Holiday clubs, such as Club Méditerranée, are hotels that offer all-inclusive packages that include sports and leisure activities.
A focus on entertainment
Holiday clubs were invented in the 1930s by Billy Butlin, an English showman who ran a fairground in a tourist resort. He noticed that bed-and-breakfast landladies in seaside resorts would, sometimes literally, push families out of the lodgings between meals, regardless of the weather, leaving them to wander aimlessly. His first camps included physical activity equipment, but the guests did not use the facilities, and seemed bored, so he came up with the idea of hiring entertainment staff to lead activities and facilitate social interactions among guests.
This story shows that people who are used to spending their days working under stressful and controlled circumstances cannot, from one day to the next, relax and engage in leisure activities without encouragement and guidance, which is the role played by the entertainment staff. While some people may mock these types of social activities that they do not think they need, the fact is that they have their own clubs as residents, and they control access to them.