Is all inclusive food actually good or just cheap and easy?

Agree with this.

Also places that do AI as an option not solely AI.

It's not generally my cup of tea, but if you are doing it you have to do a shit ton of research.

Also the star system in widely misunderstood. A 5 star hotel isn't necessarily an indicator of quality its an indicator of services available. Having a restaurant, or laundry services for example.

Plus you get what you pay for, and a med hotel in summer includes a massive uplift. For a true comparison, always look at the first week in December and see who can still charge premium prices.

Try and P and O crui. Food good. We opted for restaurant- haven't got kids. There self service option too- not sure what that is like.

It depends entirely on the hotel. We have been to one particular hotel in the Caribbean, on an AI basis, and the food was always very good - sometimes amazing.

Agreed, in 12 years of being a school governor it was the one constant topic.

Whilst AI is not for me, I can imagine not having to think about where to eat each evening, and a set budget, appeals to many.

I don’t use AI much now my family are grown up, but make sure you read reviews of the hotels and book one where reviewers praise the food.

It is also partly down to what kind of food you choose. The last hotel I went to was in Morocco and the Moroccan dishes were all really good, but the European style dishes were acceptable rather than exciting.

Most mass produced catering is shit anywhere.

I went to one(buffet) in Tenerife years ago where I thought that the food was genuinely good. Not gourmet but still very good.. Especially the bread, seafood and meat. The pasta dishes were also good. The selection changed regularly and included roast quails during our stay.

You've done it wrong - you want to look for the places where the food hasn't received rave reviews in the first instance, but crucially you need to read why other customers didn't rate the food:

"There weren't chips and nuggets served / no fry up at breakfast"
"I didn't like all the local fruit/yogurt/dishes"
"The hotel catered too hard to the French/Italian/etc customers"

We've stayed at three AI places in the last 2 years and it's not let us down.

I think it depends on where you go, irrelevant of star rating, if it is a buffet then it will always be the same, we do five star ai but it is always a la carte with small individual restaurants that you need to make reservations at. If it is a resort with an all you can eat buffet which is a free for all, it will always just be mass catering. And the ai is often done not just for food but for the booze too. So picking your resort with the kind of catering you wish is key if the food is really important to you.

Since becoming disabled I often use AI for convenience. And it does vary. For example last year I stayed at a large one and the food was truly amazing quality. Year before I stayed at a smaller one that had always been good in previous years and it was awful. If I want awesome I go out on occasions - you can't expect mass catering to be 5 star, but I do think that the quality varies enormously.

Some people love the bland food. They don’t like things with local flavour or quality. Just look at how some people eat in the uk and which meals appear on most chain restaurant menus.

we found “sporty” focussed AI hotels had the best food. On another thread about AI I mentioned that often full or half board hotels that have buffet style restaurants have much better quality food as they aren’t feeding you all day. But we will have a couple of drinks with dinner and perhaps one or two others in the day, many one icecream each during the day, so price wise it often balances out, if you have heavy drinkers or snackers in your group, then AI is better value than full board/half board.

When AI first came out the food and drink quality used to be so much better. After 14 years of it we've stopped doing it as we prefer eating out at proper restaurants and find it's actually cheaper these days.

I've always found holiday resort food to be very generic, whether that's AI or eating out.

The advantage of AI being able to try different things to find what you like!

I’d have thought 5* would have been fairly decent OP, you must have paid a lot for that in school hols.

I’m not a fan of AI but you usually get what you pay for.

I go to (as cheap as can be) cheap ai.
I have two under 5, love not having to prep anything or worry ajo it paying tons when they reject half what’s on their plate then ask for snacks ten minutes later

it’s ok. I’m not that into food. I suspect many can do nice food but it’ll never be awesome cooking at that kind of scale