Mallorca hotel chief: stop making tourism a scapegoat

Miquel Miralles, chief executive of THB Hotels and president of the Mallorca Hotel Chains Association, is entering the 2027 season with a message aimed squarely at policymakers: stop treating tourism as a scapegoat for problems that lie elsewhere. Hoteliers, he argues, cannot be held responsible for rising housing costs, and talk of tourism saturation has hardened into a cliché, an easy slogan that obscures deeper structural failures. He points instead to exponential population growth in the Balearics and a chronic, long-standing funding deficit as the real drivers of the pressures residents feel.

The intervention comes as the sector weighs a 2027 outlook shaped by two opposing forces: confidence, because tourism markets remain resilient, and uncertainty, driven by oil prices, geopolitics, housing, infrastructure deficits and increasingly complex regulation. Miralles wants tourism removed from the political fray altogether. He is explicit that the tendency to blame hoteliers for problems with much deeper causes is both unfair and unproductive.

His argument is directed at the accountability of institutions rather than the conduct of the industry itself. “Tourism saturation has become a cliché,” he says. “What people really want is affordable housing or to be able to get home without the roads being gridlocked. Yet the conversation often becomes good guys vs. bad guys, replete with easy slogans focusing the blame on tourism. But that’s not the whole picture. We need to avoid that kind of oversimplification; it achieves nothing and only breeds frustration. In the Balearics, the population has grown exponentially, and we are also dealing with a chronic funding deficit.”

On enforcement, Miralles acknowledges that measures against illegal holiday lets have begun, but insists the mandate remains unfinished. “But as long as illegal rentals exist, there is still a lot of work to be done. And it’s not just that. There is encroachment by unlicensed operators in other sectors, e.g. retail and transport. These illegal businesses should be cracked down on more effectively so that they aren’t profitable even after paying fines.” His point is that compliance failures extend well beyond accommodation, and that current penalties are not acting as an effective deterrent.

Meanwhile, the regulatory environment itself is a growing concern for the sector. Miralles believes uncertainty will become the norm and that businesses must respond with flexibility. “We will have to be increasingly flexible in order to adapt. It is true that legislation often moves in the opposite direction, becoming increasingly rigid and bureaucratic, which concerns us, but if we want to move forward, we must adapt to the major changes under way, such as the trend for very last-minute bookings, as well as to impacts on the labour market and supply chains.”

Political engagement is now on the agenda. With regional elections due in May next year, Miralles says the industry intends to present its case directly to the parties. “We will reach out to the various parties to present our view of the situation and outline our needs, which are essentially society’s needs: taking certain issues that are vital to everyone’s lives out of the realm of political debate and direct confrontation. Tourism and housing have become caught up in this, along with many other matters that shouldn’t be the subject of ideological battles.” At the national level, the Exceltur alliance of leading tourism and travel companies has already set out a ten-point wish list for the next Spanish Government.

Practical questions also hang over 2027, notably airline pricing. Miralles notes that carriers hedge a year in advance, which keeps prices stable until the end of the season, but that contracts for 2027 remain to be seen. “Oil prices directly affect airfares, which represent a major component of the tourism package, far more so than the cost of the hotel.”

On capacity, he rejects the framing of volume versus value. Hotels have operated under a stable cap on accommodation capacity for years, he says, and the priority is extending the season rather than adding July and August visitors, which would benefit suppliers and staff alike. On pricing, he expects continued growth is possible but cautions that revenue is not profit, noting that THB Hotels dropped the all-inclusive model because higher revenue produced lower earnings.

His hope for the next four years is institutional rather than commercial: less tension, an end to scapegoating, and relief from what he calls cumbersome bureaucracy. Whether the parties contesting May’s regional elections are willing to take tourism out of the political fray remains the open question.