You’re staring at two versions of the same holiday. One’s all inclusive and costs a bit more upfront. The other’s cheaper on paper, but you know how that goes. Here’s what nobody in the package holiday industry wants you to think about too carefully.
All inclusive in the Canary Islands isn’t a yes or no question. It’s a question about you, specifically how you actually travel when you’re honest with yourself, not how you imagine you’ll travel when you’re booking from your sofa at 11pm.
I’ve stayed in all inclusive resorts in Tenerife, Gran Canaria, and Fuerteventura. I’ve also stayed in cheap apartments a five minute walk from those same resorts and eaten at the places locals eat. I’ve done both enough times to know when all inclusive is genuinely the right call and when it’s quietly eating your money while you eat the same buffet pasta for the fourth night running.
What “All Inclusive” Actually Means in the Canaries
The phrase covers an enormous range of actual experiences. At one end, you’ve got a five star resort in Costa Adeje where the food is genuinely good, there are three or four different restaurants, the bar stocks decent wine, and you’d be happy eating there every night. At the other end, there’s a mid-nineties block in Playa de las Américas where the buffet smells of industrial cooking oil by 6pm and they water down the spirits so aggressively you’d need to have four gin and tonics before you felt a thing.
Most people book somewhere in between, and that’s where the maths gets interesting.
Standard all inclusive across the Canaries covers breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks within certain hours. Snacks between meals at specific windows. Usually house spirits, local beer, and a red or white wine that’s drinkable without being memorable. That’s the baseline. After that, everything depends on your specific hotel.
One thing I’ve noticed that doesn’t get mentioned much is the time restrictions. Most all inclusive resorts stop serving food between meals and if you’re the kind of person who sleeps until 10:30 and calls it a lie-in, you might miss the breakfast window entirely.
The Money Question, Answered Honestly
For a family of four in peak season, all inclusive usually makes financial sense. Eating out three times a day in even the mid-range restaurants in the south of Tenerife will run you somewhere between £90 and £120 a day, before drinks. That stacks up fast over a week but all inclusive removes that anxiety entirely, which has real value when you’ve got kids asking for ice cream every forty minutes.
For two adults who aren’t big drinkers and who like exploring, the numbers are less convincing. A proper Canarian meal, the kind where they bring you papas arrugadas with mojo and fresh fish grilled over coals, costs maybe £12 to £15 a head at a family-run place away from the seafront. A cold beer from a corner shop is about a euro and if you’re eating out twice a day and cooking simple stuff for breakfast, you can eat extremely well and spend less than the all inclusive upgrade cost.
The honest version of the maths: work out what you’d actually spend on food and drink for your trip based on how you really eat. Then compare it to the price difference between the all inclusive and the half board or room only version of the same hotel and you’ll notice that the gap is often smaller than it looks from the booking page.
Which Island You’re Going To Makes a Difference
Tenerife’s south coast, particularly around Costa Adeje and Los Cristianos, has the most all inclusive resorts and the most variety in quality if you’re going all inclusive. That’s where you’ll find the most options at every price point because the resort is genuinely set up for this style of holiday which is either a plus or a minus depending on your taste.
Gran Canaria is worth considering if you want a bit more life outside the resort and Puerto Rico and Puerto de Mogán have all inclusive options but they’re not as overwhelming in scale.
Fuerteventura suits all inclusive surprisingly well. It’s a flatter, simpler island, the beaches are exceptional, and there’s less pressure to go off and explore because the landscape around the big resort areas is, let’s be honest, pretty arid. Staying put makes more sense there than on Tenerife, where you’ve got the Teide national park and a dozen interesting towns within an hour’s drive.
Lanzarote I’d actually steer away from for all inclusive, and I feel fairly strongly about this. The island is too interesting. The volcanic landscape, the César Manrique architecture, the small wineries in the La Geria valley where they grow vines in craters scooped out of black rock. You’d be doing yourself a disservice staying locked in a resort there.
The Food: What You’re Actually Going to Eat
Budget all inclusive food is repetitive within days of your stay and you’ll recognise the pattern quickly. Eggs, bacon, cold toast in the morning; pizza, chips, some kind of pasta situation at lunch; a carved meat station, more pasta, a salad bar with limp leaves, some desserts of uncertain origin at dinner. You won’t go hungry, but if you care about food at all, you’ll be bored of it before the week is out.
Mid range improves this a lot, with better ingredients, more Canarian dishes in the rotation, and actual fresh fish occasionally. The buffet won’t be something you talk about when you get home, but it won’t depress you either.
The top tier is genuinely different and having eaten at a few of the better resorts in Costa Adeje, the food was without any exaggeration, as good as most restaurants I’ve eaten at. Multiple restaurants with different cuisines, quality local produce, staff who clearly took some pride in the thing and at that level, the food stops being a compromise and starts being an actual reason to stay in.
The trick is reading recent reviews online specifically for the food, and looking at what people say six months ago, not three years ago. Hotel restaurants have a habit of quietly declining when management changes.
The Stuff They Don’t Put in the Brochure
The things that will get you are the excursions because the ones organised through the resort are always significantly more expensive than the same trips booked independently in town. A whale watching trip booked at the resort desk might be £65 a head but the same company running the same boat, booked at the kiosk five minutes down the road, is often £35.
WiFi in some of the older resorts is still either paid or so bad it’s functionally paid. Check before you book if this matters to you.
And the mini bar, if there is one, will be priced at the kind of rates that make you feel personally insulted. Just don’t touch it.
One thing I’d actually recommend if you’re staying all inclusive: eat at least two or three dinners outside the resort. Not because the hotel food will necessarily be bad, but because eating at a place where a local family is also having dinner, somewhere you found by walking down a street you didn’t recognise, is a genuinely different experience. It’s part of why you got on a plane. Tenerife Forum has a great article about popular Canarian dishes so that you get an idea the kind of food involved.
When All Inclusive Is Actually the Right Answer
If you’re travelling with children under about ten, it’s probably right. The logistics of feeding small humans who are hungry at irregular intervals and have opinions about everything is significantly easier when you can just walk back to the buffet at any point. The peace of mind is worth the premium.
If you want a complete reset, the kind of holiday where you don’t think about anything, don’t make any decisions, don’t check prices or plan meals or figure out where you’re going next, all inclusive delivers that in a way nothing else quite does. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need and there’s no shame in it.
If one person in your group drinks heavily and the other eats everything, the maths tips in your favour quickly.
If neither of those applies, be honest with yourself, you might be booking all inclusive because it feels safer, not because it’s actually better value for how you travel.
All inclusive in the Canary Islands works when it matches how you actually want to spend your time. If you’re going to spend most of the holiday at the pool with a book and a cold drink and call it perfect, it’s probably worth it. If you’re going to feel restless by day three and want to drive up into the hills and find somewhere for lunch that doesn’t have a wristband policy, book bed and breakfast and leave yourself the freedom.
Either way, you’re going to the Canary Islands, which is a fairly good decision regardless of the payment structure.
