Pep Cañellas is the founder and president of the Fergus Group, a company which has grown from nothing in 2011 to now having thirty hotels.
Closely associated with the regeneration of Magalluf, Cañellas explains that the company saw a gap in the market for a value-added product. "We knew how to adapt to what the demand was looking for. It was a blank canvas. There were many hotels that were simply being renovated with a coat of white paint and that didn't make any sense. There was a lot of all-inclusive product in hotels with no space and vice versa. At the beginning we didn't have money to buy the best hotels, so we had to buy the ones we could and then reposition them. Changing quantity for quality is good business for anything nowadays."
He says that he gets people who reproach him for having opened new hotels where there were none before. "I have to explain to them that that is not the case. We only invest in improving the facilities of existing hotels. There has been a moratorium for almost 25 years and it is not possible to grow."
Cañellas accepts that the hotel sector is often "demonised". "It's been like this for many years and has come from many different sources with very different interests. Anyone who denies this has not lived in Mallorca. But when you explain clearly what you are doing, people end up understanding. We got our hands on products that were in a very difficult condition - staff who were owed money, etc. With the tourism debate on the table more than ever, it is an ideal time to explain this to people."
The debate frequently raises the word degrowth. On this he says that the first thing to understand is where the growth has come from and how Mallorca has reached the situation of overtourism that it is in. "The answer is obvious: holiday rentals - legal and illegal - and second homes. We have to decide what we want to do and it is a debate that society must face: do we prefer to have tourists in hotels or in the apartment opposite?
"I'm in favour of degrowth applied to the part that we are least interested in preserving. We have to decide where to start cutting and if that is what suits us best. We aren't as overcrowded as we might be. There will be more saturation if we all rent out granny's house to a tourist without any kind of control. That is the real problem."