5 ways to make your holiday park smarter

Here, Tom Ambler, leisure sales manager at Ramtech Electronics, looks at five ways to create smarter holiday parks.

Record numbers of people are choosing to holiday in the UK. That’s good news for holiday park operators that can deliver a fantastic experience for customers, whilst creating an efficient and safe working environment for staff. In order to achieve this utopia, holiday parks operators are choosing business information and monitoring platforms that provide real time alerts, data and information about security coverage, energy metering, fire safety, equipment failure, occupancy monitoring, staff management check-in-checkout and access history.

Having this information available and being able to deploy it cost effectively on existing assets, allows operators to create ‘smarter’ parks. Here we look at five ways in which this can be done:

Changeover days are hectic for holiday parks as the previous customers depart and new ones arrive, often at the same time. However, latest WISE systems use keyless RFID technology to activate and deactivate a central hub. This technology enables you to have an easy overview of which caravans / homes have had a check-out completed on the online portal, so you can be confident that they are ready for the next customer. This kind of approach makes check-in a seamless experience for new holidaymakers, establishing a much more efficient service that enhances the guest experience.

Tracking staff and contractors on a holiday park site can be difficult especially those that extend over several acres. Using RFID technology now allows park operators to know where their staff have been on site, how long they were there and the work that has been completed.

Likewise, utilising keyless RFID technology wirelessly linked to the hub, provides you with an access history platform for staff, which can be used for cleaner check-in and check-out or use the same functionality for maintenance, or any other type of staff visit to a holiday home.

The data collected can then be accessed on the online platform, giving you the confidence that you know who is working on your park and where they are.

Accurately predicting how many holiday makers are staying on site and will be planning to make use of all your facilities can be a challenge for most holiday parks. Incorporating motion detectors in the individual vans and around park can anonymously register movement, giving you an overview of how many people are on the park and, crucially, which are the busiest areas and might need extra staff. In addition, by logging into the online portal, it’s easy to see which units have detected motion over the last 24hrs so you can confidently plan the staff allocation for the day ahead.

Latest smart metering technology enables parks to accurately track energy consumption, which is vital to ensure business costs are precisely managed and recouped, as well as identifying potential savings. The technology achieves this by capturing data from electricity, water and gas meters and transmitting this via radio to the base station. The base station uploads the data to a cloud platform where it can be shared with your own business system and is also available on our online platform.

There is no need to access individual buildings on site to take manual readings which saves time and avoids disruption to guest.

All businesses need to be aware that safety of guests and staff is paramount. It is now possible to incorporate security monitoring into the wireless solutions, so that the entire estate can be monitored 24/7. In order to minimise your environmental footprint these can be powered by long-life batteries and connected to reliable LPWAN radio technology that allows thousands of devices to be linked to a central base station that creates an instant alert via email, text or pager.

Using RFID technology, security teams can check into designated security points and, using the online platform, operators can review any alerts and verify if the team responded to them. Being able to direct the security team to an emergency means that they can be better deployed to areas of the park where they are most needed.

Companies often believe that they must undergo wholesale investment in Internet of Things (IoT) to create a ‘smart’ holiday park, including purchase of new ‘smart’ assets. However, wireless systems are a much more cost effective way of establishing a park-wide network of machines and devices capable of interacting with each other. For instance, WiSE technology, which, when added to older assets such as security doors, barriers, utility meters, motion sensors or even water pumps, can make them ’smart’, and capable of transmitting data to the cloud. Apps then enable this ‘data’ to be trended and interpreted into useful management information.

These technology platforms have been developed and engineered to provide park operators with greater control. It is now possible to wirelessly collect meaningful, non-intrusive data to help work smarter. Ultimately it creates a safer, more user-friendly park a time when a record numbers of people are choosing a staycation.

For more information on Ramtech’s solutions, please get in touch either by phone on +44 (0)115 957 8282, by email to solutions@ramtechglobal.com or via the online enquiry form situated on our contact page.