After a lot of intense negotiations and multiple changes of mind, we have finally settled on holiday plans for the summer. A short break in Ireland with extended family, and another at-least-it-won’t be-raining trip to another country.
It was the foreign holiday that caused the contention. It’ll be just myself, Herself, and Daughter Number Four. On previous occasions, we’ve done city breaks: get a place with access to a pool and do touristy things during the day – things that will entertain Daughter Number Four enough so that she won’t be asking when we’re going back to the pool.
It has worked reasonably well. Yet it hasn’t always been that relaxing. There’s a lot of taking trains and buses and feeling pressure to get to the next thing. A lot of Daughter Number Four asking when we’re going to get there.
So, Herself suggested that this year we investigate something a bit more straightforward: find a nice resort and stay there. It could have activities on-site to entertain Daughter Number Four. There would be a pool. Daughter Number Four might even make a friend or two. The downside would be that we’d be stuck there. Not so much stress, but a threat of feeling trapped.
I had a look, and immediately it threw up a taxonomic question I’d never considered before: what’s the difference between a resort and a hotel? The answer would seem to be one of scale. Obviously, there is a category of hotel that is simply for staying the night and moving on, but apart from that, both resorts and hotels offer some facilities on top of those for sleeping and eating: a gym, a spa, a pool. Resorts just have more of them.
But what was striking – and what convinced us to revert to our city break plan – was how humdrum the activities were. A few sporty things. Maybe a games room. Arts and crafts.
For adults, it was even more unimaginative. No matter how fancy or cut-price the venue, they are all pretty much the same. Some may offer golf. Some may not. They might have a tennis court. But it’s close to impossible to find a hotel that pretends towards luxury and notions that doesn’t have a spa.
‘The apparent assumption seems to be that when adults stay in a hotel or a resort, that’s all they want. They are sitting in traffic jams on a rainy Thursday in March and daydreaming about being slathered in mud or inhaling candle smoke’
There is a financial component to this. A hotel with a spa entices its guests to stay on the complex and not go off elsewhere to spend their money.
Over the years, to prove that I’m not an entirely cynical grump, I have been to hotel spas. I’ve got massages. And they were grand. I can understand why other people might like them. But it’s everything else that shoves my BS detector up to 11. The vaguely medical uniforms, the decor that implies orientalism, the ghastly electronic panpipe muzak. Go to a spa in Ballinasloe or Barcelona, and they are all like that: pushing a woo-woo/Gwyneth Paltrow range of “treatments” that are sold as “pampering”, but most astonishingly, often promise to reverse the natural process of ageing – a problem medical science hasn’t come close to cracking.
None of this does any harm, of course. But there’s little evidence it does much good either, other than the faint glow of “wellness” that’s probably brought on as much by the heavy marketing convincing you to feel that way.
Obviously there’s a demand for this kind of thing, or spas wouldn’t be so ubiquitous. But the apparent assumption seems to be that when adults stay in a hotel or a resort, that’s all they want. They are sitting in traffic jams on a rainy Thursday in March and daydreaming about being slathered in mud or inhaling candle smoke. There’s no clamour from hotel customers to take part in a whist drive or learn to play the banjo or dance the salsa. Or if there is, it’s been silenced. The victory of the Wellness Industrial Complex has been total.
