Hang up your mankinis, turn off the foam machine, silence the DJ Ötzi, let the mourners come, for it looks as though Club 18-30 is approaching its demise and with it, the great British holiday as we know it. Thomas Cook, which owns the raunchy holiday club for young adults, is reportedly considering its future as the “Instagram generation” no longer sees the appeal in necking fluorescent blue fishbowl cocktails at a foam party while a tanked-up rep from Devon gropes their arse through chlamydia-tainted bubbles. According to reports, young people seem more concerned with taking impressive selfies than playing sex-position statues next to a semen-laced swimming pool.
There could be some truth in this. I have written before about the tyranny of Instagram when it comes to travel. In some south Asian holiday destinations, locals will even offer to take you to the best “Instagram spots” – for a fee. Your trip now needs to have aesthetic appeal: beautiful views, unique destinations, attractive food. When it comes to social media, wilderness is in and the all-inclusive prawn buffet is definitely out. Attempts to rebrand 18-30 as more sophisticated and urbane have largely fallen flat. First they came for the pub crawls, then they dropped Benidorm; the VIP Saatchi & Saatchi ad campaign followed. Thomas Cook wants to focus its attention now on its Cook’s Club brand. The website is certainly Instagram-worthy: mini-pizzas are out and street food is in. “Cocktails at the Captain Cook Bar have been created by a Berlin-based mixologist to deliver the perfect poolside golden hour.” It’s a far cry from pina colada. I doubt they even do chips.
In these days of social media showing off (not to mention stark social inequality), more and more people want a slice of the lux-lifestyle pie. Tastes have changed, aesthetics are determined by influencers, and a basic week in Kavos just doesn’t cut it any more. There are other factors at play here, too. Perhaps most significantly, people don’t need to go on holiday in order to find no-strings-attached sex: we have Tinder. 18-30 used to be marketed under the slogan “It’s not all sex, sex, sex. There’s a bit of sun and sea as well,” and traded off its notoriety for raunchiness. Nowadays, you can sort yourself some sex with one swipe of a finger; much cheaper than an organised singles holiday.
Although precise definitions differ, broadly speaking millennials are those people born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. They are so called because they turned 18 in or after 2000. They are also collectively known as Generation Y
And in this age of #MeToo, the highly sexualised culture of 18-30 begins to look old hat. Pushing inebriated young punters into wet T-shirt competitions and public blowjobs begins to look distinctly seedy at a time when we are interrogating sex, consent and power. The public revulsion at the drunk 18-year-old girl who performed a sex act on 24 men in a bar in Magaluf on a different company’s tour four years ago was shaming and misogynist. Post-Weinstein, how much have things changed? At least a little, though still not as much as we can hope. The case also drew attention to how easily antics abroad can end up haunting you back home, thanks to the ubiquity of camera phones. What happens in Malia no longer stays in Malia.
Or could it be that 18-30 holidays are just, well, a bit crap, and millennials are seeing the wood for (inflatable palm) trees? Holidaymakers still want to party abroad, but more and more want to do so on their own terms. It’s so easy and reasonable to self-organise a trip these days using Airbnb, low-cost airlines, and Uber. This generation of travellers is more intrepid than ever before: they are not intimidated by foreign travel and don’t need to be shepherded via sweaty coach into a closed compound where everything is arranged for them. Don’t get me wrong, I love a package holiday, I’ve been on several, and sometimes use them for the cheap flights, but browsing what was on offer recently in the hope of a budget trip for me and my mum, I found the lack of choice and rigidity on offer frustrating, not to mention the prices. It seems the golden age of the package holiday is over, and the loss of 18-30 is a symptom of that. Can it evolve? We’ll have to wait and see, but I’m certainly not holding my breath.
• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author
