Just last week Ibiza changed forever. Kind of. No, global warming hasn’t forced the sun to stop setting over Cafe Del Mar. No, Sven Vath hasn’t suddenly decided that, actually, Middlesborough is the place to be summer after summer. And, no, Wayne Lineker’s not going to be taking up a residency at Pikes. Well, not yet anyway.
What’s actually happened, according to island journal The White Isle, is that ticket sellers and PRs have been banned from hawking their papery wares on the streets of San Antonio. The suspension, they state, “comes after several summers of complaints from not only tourists who feel they are being harassed in public spaces but also from businesses in the area who are tired of those visiting San Antonio being urged to attend bars, boat parties and club nights elsewhere.” Which makes sense. Sort of.
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Except, it does seem like an ever so slightly strange decision to make. San Antonio is San Antonio. It serves a purpose: to get hyper-active holidaymakers as pissed as possible for as little money as possible so they end up spending all the rest of their money on eight euro bottles of water down at Sankeys. Now, that purpose may or may not be admirable, but it’s one that’s clearly defined. Anyone visiting San Antonio knows what to expect. That doesn’t excuse the vomit and bare arses and binge drinking and kebab huffing, obviously.
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For local residents and business owners, though, the news is (presumably) to be celebrated. After all, what’s a holiday destination to thousands of tanked up Brits fresh out of sixth-form looking for their first shag or their first pill or their first fight or their first paella, is a home to them, and most of us don’t want our homes filled with PR workers hawking tickets for BIG AND BOUNCY HOUSE NIGHTS AT KLUB KFC night after night.
As it stands, hundreds of UK residents flee to the Balearic island each summer in search of work, with most of them finding it on San Antonio’s infamous strip. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of visiting, imagine Blackpool promenade designed by the Loaded editorial team and the Hooch mascot. It’s stuffed to the gills with wallet-pleasing offers on fishbowls and positively overflowing with people who are resolutely, dementedly, almost criminally up for it.
These summer-jobbers often find themselves working for clubs, spending days and nights on the strip selling tickets. This, we’re told, is now illegal. Which means that A) people who thought that they had worked lined up this year now don’t, and B) people who were thinking about maybe spending a bit of time in Ibiza this summer because it’s quite sunny there and you can get pissed quite cheaply and there’s a Burger King and a bar where you piss into a pair of moulded lips now have to find another way to make some relatively easy cash.
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THUMP contributor Tamara Roper, who spent time working in Ibiza, thinks that that only real positive to come out of the decision is, as she tells me, “from an environmental point of view there’ll be much less litter,which makes things a lot more aesthetically pleasing,” before noting that, “I’m not sure if it’ll make San Antonio ‘nicer’, as it were, because I don’t think PR’s are the main problem there.”
It’s that last point which seems to make most sense to us. While the sensation of what initially feels like near-constant harassment isn’t exactly pleasant, it’s no different, when you think about it, to the average chugger assault course that most of us embark on when we venture down any high street in the UK from Aberdeen to Wycombe. Ibiza’s, and San Antonio in particular, problems are many, but ticket sellers aren’t one of them.
The key to understanding this side of Ibiza, which also means ignoring all the lovely hippy-dippy bullshit, is to understand and accept that money rules everything. The clubs we daydream about in our offices in Luton on November afternoons don’t open their doors by magic. Everything has a cost, and clubs are now more willing than ever to do anything they can to entice paying punters through the doors. Using attractive young men and women who are happy to approach total strangers in order to sell tickets is just one of them.
And look, if sun-hungry young Brits can’t earn money for doing pretty much fuck all in someone else’s country then, well, what can they do?
