Running a caravan park looks like a lifestyle from the outside — a nice spot, guests on holiday, sunsets. From the inside it’s three businesses stacked on top of each other: a hospitality business, a maintenance business and a people business, usually run by one or two people who also live on site. None of it is complicated on its own. What makes it hard is that it all happens at once, every day, and most of it lands on you.
Here’s what the job actually involves, day to day and season to season — written from the inside, not from a brochure.
The shape of a day
A park day has a rhythm, and it runs whether you’re ready or not.
Mornings are departures and turnovers. Guests check out, sites and cabins get cleaned and reset, and the amenities get their first pass before the day heats up. Late morning to mid-afternoon is the quiet window — the time you use for maintenance, ordering, banking and the hundred small jobs that never make it onto a list.
Afternoons are arrivals. New guests roll in, usually in a cluster, usually needing directions, a hand reversing a van and an answer to a question the website already answered. The front desk — whether that’s an office, a window or your phone — is the busiest it’ll be all day.
Evenings are quieter, but you’re not off. You’re the person a guest finds when the hot water cuts out or the neighbours get loud. Which brings us to the part nobody warns you about — but first, the tasks themselves.
Arrivals and the front desk
Check-ins are where guests form their opinion of the place, so they matter more than the five minutes they take. A good arrival is quick, warm and clear: where the site is, where the amenities are, what the rules are and how to reach someone if they need to. A bad one is a queue of vans at 3pm while you’re on the phone to a plumber.
The fix is having the answers ready before you need them — a simple arrivals process, a map and the rules on one page — so anyone can run a check-in, not just you. Most parks don’t have this written down. That’s fine until the day you’re not there.
The cleaning cycle
Cleaning is the part of the job that never stops and never gets easier. Amenities blocks need doing at least daily in peak, sometimes twice. Cabins and sites turn over on checkout and have to be reset to the same standard every time — whether it’s the first turnover of the season or the two-hundredth.
The standard is the thing that slips. When you’re tired and it’s busy, “good enough” creeps in, and guests notice the amenities before they notice anything else. A written cleaning checklist isn’t bureaucracy — it’s the only way the tenth clean of the day matches the first, especially when someone other than you is doing it.
Maintenance: what can’t wait, and what compounds
Maintenance on a park splits into two piles.
The first is the stuff that can’t wait: a blocked amenities block, no hot water, a branch across a road, a power fault. Drop-everything jobs, and they never arrive at a convenient time.
The second is the stuff that compounds: the tap that drips, the gate that sticks, the tree that needs a prune, the road that needs grading. None of it is urgent this week, which is exactly why it’s dangerous. Deferred maintenance doesn’t go away — it waits, gets worse, and eventually becomes a can’t-wait job at the worst possible moment, usually in peak. The parks that stay on top of it write it down and work through it in the quiet months. The ones that don’t spend peak season fighting fires they lit themselves.
Staffing: peak, off-season, and the caretaker question
Most parks are run by too few people, and the number changes with the season. In peak you need hands on the desk, in the amenities and on the grounds. In the off-season you might be the only person there.
For seasonal parks, this is where caretakers come in — often a couple who live on site and run the place through the open months. Getting that right is its own skill: the wrong pairing, or the right one with no proper handover, can cost you a season. It’s worth having the arrangement written down, both the legal side and the practical one. There’s a free caretaker agreement template and a 48-hour handover kit if that’s where you’re at.
The through-line, whether it’s you, a couple or a small team: the park runs on knowledge, and most of that knowledge lives in one person’s head. That works until it doesn’t.
The season
Seasonal and inland parks live and die by the calendar. There’s a rhythm to it:
- Pre-season — the gates are shut but the work isn’t. Maintenance, deep cleans, bookings, staff or caretakers lined up, everything checked before the first guest.
- Peak — full sites, long days, no room for error. Good systems earn their keep here and bad ones get exposed.
- Shoulder — quieter, the time to catch the maintenance you couldn’t get to and fix what peak showed you was broken.
- Close — shutting down properly so next season starts from a good place, not a scramble.
A park that treats the off-season as downtime starts every year on the back foot. A park that treats it as preparation starts every year ready.
The money and the admin
Behind all of it is a business. Bookings come through your own system and through online travel agents that take a cut. Takings need banking. Occupancy, rates and costs need watching, because a park can be full and still not making money if the rates are wrong or the costs have crept. You don’t need to love spreadsheets, but you do need to know your numbers. If you’re curious whether it adds up, is owning a caravan park profitable? goes into the real economics.
The after-hours phone
Here’s the part nobody puts in the brochure: you’re never really off.
The after-hours phone is the true cost of running a park. It’s the 11pm noise complaint, the guest locked out of the amenities, the water main that picks midnight to fail. Even when nothing happens, you’re the person who’d have to deal with it if it did — and that low-level, always-on responsibility is what wears owners down, far more than the physical work.
It’s also the single best argument for writing your park down. Not so you can hand it off tomorrow, but so that the day you want a night off, a weekend or an actual holiday, someone else can pick up the phone and know what to do.
The real job
Running a caravan park isn’t really about arrivals or cleaning or maintenance. Those are the tasks. The real job is holding all of it together — and in most parks, the thing holding it together is one person and everything they carry in their head.
That’s fine right up until you want to step back, get sick, take a break, or eventually sell. Every one of those moments tests the same thing: can the park run without you in it? Most owner-operators already know the answer, and it’s usually no. That’s not a failure — it’s just the next thing to build.
Could your park run for a week without you?
The Owner’s Operations Scorecard is a free, five-minute check of how much your park depends on you personally — with a named first step at the end.
Related: is owning a caravan park profitable? · the free 48-Hour Caretaker Handover Kit · a free caretaker agreement template