In my last blog, it probably came across that I understand little about technology. Put in better words, I have never fully appreciated the need to integrate it to any large extent in my activities.
Technology can be an incredibly wonderful manner in which to save time and hassle.
So can all-inclusive vacations, but I have only tried that once, too. Cruise liners, likewise. I’m not interested. It’s my problem, my prejudice, but these vacation options appear to me too constrictive. On a cruise ship, there is no ability to suddenly alter plans—well, not without getting wet. With the extremely popular all-inclusive idea, there’s nothing stopping you from deciding to ditch the hotel buffet for that independent restaurant several towns away, but I am sure that happens rarely, and I’d probably also become too comfortable with the ease of having everything five steps away.
In regard to mass-tourism cruising, no one will ever write anything better, or sum up my general take on it, than the much-missed American writer David Foster Wallace, whose essay “A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again” in his collection of essays of the same name is a literary gem.
I mention all of this because last week I had the enjoyable—as enjoyable as having an all-inclusive resort plastic wristband placed on me and immediately shown where the swim-up pool bar is—task of analyzing the complex setup of the world’s largest leisure tourism company, TUI Group.
TUI, essentially a German company, but one with lengthy British roots, is as all-inclusive as it gets. It has the booking platforms, the tour operators, the airlines (Europe’s seventh largest) and the hotels, including Riu and new brand TUI Blue. It owns and operates hotels but also manages, leases and franchises them.
It’s now undergoing a process of migrating all its myriad brands under the TUI name, pushing its “Smile” logo everywhere, ditching non-core assets and stripping out any confusion customers might have that not all the bits of their holidays derive from the same supplier.
Its customers are not business travelers or conference-goers, rather travelers who might not particularly care they have chosen Morocco over Spain, Bulgaria over Greece, but of these 20 million people (that’s according to TUI itself), there has to be a good number who contravene the traditional hotel route, the one in which the bits of the puzzle are done separately or via online travel agencies. (Are OTAs really all-inclusive providers?)
Perhaps we here at Hotel News Now have always been more comfortable analyzing traditional hotel-chain setups, where the chain only really has to sell the room and after that concentrate on upselling or bundling in spa, restaurant and other experiences?
Such is TUI’s plan to integrate under one platform. It is to eventually retire its Thomson brand—which in the United Kingdom along with Thomas Cook—is synonymous with the package vacation, ever since the British ditched cool summers in Blackpool and Torquay for the warmer ones of Benidorm and Torremolinos.
All-inclusives generally, if not always, have bad food. That probably has little to do with my ongoing project to give a little more attention to this industry sector in terms of its effect on the top-line profits of traditional hotel chains, but I wanted to mention it in the slim chance that hoteliers might be embarrassed to do something about that.
Thomas Cook publishes its half-year 2015 results Wednesday.
Frozen, reheated, plain
And I added this about the poor food as I’ve just returned from Malta, where I booked all the bits separately at more expense and ended up on Comino, an island with only one hotel.
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| Beware: This hotel has the only food for many nautical miles: the beautifully situated Comino Hotel and Bungalows in the Maltese islands. (Photo: Terence Baker) |
On the tiniest of the three Maltese islands, Comino—population, four, all older than 65—the seasonal Hotel Comino, too, mostly provides an all-inclusive option. If you want to eat on this beautiful, 2-square-mile nature reserve with no other food outlets, it’s a godsend.
Surrounded by millions of gallons of Mediterranean Sea water, you’d think finding a fish wouldn’t be too difficult, but here the choice was breaded “scampi” prawns straight from the deep freeze.
The language many hotel restaurants use on their menus—locally sourced, seasonal, farm-to-table—might sound twee and like marketing speak, but it’s a trend to be encouraged and not mocked.
Maybe this is a lesson to hoteliers to continually tweak and improve their traditional hotels’ F&B offerings. A good restaurant is a game changer between the I’ll-do-it-all-myself and all-inclusive crowds. The latter, if they do have access to a “good” restaurant option, invariably pay a mark-up for it.
Email Terence Baker or find him on Twitter.
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