Another British tourist has perished. Not on a Mediterranean package holiday but in a fire at a resort in the Dominican Republic. The Foreign Office has, as protocol demands, issued an urgent travel warning.
What should we feel? Grief, of course. But also a certain weary disgust.
For this is not a natural disaster; it is a parable of the profit-driven, safety-neglecting, deregulated global tourism industry that sells paradise on the cheap and delivers, all too often, a coffin. We are told to check fire exits. But who checks the safety culture of a hotel chain that cuts corners on sprinklers in a country where building regulations are a suggestion?
This is the logical endpoint of the holiday industrial complex: a system that treats the Caribbean as a playground for jaded Britons, a place where they can drink cheap rum, ignore the locals, and return – most of the time – with a tan. When a fire takes a life, we tut, we share the news, we maybe donate to a GoFundMe. But we do not stop.
Instead, we book another sunny holiday for next year. The FCO warns; the travel agents sell. The empire of leisure, the consumerist paradise, demands its sacrifices.
And we, as a nation, happily provide them. What does this death tell us? That our desire for a cheap, easy escape from a drizzly island has become a kind of madness, a colonialist disregard for the places we visit.
The Dominican Republic, after all, is not just a resort; it is a country of 11 million people, many of whom work in the very hotels that failed to protect our tourist. We treat it as a backdrop for our happiness, a place where we can indulge our imagined selves – tanned, relaxed, free from the burdens of proper British society. But society has a way of reasserting itself.
A fire. A death. A warning.
And we will forget, as we always forget, until the next tragedy. Because the real tragedy is not the fire. The real tragedy is that we have built an entire civilisation on the promise that safety, enjoyment, and cheap prices can coexist.
They cannot. And the proof lies in a charred room on a tropical island.
