Let’s boycott the homogenous, all-inclusive holiday this summer

Patrick Leigh Fermor must be turning in his grave. More than half of all summer holidays booked this year are all-inclusive packages. You know the form: you’re zipped up, fed, watered and entertained. Before you leave you have a row about the extras, then you come home, pretty much oblivious to the country you’ve just been to, hoping you won’t actually hear from the new friends you made beyond a message on Facebook.

Paddy, as Leigh Fermor was known, was the antithesis of the modern traveller. OK, so his circumstances afforded him with a little more time on his hands than we today would ever allow ourselves, but dip into his writing and you’ll get a rather different idea of what going abroad is about.

A Time of Gifts, for example, published in 1977, while feeling like a lost era of experience, can nudge you into realising that it is still possible to go on holiday and have conversations with strangers (if only using hand signals, facial expressions and animal noises), to hear unusual music, to sip strange drinks.

And few of us have the gumption to travel and explore as he did. He travelled on his own through Europe in the 1930s, for instance – living on his wits, his skill for languages and his conversation. He was adept at showing up at grand castles and palaces – not always with a letter of introduction – charming his hosts and occasionally getting robbed (of everything, including his money and notebooks). But whether he supped with peasants or lay with a countess, had a four-poster bed or a bale of straw under the stars, he immersed himself in the country and culture he was in.

Thus he would gaze upon the sight of the modern all-inclusive package holiday with a mixture of sadness and disdain. He would be surprised to see how willingly we submit ourselves to these experiences, or rather lack of experience.

Especially at how these packages now ensnare all corners of society, for every budget. There is one such place just up the road from me. Butlin’s Minehead is the model for all to follow.

You get there, they bring down the barrier, and you are not expected to leave the premises. And why would you? You get fed, watered, boozed to the hilt (depending on your package), entertained, you can mooch around on “land pedalos”, eat ice cream and waddle in the giant indoor pool. There’s a supermarket on site, so you can buy a paper or some fags (sorry, vape refills). And ask a Redcoat the way to Minehead and they’ll reply, “Mine what?” As I say, the idea is not to leave.

And the concept is the same when you book into, say, an island on the Maldives. Except in the Maldives you really are trapped. At Butlin’s, to escape, you nip through the car park at the front, dive under the barrier, then turn left and it’s a bit of a schlep along the bleak road by the shoreline into town.

Hire a villa over water and you can’t even get to shore without phoning for the launch. As in all such resorts, while the food and service is astonishingly good, there is no semblance of what is local. While there are some locals, most senior staff and the chefs are flown in from India, Japan, Europe or other parts of Asia, and, after even two weeks, you will leave the country with not even a hint of what the locals eat or drink (non-alc, I did get that…) or what the nation’s traditions, customs or even languages are.

And this is how it is supposed to be. The all-inclusive package, developed from the 1950s so-called “alchemy of happiness” that was Club Med.

I recall my first spotting of it. We were on holiday in Corfu in the 1970s and, from the next bay, where some monstrosity of a hotel had been plonked, came wakey-wakey music each morning, followed by a water-skiing display. We felt happily entrenched in our own version of a Corfu holiday: Greek salad, retsina, old men in the village squares drinking coffee and fiddling with their beads, old women dressed in black sweeping the steps of their houses, and the odd mangy dog limping by.

Each January my parents went on holiday by themselves and pursued a relentless itinerary. The results are firmly recorded in the family albums: the markets of Aleppo, the temples of Angkor Wat.

This spirit carried through to most of our holidays. A holiday to Bodrum, in Turkey, would feature the beach but not without us being dragged to Ephesus or the ruins of an ancient amphitheatre in Termessos. At the back of our hotel, Motel Turtel, I looked at the wildflowers growing among the ruins of ancient Greek columns. At a café opposite I played (and was thrashed at) backgammon with the locals.

And thank God. We holidayed and we also travelled. Which makes today’s slide to the all-inclusive all the more painful. I’ve even been unwittingly ensnared into one when I thought we were holidaying in Crete. I thought the bay we were staying in would be just that, a bay. But no, it was a snazzy resort. Past the car park, off the main coastal road, through a barrier and security box, and it’s a replica of a Cretan village – albeit beautifully designed – with bars, restaurants, shops and a “taverna”, as well as gold buggies to get you around.

I managed to hire a car one day and escaped. Escaped across the island to an actual village, with actual shops and an actual taverna (with calamari, Greek salad and a bottle of retsina). The resort didn’t even sell retsina. Its job was to cosset us from such horrors. And it is the horror of the real world that pushes us to the all-inclusive. Travel in the real world and there are horrors at every turn. Foreigners who don’t speak the language, foreign muck pretending it’s breakfast, foreign heat, foreign mosquitoes, foreign currency, foreign drinks and foreigners trying to rip you off, be it with a dodgy carpet or an overpriced water-skiing session.

At the international all-inclusive package resort, these fears are all banished. Trained to within an inch of their lives at colleges of hospitality, your international staff, with impeccable English, will guide you to the breakfast buffet (Sashimi? Dosa? Pain au chocolat? Bacon and eggs?); reassure you of untold quantities of Provencal rosé; guarantee Wi-Fi in the villa, at the bar and on the beach; air-con all central areas and private spaces until it’s snowing if need be; fumigate the resort and rooms (mozzies, what mozzies?); intro you to the in-house ski/tennis pro; and suggest you pop into their own boutiques and carpet shops.

All of which cosiness teaches you nothing of your host country’s culture, undoubtedly denies the local economy – the bars, shops and restaurants – of your spend, and renders you a tanned ignoramus.

There is of course one tiny, weeny, smidgeon of an exception to this, of course: small kids and an other half who needs to be kept happy at all costs. For which exemption is allowed, provided you pack Leigh Fermor, promise to escape the camp at least once to get bitten, hustle in the market and get squiffy with the locals.