doing this every May for more than two decades. So perhaps the time has come for a change. You either recruit new people, replace the old with the new, or send the veterans on a refresher course. It is not all their fault of course. Pay and conditions naturally come into the equation. So a new philosophy is needed of quality service with the tourists naturally being made welcome. The client is always right, is a phrase you hear a lot in Europe but it never seems to come into play. I would say to the service sector as a whole, remember the bad times, tourism has already dipped, we don't want it to fall even further.