Restaurant and hospitality entrepreneurs in Mallorca are laying off workers in the middle of the tourist season. They try to justify this with the argument that there are fewer tourists this year, something no one can believe because data from Ibestat and the INE make it clear that the summer of 2025 will follow the same path as 2024: that is, all tourism records will be shattered. In fact, this year, spending is growing even more than the number of tourists. Specifically, and in Mallorca alone, between January and June, almost six million tourists arrived on the island (3.7% more than last year), spending €6.712 billion, a figure that represents a 6.7% increase compared to the previous year.
Mallorcan restaurateurs, however, are not letting reality spoil their excuses. A few weeks ago, they said that tourists were indeed selling, but consuming less ("they order a sandwich and eat it between five people," they lamented). Now, they say they do come, but they spend fewer nights ("if before they stayed ten days, now they stay three," they claim), or simply that they don't come at all, even though the official statistical institutes, and Aena itself, deny them. It doesn't matter. Finally, when they probably don't know what other excuse to use for leaving workers on the street, they declare that tourists, this protected species, aren't coming to Mallorca this year (or aren't consuming, or aren't spending the night) as they did "before" (this "before" always remains vague) because of tourismophobia. Here we are already at the top of the list.
The alleged tourismophobia that certain restaurateurs and hoteliers denounce, and against which they wage a singular battle that even includes eye-catching advertising campaigns, amounts to nothing more than a few graffiti and the occasional symbolic action by Arran or some other anti-capitalist group. These are very small things compared to the overwhelming power of a tourism industry accustomed to doing and undoing exactly what it wants with the coast, the mountains, the city, and public spaces, exploiting for its own benefit what is a common good, a vital space cared for and maintained with taxpayers' money. The reality is that the citizens of Mallorca, like those of Barcelona and so many other places, have grown accustomed to living with an exaggerated touristification of the places where they live and work, without the benefits generated by this activity ever reverting to them.
Tourism entrepreneurs have far more reason to express their gratitude to the public than to accuse them of phobias that don't exist. These are, if anything, legitimate forms of protest against a fast-paced, predatory tourism model capable of leaving workers out on the street in the middle of the tourist season. Perhaps the problem isn't the public, nor the tourists, and certainly not the workers. Perhaps it has more to do with the number of opportunists who come to Mallorca, eager for easy money, presenting themselves as restaurant or hospitality entrepreneurs without deserving the name.
