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Family Resorts, and What the Price Really Covers

All-inclusive is a marketing word before it is a price. These guides open with the inclusion strip instead: what the nightly rate covers, what gets charged at the desk, which restaurants need booking, what the kids club costs and how tall a child has to be for each slide.

Emma, who writes the Journey Finder hotel guides, standing on a Paris street with the Eiffel Tower behind her

Emma

Published

In Brief

What do these family resort guides tell you?

What the rate includes and what it does not, resort by resort. Meals, drinks, kids club, water park and transfers are each marked included, charged extra, not offered, or not published. Kids club ages and hours are printed as the resort states them, and every slide carries its height minimum in centimetres.

Key takeaways

  • An inclusion strip per resort, so the extras are visible before you book
  • Kids club ages, hours, lunchtime closures and any charge
  • Slide count, height minimums in centimetres and the months each pool runs

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How these guides work

What goes into the inclusion strip, and what deliberately does not.

What the price covers and what it does not. Every resort gets an inclusion strip: meals, drinks, kids club, water park, activities and airport transfers, each marked as included in the rate, charged on top, not offered at all, or not published by the resort. The list of extras is usually what decides whether a holiday lands on budget, and it is the part a booking page hides behind the word all-inclusive.

Because that is the number the lifeguard measures against, and it is the difference between a water park day that works and one that ends in tears at the top of a staircase. Slide restrictions are a published fact about the property, so we print them per slide where the resort publishes them, along with how many slides there are and which months they run.

From the resort's own website. Ages served, opening hours, whether it shuts for lunch, whether it costs extra and whether you have to book ahead. Where a resort does not publish one of those, the guide says so rather than filling the gap. A kids club that closes from midday to two changes what you can plan, and almost nobody mentions it.

No, and they never will. Recommendations here are written against published facts about the property, such as an age band a club accepts or a height a slide requires. Nothing on the site asks you to enter a child's age, name or any other detail, and nothing about your family is stored.

Every guide carries its own re-verification date, and the whole set is rechecked before the spring booking window each year. Resort inclusions move more than hotel facts do: a restaurant leaves the meal plan, a kids club adds a charge, a slide closes for a refit. A guide that was right last summer can quietly cost you money this one.

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Photo credits (39)

Photos via Wikimedia Commons, used under their respective licences.