Sun, sea and sex is not a bad formula to base your holiday on. Or a business empire. The late Gilbert Trigano made his fortune from the three S's with his Club Med holiday resorts. From Corfu to Cancun, his camps hosted young adults cavorting in next to nothing, belting out singalongs by a campfire. It was fun, it was new, it was perfectly in tune with the Sixties and Seventies, the era of the swinging singles. A Club Med hol, I remember my father telling a family friend whose husband had dumped her for his secretary, was just the pick-me-up she should treat herself to.
Little wonder that, when Trigano died the other day, a long cortege of sun-wrinkled French middle-class men and women sobbed into their hankies: his had been a life-enhancing project. Although the British never really bought it (les beefsteaks represented only 3 per cent of Club Med gentils membres, as clients were called), Trigano's project serves as an eye-opening Gallic parable for enterprises - political as well as financial - on this side of the Channel.
From the outset, the Trigano vision was one of inclusiveness (tributes at his death hailed his "democratisation of leisure"). The Club Med camps - which, in a neat parallel with new Labour, started out as groups of tents - practised an "all welcome" policy that was seen as a way of breaking down class barriers. In a daringly unconventional move, guests and staff were encouraged to treat each other as equals, and addressed one another with the familiar "tu" instead of the formal "vous". It was an appealing, all-for-one, one-for-all solidarity. Together, the attitude of these pioneers was: we can improve our lives (or the week we spend in Corfu, Cancun or Copacabana).
Until Trigano's clubs came on the scene, holidaymakers had to choose between lumpy mattresses in Broadmoor cell-style rooms, and four-star luxury where jacuzzis bubbled and air conditioning droned. Trigano's peculiar genius lay in cornering a third market, for the middle-of-the-road consumer of fun. His villages catered for those with just enough disposable income (and prospects of more) to aspire to a week in Nirvana.
By the mid-1970s, it was a large enough section of the market to catapult Trigano and co to the top of the sector. Things couldn't have been better really - until complacency and greed set in.
One of Trigano's founding principles - as befitted a one-time communist - was that money should not taint the fun of the habitues. Thus, in a coy little scheme, all Club Med villages replaced francs, dollars and shillings with strings of shells or beads - it all added up to the same thing, but at least it placed a fig leaf of respectability on what Trigano saw as a necessary evil. The problem was that, with time, and head-swelling success, this clean-hands attitude gave way to greed. Keen to grab ever more corners of the world for his hedonists, Trigano overstretched his company's resources by investing too much money in too many dubious initiatives, and he abandoned his all-inclusive package deal to set up increasingly luxurious villages at ever steeper prices. By the early 1990s, the club's profits had slumped to an all-time low. Staff morale plummeted and management infighting (back-stabbings, plots and career-furthering machinations) weakened the once unflagging esprit de corps. The darkest hour came when staff at a village in Martinique, feeling betrayed by their leader and his top brass, went on strike for more pay and held their guests hostage for 24 hours. Police armed with tear gas had to break up the mini-riot.
After this unseemly debacle, poor old Trigano was forced to retire from his creation - leaving his moribund company to be revived by Philippe Bourgignon, drafted from EuroDisney (another intriguing parallel).
Despite its inglorious end, Club Med earned its founder a little footnote in history. In its early, heady days, though, when it pledged a wonderful time for all, the project had promised to be so very much more.
