Over 20 years ago, a good friend of mine told me, apropos of nothing, that he thought the entire industry of all-inclusive resorts was corrupt. He said he’d been to a Sandals resort in Jamaica and opted to go “outside the gates,” as he called it, and had been horrified by what he’d seen there. Poverty, he said, was everywhere, but also, people living a life quite apart from the resort.
This confused me at first. The line we’d been fed was that resorts like Sandals and Barefoot and Club Med fed into the local economy, hiring people to work at their resorts and in general contributing. The picture John painted for me was very different.
It wasn’t until I finally went to an all-inclusive for myself that I actually understood what he meant. The multi-national resorts hired childcare or waterskiing or parasailing instructors from America or Europe; the local people who did get hired on to work at these resorts were usually cleaners. You didn’t really speak to them.
In any case, I haven’t been to an all-inclusive resort since then – it was too obvious travel there on multiple disaster-relief efforts for an international NGO I volunteer for: I’ve been to Haiti three times for earthquakes and hurricanes, and Dominica twice for Hurricane Maria.
