Mallorca's restaurant association says it cannot remember a September start as weak as this one. The warning came from Restauración Mallorca CAEB and was reported by the Majorca Daily Bulletin on 10 September, under the subheading "August takings below 2025 levels".
What the association said
According to the Bulletin, the association's president, Juan Miguel Ferrer, said business in the last two weeks of August was poor and below the same fortnight in 2025. The late-month recovery the trade had hoped for did not arrive. On the first week of September he was blunt: "In the catering sector, we cannot remember such a poor first week."
Ferrer's point was not that the island is empty. "We may have busy streets and a significant number of visitors," he told the paper. His argument, paraphrased, is that the problem is visitors' "ability and willingness to spend", and that tourist numbers and restaurant profitability should be looked at separately.
September is normally a good month for restaurants. It brings the guests who avoid the July and August crowds, and the trade assumes they have more to spend. This year that spending was not reaching the tills. The association said it was too early to know whether the trend would hold for the rest of the month, and the article gives no percentages or euro figures.
The context: record spending, flat arrivals
The official statistics point the other way, at least at first glance. Provisional EGATUR data, compiled by Ibestat with Spain's statistics institute INE and reported by Mallorca Global Mag on 3 September, put tourist spending in the Balearics in July 2026 at about €4,560 million, up 7.99% on July 2025. Arrivals rose only 0.22%.
- Average spend per tourist: €1,487.33 (+7.75%)
- Average daily spend per person: €239.81 (+6.48%)
- Mallorca's share: €3,047.24 million (+8.97%), about two thirds of the islands' total
INE's own release of 1 September gives a matching figure for foreign visitors alone: about €4,145 million spent by international tourists in the Balearics in July, up 8.3%.
Neither statistic says anything about restaurants, so the EGATUR numbers prove nothing either way about restaurant takings. Here is how we read it. Almost the same number of people spent more money in total, and that total covers flights, hotels and packages, most of it paid before anyone sits down at a terrace in Port de Pollença or Santa Catalina. A higher trip cost per visitor can sit alongside a tighter budget once they are here, which fits what the association describes. That is our interpretation, not something the data shows.