How to price a caravan park site: powered vs unpowered, seasons and occupancy

Before you look at anyone else’s prices, work out your floor. Add up a year of rates, insurance, wages, water, waste, maintenance and loan repayments, then divide by the number of site nights you actually sold. A park with 60 sites that averaged 55% occupancy sold about 12,000 site nights. If running the place cost $480,000, each of those nights cost you $40 before power.

Power is the cost that moves. A van running an air conditioner for eight hours on a hot night can draw 12 to 15 kWh, which is $4 to $6 at current business tariffs. A couple with a phone charger and a fridge might use a dollar’s worth. Whatever you charge for a powered site in January has to cover the heavy users, because you can’t meter every overnight guest.

Across most Australian parks, a powered site costs somewhere between $8 and $15 more a night than an unpowered one for two people. Power alone justifies a few dollars of that. The rest comes from what usually goes with it: a level slab, a tap at the site and room for a 7-metre van with its awning out.

So price each site type on what it gives the guest. These usually earn a premium of their own:

Unpowered sites fill with tent campers, families on a budget and self-sufficient vans with solar, and they keep a park busy when the powered sites are full. Price them low enough to stay attractive, and keep the grass mown, because the unpowered guest this year is often the powered guest in three years’ time.

Most parks get by with three seasons. Peak covers the Christmas school holidays, Easter and the long weekends. Shoulder is the rest of the warm months and the other school holidays, and off-peak is the stretch where the regulars and the grey nomads keep you going.

Set the off-peak rate first, since it has to stay above your floor. Then look at last year’s bookings to see when each site type sold out. If the powered sites near the beach were gone for the Christmas fortnight months ahead, your peak rate was too low. A 25% to 50% premium over off-peak is common for those weeks, and some coastal parks charge double.

Treat public holidays separately. A long weekend in a shoulder month books like peak for three nights and then empties out, so give those nights their own rate and a minimum stay of two or three nights, otherwise one-night bookings will leave holes on the busiest Saturday.

Seasonal rates are a guess made months ahead. Occupancy pricing corrects the guess as bookings arrive. You set a rule such as “once the park is 80% full on a night, add 10% to that night’s rate, and at 95% add 20%”. The guest who books early gets the normal price, and the guest who wants one of the last three sites over New Year pays a bit more for it.

Hotels have priced rooms this way for decades, and campers are getting used to it. Keep it fair by applying the increase when the guest books, never to a booking already confirmed, and keep the steps small. A jump of 50% overnight looks like gouging. Long-term residents and seasonal leases should stay on their agreed rate.

If the park keeps hitting the top tier, your base rate for those dates is too low, and next year the seasonal rate should do more of the work.

The flip side of peak pricing is the dead fortnight in May. Discounting the nightly rate rarely fills it, because nobody drives five hours for a $5 saving. A weekly rate works better. Charge six nights for a seven-night stay, or take 15% off stays of 14 nights or more, and grey nomads heading north for winter will plan a stop around it.

Keep the discount on the off-peak calendar. A long-stay discount that also applies over Easter just gives away your best nights.

Once the rates are set, publish them. Guests compare parks on price before they ever ring, and more of that comparing now happens through an AI assistant, which often searches a park’s own website for the current rate before it suggests a park. A rate card buried in a PDF, or a page that says “call for prices”, leaves it with nothing to quote.

List each site type with its nightly rate in each season, what is included for two people, the charge for extra guests, and any minimum stay over holidays. Show the compulsory fees beside the rate so the price on the page matches the price at checkout.

A pricing plan with seasons, holiday rates and occupancy tiers is hard to run from a diary. Somebody has to remember that site 14 is $62 on a Saturday in January once the park is 85% full, and on a busy morning nobody does.

We built Spacecamps so owners set these rules once. Each site has its own base rate and minimum stay, and the park adds seasonal windows, weekend and holiday rates, occupancy increases and length-of-stay discounts on top. Guests see the final price for their dates on your booking page before they pay. Whatever you use, review the numbers after every peak season, while you still remember which weeks sold out first.