Club 18-30: Magaluf reaches the end of an indulgent era as Thomas Cook retires the brand

Our travel correspondent reports from Spain’s most notorious resort as 18-30 dwindles to zero

“Everybody’s happy in Happy House!”, promises the front page of the menu of Casa Feliz on the seafront in Magaluf.

The British customers tucking into an industrial-sized all-day breakfast of sausage, bacon, beans, eggs, tomato, mushrooms, hashbrowns, toast and tea (“PG Tips, English milk”) for €4.75 certainly appear content.

But Vicente Tur Araullo, the proprietor, says: “I’m not happy at all.”

The rotund and normally genial bar owner is despondent because the giant tour operator, Thomas Cook, has thrown in the beer-sodden bar towel and killed off Club 18-30.

A brand synonymous with sun, sea, sangria and sex (sometimes, legend has it, all at the same time), has been consigned to the museum of travel curiosities. It joins Concorde, Yugotours and free baggage allowances as 20th-century concepts that could not survive in a new millennium.

“They blame the English for getting drunk and all that,” says the bar owner. “I think they were very important for Magaluf.”

Across at the BH Mallorca Hotel, location for the last-ever Club 18-30 trip, workmen are taking everything down for the winter – except for the ungainly waterslide that forms the centrepiece of the property. The “adult water park with nine white-knuckle slides, wave pool and giant jacuzzis” will reopen next summer, but without Club 18-30.

If, as Philip Larkin wrote, sexual intercourse began in 1963, Club 18-30 was not far behind. It started operations in 1970, just like the Boeing 747. And in their very different ways, the Jumbo jet and the party brand liberated travellers.

Club 18-30 quickly became synonymous with excessive drinking, wild partying and, well, short-term holiday romances.

“It was like a rite of passage,” says Peter David, now a 55-year-old company director living in Surrey. He took a Club 18-30 trip to Morocco in 1980 when he was only 17.

“My dad had to write a letter to say I was allowed to go,” he says.

“It was quite pissy,” he recalls. “Mainly drinking, and hoping you might have a shag.

“There was sex, but I didn’t get any, unfortunately.”

The Islamic kingdom of Morocco did not turn out to be a long-term partner for Club 18-30.

The brand whose name was (almost) its age limits achieved lasting relationships with some key Mediterranean resorts: Kavos in Corfu, Malia in Crete and Ayia Napa in Cyprus. But Magaluf was always the Club 18-30 heartland.

Choosing a boozing and bonking holiday from a brochure peaked around the turn of the century: in a year, 110,000 customers spent an average of £436 on a package that included flights, transfers, accommodation and the services of a rep.

He or she was not employed to inform clubbers from Somerset and Strathclyde about the landscapes and language of Mallorca, nor to lead artistic adventures to the inspirational Fundació Joan Miró just up the road.

Clients – many of whom were on their first trip abroad – were enticed onto banana boat rides and bar crawls.

At least the booze is cheap in Magaluf (Simon Calder)

But the world was changing. “Travellers don’t need reps to hold their hands all week,” says Jools Thomas, travel and tourism lecturer at Bucks College Group in Aylesbury. “The shelf life of the brand had started to decline.”

No-frills flying means that cheap alcohol and liberal moral codes are no longer the sole preserve of Mediterranean resorts. Stag and hen parties head for Riga in Latvia, Krakow in Poland or, for the cheapest beer in Europe, Skopje in Macedonia.

Eighteen years ago, social media did not extend beyond the postcard – which itself was a rare phenomenon in Magaluf, since it required a Club 18-30 customer to coordinate the activities of finding a card and a stamp, remembering the address and getting round to posting it.

But today, the standard dispatch from Mediterranean beaches has shifted from a handwritten “wish you were here” to an instant “don’t you wish you were here?”.

News of the impending demise of Britain’s best-known youth holiday brand was buried on page six of Thomas Cook’s half-year results in May. The firm said it would “discontinue the UK market’s Club 18-30 holiday brand after summer 2018 as a result of the continued strategic review of our differentiated holiday offer”.

To make its holidays more Instagrammable, Thomas Cook is discarding wet T-shirt competitions in favour of “a casually cool paradise where everyone is welcome”. People who were born in the 21st century are promised “a melting pot of cultures, textures and flavours” at its new youth brand, Cook’s Club.

“The modern day wanderer craves more, and we think it’s high time to offer something extraordinary,” says a company seemingly intent on turning itself into Thomas Cool.

Crucially, the properties have chic backdrops which look better on selfies than the giant plastic spiral waterslide at the heart of the final Club 18-30 property in Magaluf.

At BCM, the biggest club in Mallorca, the shutters are down for winter. It promises that from 9 June next year, the “Foam Party, Water Party, Paint Party or the outrageous Washing Machine Party” will be back. But Club 18-30 won’t be.

Breakfast of champions at the Happy House in Magaluf (Simon Calder)

Back at the Happy House on the seafront, Abba are singing Dancing Queen and the clientele – more Saga than lager – are loving it. But Vicente Tur Araullo is still cross with Thomas Cook.

“They want more quality customers, they want families. But they didn’t need to take all the other ones out; 18-30, they’re not all hooligans, are they?”

But with Thomas Cook unable to find a serious buyer for Club 18-30, the last banana boat has sailed. In its wake: only blurred memories, and a certain wistfulness among those who missed out on the phenomenon.

As Jane, a leading travel executive, confesses: “By the time I plucked up the courage to go on a Club 18-30 holiday, I was too old.”