You’ll never fit in. They’ll never let you join their club. Yet still you try. Discount-voucher websites have permitted everyone to visit that other realm of posh restaurants, chi-chi resorts and executive spas, just for one day. They spot you a mile off. You, with your flaccid luggage, dog-eared printouts and donkey-jacket pockets full of stolen soap. Have your bargain eggs benedict in the Sussex Suite between 9 and 11am. Then kindly fuck off. It’s impossible to relax when you’re voucher scum in a pamper palace, and if you did it’d be in some disastrously uncouth way, like farting in the reiki master’s face.
Luxury-holiday reducers Secret Escapes used to acknowledge this malaise. Its classic ad was a woman who couldn’t stop whispering about how she was only on that poolside lounger thanks to getting 70% off online. “Who are you talking to, darling?” her concerned off-camera husband would say, his holiday crippled from the outset by tension and shame.
Now Secret Escapes has changed tack. It wants us to wage full class war and front it out. #SMUGFACE is the new slogan, slapped in bold on a deal-fuelled slob in a robe, smirking aggressively outside a spa. Ode To Joy swells, fountains spurt. Jessica Brown Findlay purrs aristocratically on the voiceover.
It’s no good. Another ad has a young couple surveying their open-air suite somewhere in the far east. A waiter serves dinner on a floating platform. A leopard reclines nearby. They’ve made it! But that guy will want tipping, and the leopard can smell imposters. Stuff as many cucumber-lotion miniatures into your jeans as you can, and run.
