Club Med invented the all-inclusive holiday in 1950, and nearly 75 years later it is still busy rewriting the formula. At this year's Skift Global Forum in New York, Carolyne Doyon — president and CEO of Club Med North America and the Caribbean — sat down with the Suite Success podcast to explain how a brand famous for beach villages became a premium operator with ski resorts in the Alps and safaris in South Africa, and where it goes next.
Doyon runs more than 3,000 employees across the region and has been with the company since 2008, when she took over sales for Eastern Canada and quickly moved up to lead the whole country. Her route there was anything but linear. Born and raised in Montreal, she studied psychology before switching to tourism management, then landed an internship at Delta Air Lines in Montreal — despite speaking no English at the time. She learned the language in roughly four months, spent over five years rising through airline operations, moved into travel retail to see the industry from another angle, and only then joined Club Med, a brand she'd admired since childhood.
Her biggest career lesson, she says, came from Delta: raise your hand even when you don't tick every box. There was no master plan, just a habit of saying yes and figuring it out afterwards — summed up in her chat's title catchphrase that "the 'no' does not exist."
On the brand itself, the big shift started in 2004, when Club Med began a deliberate repositioning upmarket: closing, renovating and opening resorts until, two decades on, every property in its nearly 70-resort portfolio is classed as premium, luxury or Exclusive Collection. The next target is ambitious — 100 resorts worldwide by 2035. What Doyon insists can't change in all that growth is the so-called Club Med spirit: the human connection between staff and guests that she sees as the company's real differentiator, and something psychology training apparently still helps her protect.
Why should a traveller care? Because the all-inclusive you might have dismissed as dated has quietly become a genuinely premium product. If your last Club Med memory is a communal buffet and plastic wristbands from the 1990s, the current offering — from alpine ski lodges to African safari camps — looks very different, and the expansion plans mean more options in more places over the next decade. For families in particular, the brand leans hard on that personal, sociable service model rather than just facilities.
The episode is also a good listen for anyone working in hospitality: Doyon's path from French-Canadian intern who faked her way into an English-speaking job to regional CEO is a decent argument that careers are built by seizing opportunities, not plotting them.
