TradewindsShould you book a hotel which is All Inclusive or not? For those that do not know, All Inclusive means that all of your meals - breakfast, lunch and dinner, and all your drinks - alcoholic and non-alcoholic are included for the duration of your stay at the hotel.
Generally an All Inclusive will be more expensive than staying at the hotel on a Breakfast Only, Half Board or Full Board basis but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you will save money. Most people are more than happy with breakfast and an evening meal at the hotel; a lot of people would be quite happy with just breakfast and then going out to local restaurants in the evening, which is obviously very reliant on the fact that there will be restaurants close by. And for those people who are just using the hotel as base and like to explore the local area, then I would definitely say that All Inclusive is an option they should avoid.
However, if you don’t intend to move far from your sun lounger during your holiday - lunchtime or evening meal aside - the way that I find best to calculate whether an All Inclusive is worth the extra money is judging how much extra you think you will spend at the hotel. This can be on drinks, both alcoholic and non alcoholic, and snacks including things such as ice creams for children (if you have them) during your stay. The price of a few coffees a day or a couple of lemonades can mount up to a fair whack after a week or two. Now factor in a few glasses of wine, spirits or beer in the evening and you could be left with a much higher spend than you intended.
As I tend to travel with just my wife, I judge the value of an All Inclusive on how much extra it would cost us if we were staying on a Half Board basis, and then calculating how much we are likely to drink at the bar in the evening or want pool/beach snacks and drinks during the day (I can live without lunch). As a rough idea I set this at about £60 per person - yours may be more or less, but the point is that this then allows me to calculate an extra £120 per night for the hotel. If that extra £120 means that All Inclusive is more cost effective than Half Board then that is what I will go for. If not then I will stick with the Half Board thank you very much.
Of course there are “All Inclusives” and “Good All Inclusives” and here you may come unstuck. I speak to plenty of people who have had a less than satisfactory experience with limp, warm and stale buffet offerings, watered down local spirits that sometime taste like paint stripper and nowhere to get a snack during the day. These hotels do exist albeit less frequently as competition and the advent of Trip Advisor have forced them to up their game. But they are still there - use price as a guide and as the old adage goes, if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is.
Conversely there are hotels that go above and beyond and offer exceptional All Inclusives. The one that sticks in my mind in particular is the beautiful Mayia Exclusive Resort & Spa in Rhodes where they even have an All Inclusive champagne bar. Yes, you read that right! And that is on top of their exceptional restaurants, buffet and bars. True it is at the higher end of the scale, but avoid peak season and you can get yourself an absolute bargain luxury all inclusive stay. Mayia is an adult only hotel but the sister property Princess Andriana Resort & Spa just down the road offers similar levels for families (no champagne for kids though). I have stayed at both and can thoroughly recommend them.
Of course once you start to look into various destinations you see that there is a culture of All Inclusive offerings rather than any other board basis. For instance the Mexican Riviera Maya is teeming with high quality hotels and resorts that offer nothing but an All Inclusive stay, the same can be said of many of the main Caribbean islands such as Jamaica, St Lucia, Barbados, Grenada and Antigua - and here you must trust that these are generally of fantastic quality. But again use price as a guide.
We sell a lot of Hyatt Inclusive Collection hotels, most notably Secrets, Breathless and Zoetry and these are what we would call Ultra All Inclusive. Hotels such as Sandals offer the same levels. For your money you will get plenty of high quality food served in a diverse selection of restaurants. You will get coffee and pastries throughout the day, and you will also get branded alcoholic drinks and exquisite cocktails. For these hotels you would generally pay a little more than your standard All Inclusive but you can rest assured that what you are getting is complete value for money. And if it is a special occasion such as a Honeymoon you should be looking no further.
Places like Asia and the Far East are a different matter. You can get All Inclusive stays but you will generally find that prices for extras - drinks, snacks, lunchtime meals - are much more affordable. A lot of the hotels lead-in with low prices and they are generally reliant on their guests spending a bit of money during their stay. For that reason I would always recommend a Half Board stay in these destinations unless, of course, you are staying in the middle of the rainforest in Borneo or similar and there is nothing else around.
Then you will have outliers such as the Indian Ocean with places such as the Maldives. Here you are obviously going to be on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean and there won’t be any local restaurants to go to. Use the spend per day calculator method that I outlined earlier and see if it would be worth your while going Half Board or All Inclusive. The main cost here will be drinks. Do a little research or contact us at Tradewinds and we will find out for you what the average cost will be for these. Pretty much the same will apply to Seychelles, Mauritius and Zanzibar although you won’t necessarily be stuck on a very small island with nothing much else going on.
So to wrap up - decide what type of holiday you want; decide if you are likely to be mainly in the hotel or out exploring; decide what your average spend would be daily to see if All Inclusive is beneficial financially; and most importantly, do some research on the hotel