All-Inclusive Resorts in Morocco: The Honest Guide
Morocco has La Mamounia, which is one of the most celebrated hotels in the world — a palace hotel in Marrakech’s medina gardens that has been receiving guests since 1923, that Churchill painted from and that the Rolling Stones and Alfred Hitchcock and every generation of internationally mobile wealth since the Jazz Age has used as its Moroccan address, that was comprehensively renovated in 2009 and emerged from that renovation still recognisably itself rather than glossily replaced, and that has continued since then to be the hotel against which every other Moroccan luxury property is measured and most are found to be reaching rather than arriving.
La Mamounia is not all-inclusive. It has never been all-inclusive. The question of why it is not is answered by the question of what happens in Marrakech outside the hotel — the medina, the souks, the food stalls of the Djemaa el-Fna square, the hammams, and the riads whose courtyards are among the finest domestic architecture in the world — and by the observation that confining oneself to a single hotel’s food programme in a city with five hundred years of culinary tradition in its street food alone is the kind of decision that requires explanation.
The all-inclusive market in Morocco is concentrated in Agadir — the Atlantic coast resort city that was rebuilt from scratch after the 1960 earthquake, designed by committee for the European package holiday market, and that bears almost no relationship to the Morocco of the medinas and the Atlas Mountains and the desert south. Agadir is warm, the beaches are long and consistent, and the all-inclusive hotels deliver what all-inclusive hotels in purpose-built resort cities deliver: convenience, predictability, and the specific comfort of a week organised by someone else. What they do not deliver is Morocco.
Marrakech: The Right Way
Marrakech’s finest accommodation is in the riads — the traditional Moroccan courtyard houses in the medina whose renovation has produced some of the most distinctive small luxury properties in the world. A riad is, by definition, a property whose primary space is the internal courtyard rather than the external facade: the blank plastered wall facing the alley gives no indication of what lies inside, which may be a three-room guest house with a tiled fountain and a breakfast table under a lemon tree, or it may be a ten-suite boutique hotel with a rooftop terrace, a hammam, and a kitchen that will cook whatever the market produced that morning. The finest riads in Marrakech — Riad Kheirredine, Riad Denise Masson, Dar Ahlam in the Skoura oasis region — operate on a half-board basis that covers dinner and breakfast, leaving the guest free to eat lunch at the Djemaa el-Fna or in the narrow medina restaurants where the lamb slow-cooked in clay tagines since morning will have been worth finding.
The Royal Mansour, built by the King of Morocco on the edge of the medina and opened in 2010, is the other answer to where to stay in Marrakech at the extreme luxury level — a private city of individual riads within a single walled compound, each with a private courtyard and a private entrance, serviced by underground passages through which staff move without being seen, producing the most complete privacy available in the city at the level of expenditure that the rates require. It is not all-inclusive. It is the finest hotel in Morocco and one of the finest in the world.
The Atlas Mountains and the South
Kasbah Tamadot, Richard Branson’s Virgin Limited Edition property in the Atlas Mountains above Marrakech — forty minutes from the city by road, in a landscape where the air is cooler and the mountains visible from the pool terrace are the ones that the Saharan trade routes crossed for a thousand years — operates on a full-board basis that effectively functions as all-inclusive and that makes sense in a location where the alternative to eating at the property is an hour’s drive down the mountain road. For couples who want the Atlas Mountains alongside the financial predictability of a flat daily cost, it is the correct answer to a question that most Moroccan hotel guides do not know to ask.
When to Go
March through May and September through November for Marrakech — the shoulder seasons when the heat is manageable, the light is extraordinary, and the city’s own life is visible between the tourist layers. June through August in Marrakech is genuinely hot — regularly exceeding forty degrees Celsius — and the medina in the midday heat is an experience of diminishing returns. The Atlas Mountains are accessible and walkable in all seasons from March through October. Agadir’s beach season runs year-round with the Atlantic keeping temperatures milder than the interior.
