Why Granada is the unfriendliest town on earth

The city of Granada is notable for several things. Most visitors go to see the Alhambra, or for a strange procession during Holy Week interesting chiefly for having provided fashion tips to the Ku Klux Klan. Judging by its Wikipedia entry, it is also home to Europe’s most eccentric twinning committee: its twin towns include Aix-en-Provence, Freiburg, Marrakech and Sneinton, a suburb of Nottingham whose attractions extend to a moderately interesting windmill.

Its other distinction is that it is the unfriendliest place I have ever been. Granada’s hospitality industry seems to have improved little since 1936, when locals celebrated the return of Federico Garciá Lorca by shooting him and dumping his body by a road. Gaining admission to the Alhambra required presenting various forms of identification to scowling officials. The cafés and restaurants seemed to resent the fact that customers were cluttering their tables. My daughters, then toddlers, who received rapturous affection on Italian holidays, were treated like the twin girls in The Shining.

Why? To a game theorist or cybernetician the explanation is simple. Almost everyone goes to Granada for a day, and only once. You take a coach from the coast, do the Alhambra, eat lunch and bugger off back to Marbella. No Granada restaurant has any prospect of repeat business. Why be nice to anyone if there is no chance they will come back? Tourists also pose little reputational risk. A restaurateur in my home town knows that should he cheat me, I will tell my friends not to eat there. With tourist restaurants (I visited Granada in the days before Trip-Advisor) no such feedback loop existed. The restaurateur sees each visitor not as a possible source of repeat custom but as a sucker to be fleeced.

One conclusion to be drawn from this is that rating technologies like Yelp, TripAdvisor and so forth are vitally important not only because they help us find good restaurants and hotels but also because they force restaurants and hotels to improve.