How the birthplace of the package holiday managed to escape populist tourism

You wouldn’t normally find Corsica on any list of “lucky” places. Since antiquity, the Mediterranean island’s historical narrative has been dominated by onerous tales of rebellion, romanticism and a consistent knack for failing to make profitable use of its strategic position.

Yet Calvi, on Corsica’s northern coast, occupies a small but vital place in the history of modern tourism. It’s all thanks to the intentions of one individual. And no, I’m not thinking of Napoleon, the island’s most famous son. 

More than 75 years ago, a plane chartered by UK-based firm Horizon Holidays took off from London bound for Calvi. The firm was set up by a Russian émigré called Vladimir Raitz, whose idea was to deliver an all-in-one holiday experience in which flights, hotels, food and entertainment were included in a single price.

If you’re thinking, “That sounds like a package holiday to me”, then you’re absolutely right. Raitz demoed this new idea with a group of schoolteachers in 1950. The following year tickets became available to the general public.

Despite its pioneering package-holiday offering, Calvi never became as overrun by tourists as other popular places in the region. Though it had first-mover advantage, Mediterranean glamour, cheap flights and a romantic origin story, the town avoided becoming a relic, a forgotten coastal destination or fly-and-flop resort. 

“We’re pretty busy in summer but a lot of the people who dine here arrive by yacht from the Côte d’Azur,” a local told me as I reclined outside Île de Beauté café eating a salade de chèvre chaud on a recent low-season trip.

Calvi failed – or, for my money, succeeded – due to a mix of geography, politics, culture and sheer awkwardness.

The first puzzle pieces are the mountains that frame the town. Compare the obdurate landscape here with the Costa Blanca’s endlessly buildable coastlines. Then there’s the fact that package tourism lives or dies on cheap access. Calvi might have welcomed those early package-holiday jets but its airport remained small with volatile, weather-dependent landings, limited runway expansion and fewer direct routes.

Then add in the attitude of postwar France, which prioritised domestic tourism and had a preference for small hotels, pensions and campsites. Spain did the exact opposite, welcoming overseas tour operators with open arms. It also invested heavily in airports under Francisco Franco in the 1960s and 1970s.

Wandering around Calvi’s bijou squares and narrow lanes, I can’t help but to feel that the atmosphere of the place is innately inimical to populist tourism. Then I read more about who actually went on that maiden Horizon Holidays trip.

As Raitz later recalled in his memoir Flight to the Sun, the people attracted to his idea were not those you might expect. Raitz typified his guests as “The man in the street [who] acquired a taste for wine, for foreign food, started to learn French, Spanish or Italian, made friends in the foreign lands he had visited; in fact [became] more ‘cosmopolitan’, with all that that entailed.”

Based on Raitz’s recollection, it seems that the package holiday began with quixotic ideals before mutating into predictability, big hotels, English breakfasts, familiar nightlife and repeatable experiences.

And yet it’s difficult to identify a single quantifiable way to keep a pretty French coastal town such as Calvi from swapping the auberge for the all-inclusive, or the broody citadel for the bawdy souvenir stand. But it certainly helps to have a lot of mountains in the vicinity – and a motto along the lines of, “Whatever Spain did in the 1960s, let’s be forever grateful that we didn’t.”

Rob Crossan is a London-based journalist. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.