Pontin’s Provides Tips On Aiming Ridiculously High
Every mother of a three year old girl is used to hearing about aiming high. Any little princess knows that sooner or later, their prince will show up and happily ever afters will be had with very little effort and a whole lot of singing. However, sometimes Disney style fantasies aren’t limited to the playtimes of the Disney Princess generation: businesses can’t get enough of wanting to do this and that as Walt would do. Even *shudder* British businesses.
Last month, the Britannia Hotel Group purchased the Pontin’s chain of British holiday camps. Ah yes, at this point I feel the non-British contingent dropping into a deep sleep of befuddlement. It’s therefore probably worth explaining what a ‘Holiday Camp’ is, and why it should scare you. A holiday camp is a simple enough arrangement of permanent caravans and chalets, with extensive activity centres, swimming pools and entertainment. It’s sort of a like a cruise ship you can escape from, only more unbearably kitsch and family orientated. St Lucia holidays they most positively are not. The owner of the Britannia Hotel Group, Alex Langsam, thinks he has a plan for the Pontin’s brand (that for some reason or other doesn’t involve firing it into the sun). It’s just not very good.
The length and breadth of the plan is to do what should probably have been done forty odd years ago. The idea is to be able to give the British families the Florida holidays phenomenon on home soil. The beauty, for him, of the Disneyworld experience is that “the adults enjoy it as much as the kids”. But Pontin’s has gone too far down the way of paper-thin smiles and kitsch entertainers: changes will alienate the hardcore, the rest of the market just dislikes the brand. The chances of such a British company becoming in anyway comparable to an offshoot of the Disney company is laughable. They may as well pretend they’re offering Jamaica holidays by serving meat pies with jerk spice. The biggest idea we’ve got out of Langsam so far is that the costume wearing ‘cast members’ of Disney’s resorts should be copied. Considering Pontin’s isn’t a holiday business that grew out of the success of a motion picture studio, their only option will be to use their paltry 25 million GBP to license other people’s characters. Dreamworks characters would fit the utter disdain that most people have for the Pontin’s brand. However, any best case scenario still involves the Bluecoats staying, according to Langsam, when they’re really the root of the problem.
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