Earlier this year, one of my closest friends and I were both dumped by long-time partners in the same week. I won’t go into details because, despite lost love being one of the defining features of the human experience, for some reason reading about other people’s heartbreak is usually mortifying. Suffice to say, we were not doing well. Whatever other tactics we were going to use to survive, we knew we needed a holiday.

But we hit a snag. Usually, the kinds of holidays we would go on involved quite a lot of planning. Soliciting recommendations for offbeat restaurants in trendy European cities, sketching out daily itineraries, making a godforsaken Google map of places we would never have time to visit. At the time, the thought of so much as replying to an email was inflicting enormous psychic damage on us. There was no way we were going to have the kind of holiday we would normally take.

What I really wanted was to take myself off for a month-long stay in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps and receive a full lobotomy at the end of it, but it seems that the market for this kind of trip has waned. I think it was my friend, Elise, who realised that the closest you can get to relaxation by blunt force in the absence of psychosurgery is an all-inclusive package holiday. Flights, transfer, accommodation, food, drink and activities: all decisions would be taken out of our hands, for a flat fee.