Alicia Reina (AEDH): “Technology can make us more efficient if we know how to choose and implement it correctly and with common sense.”

Reina is a tireless professional with a great vocation and commitment to the industry. In addition to managing the family accommodation, Migjorn Ibiza Suites & Spa, she is a practising lawyer, adviser of Isba since 2016 and associate professor in the Master in Tourism Management at the UIB.

You are the Balearic Islands president of the Spanish Association of Hotel General Managers since 2020. What is the goal of the association? What are you working on?

The AEDH was founded in 1972, so we are now celebrating 50 years. It was created as a non-profit entity to represent the professional and collective interests of hotel managers and highlight these roles within these tourism companies. In the Balearic Islands, we also want to defend the interests of the tourist accommodation sector.

Right now we are working on multiple lines of action such as: the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the AEDH; presence in multiple tourism fairs; promotion of the training and professionalism of our associates through our Centre for High Tourism Performance (CART); promotion of the claim against Booking.com before the CNMC for the abuse of the dominant position it exercises in the market; support to our associates in the search for employment through the job exchange that puts candidates and companies in contact; promotion of innovation, digitisation and sustainability of the sector; presence in national and regional tourism roundtables; solidarity actions in soup kitchens; and support in the different Autonomous Communities to our associates in defence of their interests.

For example, in the Balearic Islands we have made constructive criticism of the reform of the Balearic Tourist Law to prevent the interests of our associates from being harmed, proposing solutions. We have done the same regarding the tourist tax and Law 8/2019 on Waste and Contaminated Soil in the Balearic Islands. And many more actions that we are carrying out in defence of the interests of our associates.

In 2021, you published your doctoral thesis in which you analysed the impact of the relationships between the Revenue Management and Marketing areas on the competitiveness of accommodation. In it, you formulate a novel concept: Revenue Marketing. What is it?

It is a new discipline of a pragmatic nature that aims to maximise revenue through the implementation of socio-technological tools that promote the use of techniques and processes that strengthen the coordination relationships between the Revenue Management (hereinafter RM) and Marketing (hereinafter, MKT) areas in the organisation. So, through this coordination between RM and MKT, it is much easier to deliver the right product, to the right customer, at the right time and for the right occasion, through the right channel and at the right price for both parties. What makes all these parameters adequate is the balance between the needs and interests of both parties: customer and organisation.

The crisis caused by the pandemic has forced the sector to reinvent itself. In your opinion, which have been the allies of the hotel and tourism sector to face it?

The allies that the sector has had have been science, training, technology and innovation, which have played a key role in the tourism sector’s resilience during and after the pandemic. In this way, these tools have supported the generation of professional, safe and quality holiday experiences.

Everything indicates that this is the year of recovery. How do you think technology can help you get the most out of it?

Technology can make us more efficient if we know how to choose and implement it correctly and with common sense. In this respect, and more specifically, the automation of tedious administrative tasks that do not require customisation can make our organisations more efficient and professional.

The new tourism law, which aims to turn the archipelago model towards labour and environmental responsibility, has recently been approved. Do you consider that this rule is positive for the sector?

Although this reform is guided by some very worthy initial principles that inspire it and can be very positive, as well as shared by the sector, we believe that the reform has many deficiencies that can suffocate local hotel and tourism SMEs due to the cumbersome and complicated circularity plans that are going to entail an additional economic, bureaucratic and operational cost. There is also the issue of diesel installations or liftable beds and multiple measures that they want to implement by decree, without consensus and at a dizzying pace that suffocates small and medium-sized companies.

Moreover, the sanctioning regime provided for by said reform of the Balearic Tourist Law is excessively high and unjustifiably disproportionate. The seriousness of the punishable act and the offence to be applied are not proportional. I also believe that the opportunity to opt for an incentive model has been wasted. In this way, it has been preferred to resort to a coercive and disproportionate model that does not help to bring afloat a sector that has been hit hard by the crisis during the more than two years of the pandemic.

In this regard, our sector has been heading towards circularity for a long time. Long before the Balearic Government raised this issue as the axis of its strategy. But in the hotel sector we handled times and deadlines that were very different from those that are now imposed. Deadlines and paces that we had foreseen, that allowed us to make our companies sustainable, in all senses. So, with this hasty reform of the Balearic Tourism Law, the times and deadlines of our sustainability projects have been shortened, endangering the subsistence of SMEs.

Furthermore, some of the measures promoted by the law are incoherent, since they go against the very spirit of the law. There is talk of sustainability and of protecting and promoting local products, while harming local properties, family businesses on the islands, complicating their operations and increasing their costs. On the other hand, they promulgate circularity, but said circularity cannot be preserved if, instead of extending the useful life of objects, elements and installations, we are forced to get rid of them before their useful life is exhausted. This is the case, for example, of the obligation to replace current beds with lift beds, without waiting for their useful life to run out and without the provision of a recycling plan or “renewal plan” for the beds that are replaced. Wouldn’t it have been a better option to duly justify in each case the need to implement lift-up beds and, in turn, exhaust the useful life of current beds and replace them, little by little, with lift-up beds once they were already obsolete? The same happens with the recently incorporated diesel installations in some recently refurbished hotels, before this regulation. Not all diesel facilities are the same, some more innovative and modern ones have more efficient and sustainable technological systems than other facilities whose installation is permitted by the reform of the Tourism Law itself.

The option that is globally more consistent with circularity understood strictly should be studied, case by case, and analysed. About the lift up beds, even the chambermaids, popularly known as the kellys, have pointed out that it is not ideal because they generate problems and transfer risks. I think we should all try to be coherent. And the reform of the Law must be consistent with the spirit that inspires it.

More and more tourists choose holiday rentals over hotels. There are even hotel companies that have entered this segment. How is the hotel sector experiencing it? How can it compete with this type of offer and with companies like Airbnb?

The hotel sector is experiencing this phenomenon from a dual perspective. On the one hand, they consider this trend as a concession granted to intrusiveness within the sector, thereby promoting unfair competition. Sector that is increasingly being controlled and regulated, being subject to multiple legal requirements and new obligations, while non-regulated holiday rentals escape these obligations and benefit from lower costs and legal requirements, to the detriment of the regulated legal supply and traditional. On the other, it is seen as an opportunity to make the way of entering the tourist market business more flexible, in a less legally constrained way, benefiting from the positive (the ease of obtaining revenues) without having to face to the negative aspects of the tourism business (legal, health, tax, occupational risk, quality control requirements…).

From the first of the aforementioned perspectives, the way to compete with this type of offer is by valuing the advantages of staying in the regulated and traditional hotels. These advantages include: the safety displayed by this type of accommodation; the social wealth they generate; the contribution to the economic and environmental sustainability of the destination; coexistence and social peace with residents; the professionalism and excellence of the service they offer, such as breakfasts and additional services personalised in detail; and, finally, the 24-hour service they provide to their guests.

And from the second of the perspectives, the solution is to join this type of accommodation alternatives, making the saying come true that if you can’t beat them, join them.

The Balearic Islands lead tourism knowledge throughout Spain, are home to the main lodging companies in the country and the world and are a first-class destination. What do you think you could learn from other regions or countries? What aspects could be improved?

Despite being leaders in tourism at a national level, the Balearic Islands have considerable room for improvement. In this sense, I believe that they should improve and learn from other destinations and value, without complexes, their strengths. At the same time, they must be aware of their weaknesses in order to try to minimise them. Among these weaknesses are: the need to improve the destination’s public-private tourism infrastructures; avoid reviling tourism; promote and evolve the tourism industry and enhance its value; invest in technological and professional training in all the areas in which the sector operates; simplify and streamline the legal requirements required of the tourism industry; look after the destination and its landscape, allocating the proceeds from the tourist tax to mitigate the harmful effects of tourism on the places and the environment of the destination; and finally, to create a common public-private communication strategy in which all the Balearic Islands are represented, on equal terms, segmenting by island according to the target that each island considers it should address.