Club Méditerranée - A holiday company on the road to recovery?

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Business Management Corporate Governance grade: 10 Ashcroft International Business School Cambridge course: Strategic Management language: English abstract: The following assignment is to undertake a strategic analysis of the French package holiday company Club Méditerranée or as it will be mentioned by its more common name in this report Club Med. Moreover this report will investigate whether or not Club Med is able to recover from their shrinking profitability of the last decade and turn the company back into what it used to be - the market leader in the all-inclusive industry. Club Med is the original founder of the so called all-inclusive holiday concept (Club Méditerranée 2010). Since its foundation in 1950 by the former Belgian water polo champion Gerard Blitz the corporation has set out to become the largest organization in its industry becoming a Public limited company along the way in 1963. As mentioned on the previous page the former CEO of Club Med Philippe Bourguignon once described the company's ultimate objective as bringing happiness to its customers. Nowadays Club Med has 75 villages on five different continents and hence operates in 40 countries. This worldwide expansion of Club Med is one staggering sign that the matured all-inclusive holiday industry seems to have enough demand in order to be profitable. Especially since the worldwide financial crisis hit in 2007/2008 consumers want the ability of controlling their budgets in times of an economic downturn. As a result statistics show an increase in demand for all-inclusive holidays in the last couple of years. According to figures of the Travelweekly homepage in 2009 more than one quarter of customers decided to book all-inclusive. However since the all-inclusive industry has evolved into an immeasurably diversified sector (Travelweekly 2010) specific boundaries have to be set to Club Med's indus