Turkey
Documentary series about the leisure and tourism industry. This edition looks at specialist sailing company, Sunsail and its flagship resort hotel on Turkey's Aegean coast.
The British tourist is fickle, demanding and mean. But in Sunsail's Andy Hancock, it appears we may have met our match.
Twenty-six year-old Andy has four months to save a billion pound business. Bored with package holidays, fed up with bucket and spade, we Britons are going on activity holidays in record numbers from white water rafting to sailing and climbing. Sailing holiday specialist Sunsail have already got the world鈥檚 largest yacht fleet, now they are ploughing millions into their resorts.
The flagship of this investment programme is Club Phokaia. Its setting is idyllic; a rocky outcrop of Turkey's Aegean coast, but the hotel is rather less beauteous, run down, and in some places even dangerous. Sunsail have leased it- now they want development manager Andy to transform it into a five star resort in just five months.
As Matt West, Sunsail's CEO comments, 'Well he's got to do it鈥t's in the brochure...' But for all Matt's determination, events conspire to thwart them. Deadlines aren't so much missed, as completely ignored and the first customers have to be diverted to alternative resorts. Costs are climbing, and the market's collapsing. The certainties of mass tourism are fast vanishing, as the internet, affluence and increasing choice conspire to turn the British tourist into a changeable beast.
In a last throw of the dice Sunsail starts a million pound lawsuit against the builders. The courts rule against them, and at last there's a chink of hope for Andy.
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