Mallorca Story

 For decades, Germans (and Brits) have gathered in Mallorca (the isle of Spain about 200 km off the coast of Barcelona).  

What developed here, from the 1960s on....was a party-like atmosphere where Germans (and Brits) would come for roughly seven months out of the year, party in a wild sort of way, drink excessively (even more so than they would at home), and be loud-and-obnoxious.  

Most Germans would tell you that the atmosphere went through various stages, and the local Spaniards were hyped up through the 1990s to milk every single 'dime' out of the visiting Germans.  

Police through the years would enforce some discipline, but they knew that the capital flow of cash was critical for the future of the island.

I would suggest that between 2000 and 2010....something happened.  Too many bars....too many drunk Germans....too much greed.

In the past decade, local Spaniards have been calling for 'Jesus-moment' (what I'd call a dressing-down of party-crazed Germans.  

So it happened this week.

A law was passed, called Balearic Agenda 2030. 

It reflects mostly upon tourism, or the dissolving of tourism.

Booze flat rates?  Gone, at least in terms of all-inclusive vacation packages that hotels would offer.

The package is now limited to 3 alcoholic drinks provided, per day. Anything beyond that....has a price attached at the hotel bar.

Now....most Germans would readily agree....the flat rate business usually mean cheap NON-premium (I mean seriously non-premium) booze.  

I had this open-bar deal at a Cyprus hotel about a decade ago....a whole week with the cocktails being free all day long.  It was probably a fairly cheap booze used with maybe 5-percent alcohol in the one-shot drink.  It was fairly worthless in my humble opinion.  You could have drunk fifteen cocktails in a six-hour period and marginally reached any level of inebriation.  

Happy hour in Mallorca?  Going away entirely.

Hefty fines for any hotel violating the rule?  They say up to 600k Euro could be the fine on the hotel operations.

Crazy stunts where Germans got drunk and jumped from the balcony window in a pool?  Some Germans would suggest that this occurred a thousand times a day across Mallorca in the summer months.  Well...it's going to be forbidden.  You violate the rule.....the hotel can dump you out of the room.  Fines are being set up for this game as well.  

The comical side of this change?  They wrote this waiver into the system....if you held political meetings or wedding celebrations with at least 20 guests....the booze rules were relaxed in various ways.

What'll happen now?  

Literally thousands of Germans have permanently moved to Mallorca and run various clubs, pubs, restaurants, and hotels.  Everyone of them will view the change in a negative way, and prepare to sell their operation.  The first in....will be lucky....the ones waiting until the end of 2021 will be grumbling at the lack of interest.

I'll predict by summer of 2023....at least half of the business that the island did....will be gone, and a third of the hotels will be in some form of complete shut-down.  They can blame Covid-19 to some degree, but the law being implemented will be the final part of this story.

Where the rowdy Germans go next?  It wouldn't shock me if Romania and Bulgaria got the bulk of this wild-crazy party business and they emerge in 2024 with the doubling or tripling of German guests.  

Spain will be spending hundreds of millions of Euro in 2024/2025....to get guests back and find that the interest is no longer there.