Safi – For generations, the Moroccan summer ran on the same rhythm. The car was loaded to the roof, the road led to relatives in another city or a rented flat near the sea, and the holiday took shape slowly, meal by meal, once the family arrived.
Lately, more and more families are choosing a summer that asks almost nothing of them, one resort paid for once, where the whole week has already been arranged, whether the place stands on the coast at Agadir or Saïdia, on the edge of Marrakech, or further off in Turkey or Egypt.
A week where everything is already there
Inside the gates, the day arranges itself. There is always a table laid and a meal waiting, water and shade for the long afternoons, and somewhere for the children to burn off the morning while the grown-ups are left happily to their own devices.
One part of the day gives way to the next, breakfast to the pool, the pool to an evening of music and soft light, each handed over without a single decision to make. Nothing needs booking, nothing needs chasing, and no wallet comes out between one meal and the next.
The summer nobody has to cook
For the women of the family, this is the real change, even if it goes unspoken.
A traditional summer, however warm, still ended with somebody in the kitchen, planning the meals and feeding a full house of relatives and half-invited guests.
At a resort where every plate simply appears, that weight lifts all at once. The mothers and grandmothers who usually hold the whole holiday together finally get to sit in the shade, order a mint tea, and be looked after like everyone else.
The comfort of knowing the cost
Then there is the money, which this kind of holiday settles with a rare calm.
Because the price is agreed before anyone leaves home, the week carries no running total, no small sums stacking up after every coffee by the pool or every ice cream at four o’clock.
A family can relax into the unusual feeling of a holiday that is already, completely, paid for, and let the arithmetic fall away with the routine.
What the resort quietly replaces
Something is traded for all that ease, and most families feel it even as they book. A resort like this is a world of its own, and a week inside it is a week apart from the older summer it stands in for, the aunts and cousins dropping by, the family house filling and emptying and filling again, the neighborhood that knew everyone by name.
Still, the old summer has not vanished. It simply shares the season now with this easier one.
The Moroccan family holiday always came down to the same two pleasures, everyone together in one place and everyone well fed.
The all-inclusive has just found a way to promise both at once, and to hand the family the rarest luxury of the season, a week with nothing left to worry about.
