The rising cost of holiday camping

COMMENT

It’s post-COVID holiday season: time to re-think camping...

If your idea of lazy summer holidays with the kids is in a cramped tent or trailer site at a foreshore caravan park, it’s also time to lift your horizons.

Today’s younger family travellers have no intention of joining a waiting list for the same beachside site each year. Like their kids, they're into new, fun experiences and realise that the window for happy family holidays is only open for a few years.

A friend bought a new fold-out camper trailer for happy family holidays, but within two years his young teenage children have decided they don’t want to stay in it any longer; they want their own space in their own swags!

In my own family, our grandkids (now aged 7 and 9) are already accustomed to family-friendly overseas holidays at Fiji and Bali, but this year they decided to experience canvas camping with most of the kid frills of an overseas holiday.

But they were mildly shocked by the cost of a tent site at a Queensland Sunshine Coast holiday resort – $1800 for seven nights. At $257/night, that’s pricey holiday real estate for what boils town to a piece of grass, a 240 volt powerpoint, a tap, with shared conveniences and a security gate.

To be fair, their dates were prime time, starting on December 27 and stretching through New Year’s Eve. Even so...

I confess my wife gulped. We're out of date and probably out of touch, as the most we have ever paid for a caravan site was for a gravelly, pocket-sized slice of real estate at Broome, in Western Australia.

Different priorities

Children for many years have not seen us as ideal holiday companions and when we recently travelled in our self-contained caravan, our overnight priorities include space, privacy and silence, not communal BBQs, jumping pillows, a kids shallow pool and a pet-patting zoo!

If we couldn't find a good free-camp, we would budget on spending $30-$40/night on a powered site and $20-$30/night on an unpowered one in an average, few-frills caravan park. We'd only go for on-site power if really hot, so we could run our air conditioner.

But we’re not the target market for the big guys in the holiday park business, like BIG4, Discovery, etc. The operative words here are ‘holiday park’. These are not overnight stops on the way to distant places, these are the destinations!

In the case of our kids, the requirement was a beachside location with loads of safe, kid-friendly activities within a four hour drive from home – enough time to get there, pitch their new $800 Coleman Northstar tent, then relax with a cool beer while their daughters are making new holiday friends in the facility’s waterpark or pool.

Then, every following day, the girls would be totally immersed in the park’s many other attractions, from table tennis to shuffleboard, giant chess and go-kart hire, leaving their parents free to do more relaxing adult things like visit the coffee shop, hang out at the on-site restaurant and bar, play tennis, take in a movie, or just chill.

The price of a jumping pillow

We get it, and the fact that setting up and maintaining a holiday resort is not cheap and someone has to pay. In other words, it’s time to re-set.

Travelling less than a day’s drive from home has already saved them money in fuel, maximised their time away from work, saved on dog boarding and car servicing costs and saved ‘Are we there yet?’ stress. And depending on where you live and if you're on Airbnb, you may be able to offset your holiday cost.

Of course things get a lot cheaper if you don’t pick the peak times to holiday. Off-season prices at the BIG4 park our family chose, start from $115/night and depending on how often you expect to go camping, you can purchase a $50 BIG4 membership, making you eligible to receive 10 per cent uncapped discount on this and any future booking with the next two years.

It’s a competitive business out there and G’Day Parks is currently offering a two-year membership for $35 for a similar 10 per cent discount off every booking at its 280 parks across Australia.

The downside of these manicured and organised holiday parks is that they're not designed for Wicked Camper travellers or hell raisers.

Noise restrictions are geared to the bedtime hours of their younger guests: 9pm Sunday to Thursday and 10pm Friday and Saturday in villas and tents if normal.

And if you want a specific villa, safari tent or caravan, camper or tent site number, add $10 per night to your total accommodation amount.

So, compare the price and facilities of these high-powered sites with a resort, not with a weedy paddock in the back-blocks of a transit town, and it all starts to make sense...

Related:

Australia's best caravan park named

Is this Australia's best caravan park?

Hidden costs of caravanning