Gilbert Trigano, who died on February 3rd aged 80, started out in the tourism business by lending a friend a few tents. That was the beginning of Club Mediterranee, the French holiday "concept" which turned post-war fantasies of holidays in faraway places into reality.
He made deals with local governments to allow him to open Club Med villages in isolated places - so long as sun, sand and sea was guaranteed. Club Med predated the now popular "all-inclusive" holiday resorts by a quarter-of-a-century.
A former member of the French Resistance and an actor who had also worked as a journalist on the official French communist daily L'Humanite, he was largely self-educated. His family ran a tent business and when, in 1950, his friend Gerard Blitz, also a veteran of the Resistance, needed some tents for holidays in Majorca for ex-servicemen, Gilbert Trigano provided them. So began Club Med.
The concept was idealistic, he claimed - a desire for ordinary people to "discover the sea, to breathe deeply and live healthily". The idea that everything was included in the price and that "nothing is for sale in the village" was part of his philosophy. It was, he argued, a way of making sure that everyone was holidaying on equal terms.
He called Club Med "the best idea since happiness was invented". The appealing aspect of a Club Med holiday to a post-war Europe still locked into holidays on wet beaches and in grey guesthouses, was that it offered a safe, good time in a fantasy beachside environment.
No matter that your holiday was in Greece or Mexico, Marrakesh or Luxor - there were Polynesian thatched huts, shells for money, unlocked doors (for sexual frisson), and endless social and sporting events provided by the "gentils organisateurs". A new sort of good-time ghetto was created in which no "gentil membre" - as customers were called - needed to move outside the self-striving culture of Club Med; no need to meet the host community, no need to deal with them; no need to spend money with the locals. While equality might exist within the walls of Club Med, the benefits were not equally distributed from the outside.
But the formula was successful. By the mid 1960s, 45 Club Med resorts and two cruise boats provided for half-a-million holidaymakers a year. By the 1970s there were 129 "villages" in five continents. Club Med had expanded into new markets - in such places as the US, Brazil and Japan.
Yet despite its air of the new, it was the old-fashioned management structure which contributed to Club Med's downfall: its market became older rather than younger; and the resorts began to look a bit weary and unreconstructed.
Critics said its "core identity" was lost. It also suffered a blow when a plane carrying 30 Club Med tourists to Senegal crashed. (Last year, Gilbert Trigano and his son, Serge, were convicted of involuntary manslaughter.)
By 1996, Club Med was reporting losses of £101 million and the next year the Trigano family was deposed by a shareholders' revolt.
Phillippe Bourguignon, the man seen to have revived Euro Disney, was installed as president. Gilbert Trigano and Serge resigned, protesting that Club Med was becoming a "Mickey Mouse" set-up. The new management called the old "amateurish".
Gilbert Trigano was also instrumental in taking computers to the French public. An enthusiast himself (computers were set up in Club Med holiday villages by the early 1980s), he was invited in 1985 by Laurent Fabius, the socialist prime minister, to head a project to put computers in every school and college in France.
Earlier, President Mitterrand had ask him to set up "Mission Trigano", which installed computers in deprived urban areas.
In 1997, Gilbert Trigano created the virtual University of Tourism and Culture for Peace, based in Marseille, linking universities around the Mediterranean - starting in France, Israel, Palestine and Morocco. Combining his two passions for tourism and technology, he believed that such educational projects around tourism could generate a "culture of peace".
Gilbert Trigano, a small, energetic and creative personality, worked a 14-hour day. "If you live enough for three men every day you don't have to live as long," he once said. His missionary zeal for providing holidays for other people did not extend to himself - he never took a holiday.
He married Simone Sabah in 1945 and is survived by a son and three daughters.
Gilbert Trigano: born 1920; died, February 2001