Why Can't the Middle Class Get Enough of That Resort Called Club Med?

It caught on in Europe, and some Chinese consumers are already fans. Can it now be sold to more Chinese people?

Shen Qin has gotten used to handing people a VR headset when she introduces her company's resorts: "You have to try this."

As the Club Med vice president in charge of marketing, she and her team spend a lot of time in front of people who might become customers, and in front of journalists. Compared with a long verbal pitch, the headset is much easier.

Blue sky, ski runs, cable cars, the resort itself, the feeling of being completely free, the sheer enthusiasm of the place — all of it can be thrown at you at once, in a few minutes. Afterwards, an abstract idea can turn into a want: should I go or not?

Club Med has a Chinese name that translates as Mediterranean Club. But anyone with even passing knowledge of the brand still calls it Club Med, short for the French "Club Méditerranée." That says something about the customers its founders had in mind: young, fashionable, fluent in a foreign language, well educated.

For plenty of Chinese travelers, a destination abroad stopped being a novelty long ago. But over the past few years, what each of them wants from a trip has changed.

In a series of stories QDaily has done on the upgrading of travel spending, we found that once consumers have been through the sightseeing trips meant to "broaden your horizons" and the shopping trips, what they come back emphasizing is something else: personalization, sensibility, freedom, not being disturbed. We also found that so-called standardized service — or the satisfying of subtler consumer feelings — is gradually becoming the next thing worth exploring. Consider the question this way: what kind of service actually meets the need we have when what we want is not to be disturbed?

Club Med may have an answer. It is, after all, the most successful resort company in the world.

When the company introduces itself, it always mentions the need its founder, the World War II veteran Gérard Blitz, identified: what people are really after on vacation is "inner peace and quiet, and lasting happiness."

Its real success may have come from the explosive growth of the global middle class. After the war, Western Europe, the United States and Japan all went through nearly 30 years of fast economic growth, which only began to slow in the 1980s. Globalization then started moving production out to other low-income economies, which in turn expanded Asia's middle class through the 1990s and 2000s.

Club Med followed that curve — from the Mediterranean to the rest of Europe and the Americas, then to Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and China — and learned to deliver the same service on islands and snowy mountains anywhere in the world.

Along the way it built a culture of its own, starting with the G.O., a term it never tires of explaining. It is French too, for "gentle organizer," and what it actually means is staff (much as Disneyland calls its employees "cast members"). It is also the company's model of the ideal vacationer. We'll come back to the role later.

In the kind of service the company described to QDaily, the key words all circle back to one model: the European vacation.

Why So Much Emphasis on Feeling Respected?

In Europe, the family summer holiday, or a rest cure at a hot spring or in the mountains, began as something only the wealthier aristocracy could have. As transportation developed, that kind of holiday turned into a consumer product ordinary people could buy.

Even then, the travelers that railway companies, hotels and guidebooks were aiming at were the comfortably off middle class, and what they wanted from a holiday was to live, for a while, as respectably as an aristocrat.

As one of the first service companies in the European holiday business, Club Med's service comes close to that of a butler: it works out the specifics with the customer in advance, arranges transfers in both directions, greets guests at the resort and supports them the whole way through.

Why Not Let Guests Carry a Wallet?

In the book Priceless, spending is defined as a form of loss: every time you take out your wallet for a large purchase, you feel a real pang. Roll the costs into one payment, or simply make fewer of them, and the pleasure of spending rises sharply.

Applied to the miserable business of paying for something every few minutes on a trip, Club Med's answer is all-inclusive pricing: you pay a fee up front that looks high, and then, inside the resort, you almost never pay for anything again.

Cruise ships, where spending also happens inside a sealed space, are the other classic case. Handing over the money hurts, but once you remember that the price covers the cabin, the food and a long list of entertainment on board, using any of it feels free.

Has It Always Been This Standardized and Luxurious?

Early on, Club Med was closer to a holiday for working-class people and for young people who weren't yet earning: simple rooms, meals and washing done communally. Even the fun was cheap — sports of every kind all day, dancing under the stars at night.

Next to the European tradition of summering at a country house, or renting an expensive villa near the beach, this was both new and relatively cheap. At the time a middle-class European household spent about US$10,000 a year on everything combined, and with inflation climbing alongside, there was no way to spend much of it on a few weeks away.

But in the 2000s the company deliberately cut the value-for-money resorts that had served the lower end of the middle class and turned itself into a high-end brand. A night at one of its resorts now costs more than 2,500 yuan per person. That lets it keep serving the richer part of the middle class.

How Do You Use Customers to Attract More Customers?

Not everyone who comes to Club Med for the first time likes how relaxed the place is.

The resorts sit on sun-soaked islands, or on mountains where you can ski as much as you want. The rooms are nothing special, because you're supposed to spend your time outside them. Each village has more than a dozen kinds of entertainment built in, so children can gather and play all day. After the evening song-and-dance show comes an all-night party, heavy on alcohol. The staff's main job is to hang around with the guests, which produces the illusion that nobody here cares about work.

For middle-class customers still locked in work mode, or Chinese customers who know nothing yet about the European vacation, this is a choice. Only people who genuinely love to play, who love leisure and holidays, walk into the resort and find they can never leave it again.

And the people who do fall for resort life get used later, in the company's marketing, as the case studies: they are the ones who can turn the line between work and leisure — between an efficient state of mind and a life full of feeling — into a ritual. That, the company argues, is what "work-life balance" really means.

Only a G.O. Can Make Service Truly Personal

At Club Med every staff member is a G.O. (Gentil Organisateur, "gentle organizer"). Unlike hotel staff, the skills they have to master all serve one purpose: playing with the guests better. They work more than ten hours a day at full energy, speak two languages or more, are good at every sport, can win over children, and have to stage a differently themed song-and-dance show each night.

The G.O. job is both what Club Med expects of its customers and a kind of indoctrination of its employees. They embody the company spirit; they are the soul of the resort.

For a young person, walking out of that dream is not easy. VICE once ran a first-person account by a G.O. who, after seven years, finally decided to leave:

"Getting back into a normal rhythm of life is hard, especially after seven full years in an environment like Club Med. It took me some time to break out of the G.O. lifestyle, but once I got used to that sense of stability, I never went back to Club Med."

The Whole Point Is to Make You Forget Work

Time off and holidays were never really part of working-class life, or of the life of the "upgraded" white-collar class: the free hours after work were still taken up by errands and extra work.

But a steady job is often part of where middle-class pride comes from. They can earn a reliable income from the knowledge and skills they have, with room to move up. Compared with people at the bottom living hand to mouth, they are far better off. Compared with a rich class that inherited the family business and spends freely, they contribute something real to society.

Accumulated wealth gradually gave them both the idea of a leisure life and the money for it: the notion that a person should have a stretch of time to discover and improve themselves, a way of living set against the fragmented, noisy city.

Sometimes You Have to Forget the Children Too

Unlike the small freedoms that come with money, what weighs on the middle class on holiday is the family.

In any culture, a family trip is a hard thing to satisfy. The grandparents may prefer a restful, restorative kind of holiday. The parents may want a break from stress. The daughter only wants to try as many activities as she can. And the little brother still needs someone watching him.

This is where the Club Med model becomes the best value: the grounds come with every kind of entertainment, but you can also just rest quietly on your own; the G.O.s are formidable, and the children's programs at many Club Meds mean the kids have a wonderful time away from their parents; and the adults get to step out of their ordinary state and play as hard as they did when they were young.

How Do You Sell These Feelings to Chinese Consumers?

For a first-timer, all of this makes walking into Club Med feel like walking into a utopia: no work, no family, a friendly atmosphere, everything free. All you have to do is what Gérard Blitz did sixty years ago, coming back from the war — enjoy a peaceful holiday with a slightly elevated alcohol content.

Now Qian Jiannong, a vice president of Fosun Group, wants to sell that feeling to more Chinese consumers.

Decades ago, while working in Germany, he heard colleagues talk about this "clever company" called Club Med. When he joined Fosun, Club Med became the first overseas acquisition he brought back with him.

It took him almost two years. In 2014 Fosun, already Club Med's largest single shareholder, bid to buy the company outright; after eight rounds of tug-of-war with the union and rival bidders, it bought the French company — then worth only 500 million euros on the market — for 950 million euros.

In business circles, Fosun chairman Guo Guangchang is called China's Warren Buffett. He invests with money from an insurance business, as Buffett does, and what he has his eye on may be exactly a market like Chinese tourism: riskier, but worth more if it works.

Since opening its first resort at Yabuli in 2010, Club Med has four resorts in China; by 2020 the company hopes to have 20.

After joining Club Med's board, Qian Jiannong also proposed a new plan for China. Because of the climate and terrain, the only places in China that fit Club Med's traditional criteria for a site are Sanya and the Northeast, so the number of resorts here could hit a ceiling. But around first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai, the market for high-quality short getaways is still open.

The project was named Joyview by Club Med, and the first resort, opening soon, was sited in Anji — not far from Shanghai, and known for its sea of bamboo and its white tea.

"Chinese sightseeing can't go on forever being a bottle of water and a loaf of bread and a bus that hauls you from Nanjing to Wuxi today and from Wuxi to Suzhou tomorrow. We hope that once Club Med is in China it can really change the state of the travel industry, and some of the things we complain about now."

As Fosun's first big move into tourism, and its first attempt to change the industry, Qian Jiannong thinks 960 million euros is not a high price. According to a research report by the consultancy Oxford Economics and the payments company Visa, by 2025 Chinese travelers will generate US$255.4 billion in revenue worldwide. Fosun wants to get there first and take a bigger slice.

But the young people drawn to a Club Med holiday may only want to go back to the 1970s, to that Caribbean resort beach The New York Times once described: full of half-naked, idle young people, in a hormone-charged atmosphere that "middle-aged people couldn't stand."

For a middle class squeezed now and then by work, and carrying a little emptiness, that way of living still has its pull.