Hoteliers slam businesses attracting booze-fuelled tourism for damaging Mallorca resort image

PLAYA de Palma hoteliers have slammed businesses which attract the kind of boozed-fuelled tourism which led to the Balearic government’s shutdown of all outlets selling alcohol in two of the resort’s streets last week.
The regional administration ordered the closure of businesses in the so-called Ham and Beer streets on July 15 due to gatherings of throngs of revellers the previous weekend, many of them German, and virtually none of them wearing a face mask or social distancing.
The Playa de Palma Hotelier Association Vice-President Jose Antonio Fernandez de Alarcon told press on Friday that it was “not right” that just two streets dictate the image of the whole area, damaging efforts to associate the resort with quality.
“We say enough”, Fernandez de Alarcon stressed.
He pointed out that the two streets represent an area of just 100sqm and maintained that in the rest of the five-kilometre zone of Playa de Palma’s efforts are being made to ensure compliance with health safety regulations.
The hoteliers want leisure businesses to change and make efforts to attract what they describe as a higher quality clientele rather than a model of mass tourism based on alcohol consumption.
The association president Isabel Vidal meanwhile criticised what she claimed was insufficient police presence in Playa de Palma this summer, especially at night.
“There are not sufficient police officers to prevent crowds gathering and to put those who violate the law in order”, she maintained.
She argued that the boozing tourists who would have gone to Ham and Beer street will simply go elsewhere and that without more police in the zone to keep an eye on them “the closure of these outlets which sell alcohol will not do any good.”