Restaurants in the Balearic Islands recorded the steepest drop in customers across the whole of Spain last year.
High inflation and overtourism has caused prices in Majorca to soar (Image: Getty)
Officials in Majorca are considering a discount campaign to ease pressure on its struggling hospitality sector amid a drop in customer numbers. The Balearic Islands recorded the steepest decline in restaurant footfall across Spain last year in a trend linked to high inflation and overtourism. The new analysis by Delectatech, which mirrors previous findings focused on the summer season alone, showed a 3% overall drop in customer numbers in restaurants across the archipelago throughout 2025.
Meanwhile, parts of Spain with the lowest average spend, including Castile-La Mancha and Extremadura, saw a spike in footfall, the Majorca Daily Bulletin reports.
Delectratech said: “This behaviour suggests that consumers have reached a price ceiling, which limits price increases in the most expensive areas and reinforces the idea of a restraint in real spending, even in areas traditionally less price-sensitive.”
Protests and high costs contributed to a drop in visitor footfall during last year’s peak season (Image: Getty)
The Balearic Government has announced plans to help the archipelago’s restaurant sector by launching a discount voucher system similar to the scheme already in place to ease financial pressure on retailers.
It comes amid continued high inflation on the island group, linked to a reliance on imports, and a drop in international visitors to Majorca last year following anti-tourist demonstrations telling non-locals to “go home”.
The island’s biggest markets, Germany and Britain, saw respective year-on-year drops of 8.6% and 2.2% last July, with commentary linking the shift to both local hostility and rising costs.
“German demand appears to have reached its limit in terms of price sensitivity after two years of accepting substantial increases in package deals and flights, hotel rooms, car rentals and other products and services,” Spain’s tourism institute Turespaña noted.
Juanmi Ferrer, president of the CAEB Restaurants Association, said trade projections for 2026 would likely be similar to last year “or at most a little worse”.
Mr Ferrer told the MDB that the sector was already off to a rough start, with a “disastrous January” under its belt, making further price rises a near-inevitability.
“The last thing a restaurant wants is to raise prices, because that means fewer customers,” he said. “This year we’ll try to absorb those extra three to four percentage points of inflation as much as we can.”
