The Berlin ITB tourism fair starts on Tuesday. The third and last of the big three annual European fairs, it comes at a time of some concern about German tourism in the Balearics.
María José Aguiló, vice-president of the Mallorca Hoteliers Federation, accepts that this "priority market" has been experiencing an awkward economic situation. Her hope lies in the fact that the German economy is stabilising. This priority market is by some distance Mallorca's largest.
Any concerns about the German market aside, the islands' tourism is dominated by all the talk about overcrowding. In this regard, Aguiló questions government claims to have eased it.
"The important thing is that if action were truly being taken against the illegal supply, perhaps we wouldn't be talking about containment. The initiatives regarding the thousands of illegal lets are clearly insufficient. Talking about containment without tackling this illegal supply is pointless. If we want to work on containment, we must first eradicate all the illegal supply, which is contributing to these factors of human pressure.
"There has been some progress with websites like Airbnb, but I wonder if there's an element of whitewashing. What has been done is of course insufficient, and many more resources need to be dedicated, along with much greater efficiency."
On the possibility of an increase in the tourist tax, she insists "we need to move beyond the debate of whether or not to raise the tourist tax and start discussing how we manage it. We need an analysis of how to improve the management of the resources that are already being collected. At the last meeting of the tourism tax committee, I think the government realised it doesn't have the necessary support to push through this increase."