An Elite Dynamics customer perspective: Holiday parks need to adopt new technology to keep up with the hotel industry

Family run Vale Holiday Parks operate 12 parks across Wales and Cornwall and are celebrating their 20th anniversary year in 2023. Director, Thomas Scarrott runs the parks with his parents and two brothers and is chairman of the West Wales branch of the British Holiday and Home Park Association (BH&HPA). Thomas champions the holiday park industry through his work with the BH&HPA and recognises the opportunities for the industry to engage with technology and the benefits to parks of digitising processes.

“The project to upgrade our software systems started because we wanted to be completely cloud-based. We needed to be able to log on wherever we were in the world, no matter what device we had, and we knew EliteParks from Elite Dynamics could offer us this. I can go on my phone, dial into any of the parks, see what devices are plugged in, and if there are any issues.

“For me, the best benchmark is the way the hotel industry does things and we as an industry are a few years behind them in the way we manage our processes and systems. What Elite Dynamics are delivering with their software puts us on par with the tech that hotels have, and in some respects, takes us beyond what they have. Parks willing to adapt and make the shift over to an ERP, are the ones that will succeed, and if not, they’re going to remain stuck in the

20th century and that’s a big issue for the industry.

“If I wanted to get information from our previous system, I’d have had to go to two or three different pieces of software, run two or three different reports, and then sit down and collate it all to pull out what I wanted. In caravan terms, we partexchanged a park management system, a finance system and a general office system and upgraded it to an ERP so everything is under one umbrella. I can get every last piece of information I need in real-time at the touch of a button and that’s something we’ve always strived to achieve. It helps us make better decisions and take the business to the next level.

“Like us, there are a lot of family-owned holiday park businesses in the industry and so many parks are reliant on 3rd party service providers like OTA’s to manage bookings for them. Then have other systems looking after accounts and owners. It’s very fragmented. Perhaps it’s not widely realised that there’s an all-encompassing solution out there designed specifically for holiday parks. Before we made the switch to EliteParks, we were using, and paying for, multiple pieces of software to carry out different tasks within the business.

“Another benefit is that it is completely scalable, and as it’s based on Microsoft licencing, the cost is dependant primarily on the number of users. So, no matter how large or small your holiday park operation, you can still drive your business forward with technology.

“It really is one of the best business decisions I’ve ever made.”

Elite Dynamics is an accredited Microsoft Solutions Partner for Business Applications. For more information or to arrange a demonstration of Elite Dynamics’ industryfocused IT business solutions, visit https:// www.elitedynamics.co.uk or call 0161 615 5548. youtube