One way to get to grips with the opening
premise of Friday’s post is to consider our attitudes to holidays.
Sometimes your ambitions move faster than the world. Sometimes the world moves faster than you.
Holidays are an annual ritual in paying real money to
calibrate our ambitions with the pace of the world. If you want a week of sleeping, eating and
reading you buy a ‘fly’n’flop’ at a childfree resort somewhere sunny. To reconnect with your preteen kids choose Euro Disney. Because our own
scarce resources (time and money) are at stake any dissonance aggravates us so much more on holidays than in usual life; “It wasn't like this in the
brochure” is a near-universal lament.
For eight years my family ran a 3½-star
hotel on Mission Beach in Far North Queensland.
I looked after the marketing on a part-time basis, which was a pretty
cool job. How could it not be when this
is your workplace?
In our day Castaways on the Beach was
a pretty modest operation whose prime selling point was the location. The property had a longstanding reputation for
being ‘family friendly’, offering easy access to a vast waveless beach, lots of
suites with in-room cooking facilities and a short walk to a town centre that featured lots of relatively inexpensive dining options and a small supermarket. Our in-house restaurant also offered an
extensive children’s menu. As everyone knows (or should know), ‘family
friendly’ is code for “There will be screaming kids everywhere. If this is not want you want on your holiday
then best you go someplace else.”
Families with younger children were consistently our most satisfied
customers, not least because our business plan didn't rely on corralling our guests
into the dining room three times a day. What
parent doesn't find it galling paying for a breakfast buffet when all the kid wants
is a bowl of cereal?
Our least satisfied customers were always honeymoon
couples who had locked onto the picture on the website and the 3½-star tariffs
but (often willfully) ignored the ‘family friendly’ signals. Signals that included the actual words
‘family friendly’ on all our brochures, billboards, website, etc. We accepted that our offering couldn't match the
ambitions of most loved-up newlyweds and instructed the booking staff to try and gently warn off these customers. Over the years we invested quite heavily in
improvements to the property but intentionally stuck to the 3½-star bracket. We were happy with our positioning at the
‘family friendly’ end of the market.
I
have no children and a relatively high disposable income but we never attempted
to build an offering that would appeal to people like me and in 2007 my family sold a thriving
business. The new owners, who have far more access
to far more capital than us, spent an actual fortune taking the place
‘upmarket’. They refurbished the public
areas, reduced the pool size to increase the bar area, added a day spa, removed
most of the in-room cooking facilities and upped the tariffs by about 60%.
I was back in Mission Beach last July and to my
childless eyes the place looks amazing. But
to a family on a budget with a brood of young kids the whole package screams
“Stay Away!” The word around town is that
Castaways Resort & Spa is for up sale again.
The need to purchase a world that temporarily matches our ambitions is the reason why we expend so much energy researching
our holidays. We only get to spend this time
and money a few times a year and it's personal. This is why holidaying with any
but the closest of friends is rarely a good idea ("It’s my holiday too, y’know")
and why most of us revisit those trusted holiday places again and again and
again.
