Mediterranee on the Move
Vacation-bound Europeans can find a wider selection of resorts at Britain's Thos. Cook & Sons, fancier accommodations at Hilton hotels, or lower prices at youth hostels and campsites. The competition is intense, but even so, the Paris-based Club Mediterranee has prospered. For its 700,000 members, who pay $10 each in annual dues, Mediterranee has a unique attraction--the away-from-it-all ambiance of the 47 "vacation villages" that it maintains in 13 countries on five continents. Founded in 1950, the club has been increasing its revenues by 25% a year; in 1968 it took in an estimated $30 million.
That performance has made the stock of the publicly owned corporation one of the highest-flying issues on the Paris Bourse. Over the past five months, its price has risen from $88 to $120 per share. Investors include Edmond de Rothschild, who owns a 35% interest, and France's Louis Dreyfus Bank, which holds 8%. Last August, American Express Co. paid $2.7 million for a 15% interest in the club and took over as its North American booking agent. An American Express spokesman says that the company expects to increase its stake in Mediterranee in order to get more of "the swingers' market" in travel.
For Mediterranee, which already has 17,000 American members, the American Express tie-in has provided a computerized reservation system and a ready-made U.S. sales organization. Last month, establishing a more tangible toehold in the Americas, the club opened a 140-bed, $1,000,000 ski lodge in Bear Valley, high in California's Sierra Nevada. It also added a 250-bed, $4,000,000 hotel on France's Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.
Total Escape. Belgian-born Gerard Blitz got the idea of starting Mediterranee while he was operating government recreation centers for concentration-camp victims after World War II. He scraped together capital from friends and family and set up a village of U.S. Army surplus tents on Mallorca. The accommodations were spartan, but the club's predominantly French members jumped at the chance to spend a two-week holiday on an exotic island for $30. After that, Blitz added one vacation village after another in North Africa, the Middle East and Tahiti as well as in Europe.
Blitz's basic notion was to provide "total escape" from the complications of modern society. Even today, none of the club's villages have telephones in the rooms, television or even newspapers. Members wear sport clothes, bikinis or sarongs, and hardly anyone carries around any money. The club's youthful employees, recruited from France and other countries, wear no uniforms, accept no tips and mingle freely with the guests. The emphasis is on food and fun. The club serves hearty if standard French cuisine--langouste `a la parisienne is a typical dish--and an unlimited quantity of free wine at meals.
Full Circle. By comparison with its older outposts, some of Mediterranee's more recent villages are almost luxurious, featuring such amenities as air conditioning, wall-to-wall carpeting and private baths. And prices are not always the rock-bottom bargains they once were. U.S. members can spend a week at Bear Valley for $182, including bus transportation from San Francisco, meals, four hours of ski instruction daily and chairlift tickets.
The new vacation villages reflect the fact that Mediterranee, which once appealed mostly to secretaries and young marrieds, has lately been attracting affluent, middle-aged vacationers as well. Within the next year Blitz, 56, still the club's chief, plans to open both an inexpensive "family village" in Tunisia and a costlier, more comfortable resort on Martinique. Last month the club, which was founded mainly to provide Frenchmen with vacations abroad, came full circle. It agreed to manage four new vacation resorts for the French government. French tourism declined by more than 10% in 1968, and officials want to use the Blitz lightning technique to help attract more foreigners to the country.
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