The best way to get your caravan park ready for peak season

Open last year’s bookings and look at when each site type sold out. If your powered sites near the amenities block were gone for the Christmas fortnight by August, you charged too little for them. If the unpowered sites up the back still had gaps on 2 January, a lower rate or a longer-stay discount might have filled them.

Then put the dates in the calendar. Christmas Day falls on a Friday this year, and Australia Day 2027 lands on a Tuesday, so expect plenty of guests to take the Monday off and turn it into a four-day weekend. Easter Sunday is 28 March. If you sit near a state border, check both states’ school holiday dates, because they don’t line up.

Decide on a minimum stay for the busiest weeks, too. A run of one-night bookings over New Year can leave your best sites half empty in a week you could have sold out.

More travellers now plan a summer trip by asking an AI assistant. Before it answers, the assistant runs searches much like the ones a guest would type: what a powered site costs over Christmas, and what other guests thought of the park.

So when a family asks for the best caravan park near Port Macquarie for the January holidays, the assistant goes looking for prices and reviews. It often searches the park’s own website directly. A rate card saved as a PDF, or a page that says “phone for peak rates”, gives it nothing to quote. Put these on your site as plain text before the bookings start:

Show the compulsory fees next to the nightly rate. A guest who reads $55 on your website and pays $68 at checkout starts the holiday annoyed.

A park’s own website will say the park is lovely, so an assistant asked for the best one goes looking for what guests say about it. For a caravan park that mostly means Google reviews, plus whichever travel sites list you.

Reviews are slow to build, and January is a bad month to start asking. Email the guests who stayed this winter and spring and ask them for one. Grey nomads who spent a fortnight with you in July are often happy to write a paragraph. Reply to the poor reviews as well, briefly and without arguing, because the next family reads your reply alongside the complaint.

A full park puts a load on things a half-empty one never touches. Find out how many showers your hot water system can handle at 7am, because on 28 December that is when everyone wants one. Have an electrician check the power heads and switchboard before the air conditioners all switch on in a heatwave, and get the dump point and septic serviced while the park is quiet.

Book extra bin collections over Christmas now, since contractors fill their holiday rosters early. Clear gutters and trim branches over sites before the fire season, and make sure every staff member knows where the evacuation assembly point is and who makes the call to use it.

Casual cleaners and gate staff are easiest to hire in October and November, when university students come home looking for summer work. Work out your changeover days first. If checkout is 10am and check-in is 2pm, you need enough people to turn every vacated site and cabin in four hours.

Then write one page covering the questions new staff will get: late arrivals, the noise curfew, day visitors, and what to do when a guest turns up with a booking nobody can find. A casual working their third shift on New Year’s Eve should be able to answer those without ringing you.

In peak season the phone rings for the same few questions, mostly whether anything is free and what it costs. The more of that a guest can sort before they arrive, the more time your staff have for the people standing at reception.

That is the job we built Spacecamps for. You set your seasonal and holiday rates once, guests see live availability and book and pay on your park’s own page, and an email before arrival asks them to check in online. Whatever system you use, set it up and test a booking in October, while a mistake costs you a quiet weekend and not the busiest week of the year.