Are holiday parks, like Center Parcs and Butlin’s, up to scratch? Which? Travel research found holidaymakers aren’t too enamoured with them, so what is it that holiday parks are failing to deliver?
The brochures all show big smiling faces and everyone I have ever spoken to about a visit to a holiday park has raved about their trip.
Admittedly, the accommodation might generate a few grumbles, but the chance to spend time outdoors and explore Britain’s countryside, splash about in a pool and enjoy the evenings with or without entertainment, has generally made people very happy.
Low customer satisfaction
Perhaps I’ve been speaking to the wrong people, as our recent survey put the overall score for UK holiday parks at just 60%. This figure combines overall customer satisfaction with the likelihood that they’d recommend the holiday park to a friend.
Compared to the customer scores of comparable travel services, such as stays at UK hotel chains (64%) and holidays booked by travel companies (70%), this seems quite low.
Now I recognise that staying in a holiday park isn’t always cheap, especially for those who need to pay the heavily inflated school holiday prices (£1,458 for a week at Center Parcs in August, compared to £688 in September). But as this is often the case for other travel services, I still wonder why holiday parks don’t score as well. Surely everyone couldn’t have had bad weather?
In hindsight
We know from our own research that people are more likely to score a visitor attraction higher if they’ve visited it recently. Perhaps those staying at holiday parks rated their experience lower because they’d had time to reflect on their visit.
However, given the fact that we use the same methodology to survey other travel services, again, the results should be comparable. We still haven’t got to the bottom of why holiday parks have such a low customer score.
What is it about UK holiday parks that aren’t meeting the expectations of UK holidaymakers? Maybe it’s just because they’re situated in the UK…
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