Vale Holiday Parks

After an enforced hiatus, the family run holiday park company is gearing up for the new season with a whole new digital focus…

Thomas Scarrott is Director and co-owner of the family run, Vale Holiday Parks and Clarach Bay Holiday Village, which he runs with his parents and two brothers. Vale currently operate 12 holiday parks across Wales and Cornwall. Thomas is also chairman of the West Wales branch of the British Holiday and Home Park Association (BH&HPA).

When Vale Holiday Parks recognised they were outgrowing their existing holiday park management system, their initial plan was to develop their own brand new, fit for purpose software. However, when researching the technology market, they discovered there was already a solution out there for holiday parks – EliteParks – and there was no point reinventing the wheel.

“I realised pretty soon that the Elite Dynamics system was everything we were looking for,” said Thomas. “And if we were going to develop a system and had the capacity to do it right, we would design it in exactly the same way that Elite designed their system.”

Cue a conversation with MD, Jamaine Campbell, and within a matter of weeks, contracts were signed, timescales were agreed, and the project to switch Vale systems to Elite Dynamics was underway.

With Vale being first and foremost a family business and despite having a number of corporate processes within the operations, one member of the team is often responsible for multiple roles. For example, the superuser for bookings may also be an end user for another part of the system, which is quite common within family run parks. So staff buy-in to the project was crucial.

Getting everyone onboard with the new system

“We knew from the start that one of the biggest challenges of the project would be staff getting on board,” said Thomas. “I wanted to make sure they were with us from the outset, so every park manager was responsible for taking ownership of the data their park produces and exporting all of that data from our existing systems to the Elite world.

“We could have just told everyone – ok, here’s a brand new all-singing, all-dancing system with your data in it – just carry on. However, by them taking ultimate responsibility for transferring their own data, it gave them insight and knowledge into the architecture of the system, why it works in the way it does, and how it’s going to make their lives easier in the long run.

“Elite have adapted to our way of working and the one thing I’ve always felt with the Elite Dynamics team is the way they make you feel as if you are their only customer. It’s great. I know they’ve got other customers and other projects on the go, but you can contact them pretty much anytime you want, and they will always get back to you and always with the response you need.”

Of course, Vale’s hands-on attitude might not work for other holiday parks, with many choosing to have one designated person responsible for managing the transfer of data across all departments of the business. However, Vale’s approach meant staff really bought into why they were changing systems and were able to look outside their usual job roles to see the benefits to the company as a whole.

“If you looked at our finance department and our park management teams, each department never truly appreciated what the other was doing or what they brought to the business. Everyone worked in their own little bubbles – that’s bubbles in the pre-covid sense!” added Thomas. “Now the Elite system has given each department a much greater understanding of what another does and that we’re all part of a very big machine. Ultimately everyone needs to play their part for it to function properly.”

Vale Parks holiday park
Ocean Heights - Ceredigion
July 01 2018©keith morris
www.artswebwales.com
keith@artx.co.uk
07710 285968
01970 611106

Integrating multiple systems into one

As a champion for the holiday park industry through his work with the BH&HPA, Thomas recognises there’s a vast opportunity for the industry in the immediate aftermath of covid and vaccines. With 2021 looking set to be a strong year, he nonetheless appreciates the need for more education within the industry, to encourage increased engagement with technology and see more parks benefit from digitising processes.

“For me, the best benchmark is the way in which the hotel industry does things and we as an industry are a good few years behind them in the way we manage our processes and systems,” he adds. “I think what Elite Dynamics are delivering with their software puts us on par with the tech that hotels have and actually, in some respects, takes us beyond what they have. In my opinion, those parks that are willing to adapt and make the shift over to an ERP, are the ones that will succeed. If they don’t, they’re going to remain stuck in the 20th century and that’s a big issue for the industry.

Often, until holiday park operators try out systems like EliteParks, they don’t realise how much more efficient they can be, how much time can be saved, and how they can make every job role easier.

Thomas continues: “The main thing EliteParks is going to do is provide us with real-time dynamic information. If I wanted to get info from our previous system, I’d have to go to two or three different pieces of software and I’d have to run two or three different reports and then sit down and collate it all to pull out the info I want. In caravan terms, we’re part-exchanging a park management system, a finance system and a general office system and upgrading 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’s really going to help us take the business to the next level and make better decisions.”

Embracing an all-encompassing software solution

So, if EliteParks can really make such a positive difference to processes, reporting and much more, why is there still an ambivalence among the holiday park industry to embrace technology, when other areas of hospitality such as hotels and restaurants are streets ahead?

“Like us, there are a lot of family-owned holiday park businesses that make up the industry and there’s the historic attitude of sticking with what they’ve always done and using the systems they’ve always had, as that’s what they’re comfortable with. No matter how fragmented it is,” said Thomas. “So many parks are reliant on 3rd party service providers like OTA’s to manage bookings for them and then other systems look after accounts and owners, I just don’t think they realise that there is an all-encompassing solution out there.

We were in the same boat and understand the thinking. There was a lot of fragmentation in our processes because we were using, and paying for, multiple pieces of software to carry out different tasks within the business.

“Another barrier could be the size of holiday park operators with many smaller operators under the misconception they are too small for an ERP solution. For me, one of the benefits of EliteParks 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.”

And today’s technology is all about the cloud. Gone are the days of basements or server rooms full of noisy machines reliant on constant air-conditioning to keep them cool and someone employed to manually update infrastructure, licences and virus protection. Most importantly, it’s not Elite Dynamics’ cloud, it’s Microsoft’s cloud. It’s secure, it’s reliable, it’s automatically updated, it’s better for the environment and it’s cost-efficient.

“The project to upgrade our software systems initially started off because we wanted to be completely cloud based,” said Thomas. “We needed to be able to log on wherever we were in the world, no matter what device we had. We knew Elite could offer us a fully cloud-based environment, with the added bonus of being driven by Microsoft. I can go on my phone and dial into any of the parks, see what devices are plugged in and see if there are any problems. It’s a fully manageable cloud-based solution.”

Improving customer relationships

One of the solutions that particularly excites Thomas is EliteCRM, Elite Dynamic’s CRM solution. A fully integrated customer relationship management (CRM) solution, it has been designed to help boost sales and improve the customer experience by providing valuable customer insight across all departments of your holiday park operation.

“CRM is going to be a big turning point in the way we run the business and the way we interact with customers,” Thomas says. “Prior to moving to EliteParks, we never really had any form of CRM system in place. Again, it was fragmented and done from various email contact lists and information gathered from the website and social media. To have one central place to manage every part of the process, from nurturing the lead to marketing, to them to sending out surveys, will be key to the way we interact with our customers, especially in the digital world we live in now. It’s the start of a new era.”

The pandemic, although being devastating for the holiday park and wider hospitality industry, has potentially provided holiday park operators with an opportunity to focus inwardly on the business and make changes where needed.

“Covid did accelerate our decision to implement a new software solution,” said Thomas. “We were getting frustrated as we needed staff to work from home and we found ourselves having to jump through hoops just to get the right things set up on their home computers for that to happen. Because we had a little more time on our hands, we looked at the business from top to bottom – not just IT and infrastructure – and came up with a new blueprint. Covid has given us time to press the pause button, take a step back and look at every aspect of the business to see how we can improve it. It’s given us a chance to take stock and galvanise certain areas. If we had kept things the way they were, I don’t know how we would have come out the other side of it.”

In 2020, despite the added pressures of the pandemic, Vale completed the purchase of an additional three holiday parks, which takes their portfolio up to 15 parks across Wales and Cornwall. Future plans include ongoing investment in upgrading facilities and infrastructure across the parks, but Thomas isn’t ruling out further expansion if the right opportunity presented itself.

“It’s perhaps a bit of a contradiction in terms but we will consolidate and grow as well,” he said. “That’s why with IT and infrastructure, we always put things in place that are scalable and I’d recommend others do the same to futureproof their businesses. That’s the key thing, you’ve always got to futureproof the business. Knowing what we know about Elite, we’ll never outgrow this system, it’s not going to happen… and you’re not going to go wrong with Microsoft either.”

To find out more about Vale and their holiday parks in Wales and Cornwall, visit www.valeholidayparks.com. To find out more about Clarach Bay, visit www.clarachbay.com.