from the ibiza sun:
Marketing Plan
The municipal of San Antonio was, not surprisingly, the first to act to the news of the possible arrival of 15,000 pensioners from across Europe to the island. The Town Hall revealed on Tuesday it had already had a meeting with all of the leading businesses in the area, including the hotel, restaurant and bar, retail and nautical sectors within the municipality, in order to put itself forward as the outstanding candidate on the island.
After the meeting, the Town Hall revealed that a marketing plan had already begun which would outline why the municipality should receive the pensioners, which are due to arrive from this November, according to plans unveiled by the Island Council the previous week in a joint press conference with the Balearic employment minister, Margarita Najera.
The Town Hall claimed the infrastructure was already in place within the town, and a number of hotels already stayed open throughout the year. This, added to the new promenades and the re-vamped town centre, clearly made the municipality the first choice.
The idea will be similar to that of the Imserso scheme already in place, which offers thousands of Spanish pensioners the opportunity to visit the islands at vastly discounted rates between November and March. The hotels offer substantially reduced prices and the airfare is also heavily subsidised.
The programme will start in several central European countries including Germany, Belgium and Holland, and bring a total of around 100,000 people to the Balearics in the first year, 15,000 of which will be sent to Ibiza. The total would hopefully increase to 500,000 once the project was implemented across the Continent.
The key to the plan, in the first year at least, is to concentrate all of the tourists in the same area which would hopefully encourage more places to open. Although several zones were mentioned, including Playa den Bossa and Talamanca, San Antonio and the bay remain the most likely choices, especially due to the experience they already have with the Imserso groups over the last five years.
However, it appears that the Town Hall does not want to take any chances and has already begun to act in order to seal the deal.
Several days after the San Antonio meeting, the tourist department of San Jose met with business representatives from Cala de Bou and the bay area. Afterwards the councillor for tourism, Maria Angeles Mostazo, said that she hoped the two municipalities (San Antonio and San Jose) would be able to join forces to try and capture the proposed 15,000 tourists from Europe which the Balearic Government are hoping to bring from January 2009. She said she was happy with the level of interest shown by local businesses, and would be speaking to her counterparts in San Antonio over the next few weeks to talk about the possibilities of a joint bid.