When news broke last month that Center Parcs’ UK and Irish business was up for sale for a rumoured £5bn, the punchlines wrote themselves. “That’s almost as much as it costs to do a few activities!” “Try booking it during the school holidays!” You get the gist. More than 35 years after Sherwood Forest, the company’s inaugural UK resort, opened its gates in Nottinghamshire, ushering visitors into the Subtropical Swimming Paradise’s sci-fi geodesic dome, Center Parcs has become a very British obsession – one that’s surprisingly polarising.
Some see the brand’s short breaks as an egregious rip-off, the rates exorbitant for a brief sojourn in what they believe is essentially a holiday camp with delusions of grandeur. They have a point. A four-night stay in a two-bedroom woodland lodge in Sherwood Forest during the final week of July would set you back £1,299 at the time of writing. If you fancy a four-bedroom “new style executive lodge”, with a sauna and games room, that’d be £2,799. “For some sites, a weekend there is the cost of a self-catering holiday in the Mediterranean,” notes Beverley Boden, head of aviation, tourism, finance and marketing at Teesside University.
