Holiday Park Websites: Winning Direct Bookings Back From the OTAs (2026)

Of the 202,000-odd guest reviews written about Australian caravan holiday parks last year, Booking.com carried 54% of them and Google 33%. That figure comes from the Caravan Industry Association of Australia's 2026 Caravan Park Guest Review Report, which analysed reviews posted across roughly 1,000 Australian parks through 2025.

Review share isn't booking share, and we won't pretend it is. But guests review where they booked, and a channel producing more than half the written feedback about an entire accommodation sector is doing well over half the work of getting people through the boom gate.

That matters more than it used to, because the sector is now big enough to be worth defending properly. The association's State of the Industry 2026 report put caravan park revenue at a record $3.3 billion AUD for 2025, up 7% year on year, off the back of 17.3 million caravan and camping trips and $12.6 billion AUD in total visitor spend. Eighty-seven per cent of those trips happened in regional Australia. It's a large and growing market, and a meaningful slice of it routes through a commission-taking intermediary because the park's own website can't close the booking.

A holiday park is not a hotel, and that is the whole problem

Most booking software, and most of the web design built around it, assumes a hotel. Twenty-two rooms across four room types, one bed configuration each, everyone arrives in a car and parks it somewhere. A holiday park doesn't work anything like that, and a website that treats it as though it does will lose to an OTA every time — because the OTA has spent years and enormous engineering budgets making a badly-modelled inventory feel simple to browse.

Here's what a guest is actually choosing between when they land on a park website:

None of this is exotic. It's the ordinary reality of running a park, and it's why a generic booking widget on a generic template underperforms. The OTA doesn't model it any better, but it does one thing the park site usually doesn't: it answers the guest's real question inside the browsing experience instead of sending them to a PDF or a phone number.

The park map should be the booking interface

If there's one thing we'd change first on almost any holiday park website, it's this. Nearly every park in the country has a site map. On nearly every website, that map is a JPEG or a downloadable PDF sitting on a page called "Park Map", disconnected from availability, pricing, and the booking flow entirely.

That's backwards, because at a park the map is the product. Guests don't want "a powered site". They want the one down the end near the river, not the one beside the amenities block or under the light tower. Site 42 and site 43 cost the same and are not the same purchase, and every returning guest knows which one they want.

A map-first booking interface means the guest picks dates, sees which sites are actually free on the map, hovers or taps one, and gets the site number, the dimensions, the surface, what's next to it and the nightly rate for their dates — then books it. That's a genuinely custom piece of front-end work sitting on top of the park's availability data, and it's the single strongest reason for a guest to book direct rather than on an OTA, because no OTA can offer it. Booking.com will sell them "a powered site". Only the park can sell them site 42.

It's also what converts the returning guest, who is the most valuable guest a park has and the one most often handed to an OTA by default because the direct experience is worse.

Seasonal pricing deserves pages, not a tariff sheet

Park demand is violently seasonal, and search demand moves with it. People search for Christmas and January school holidays in September. They search Easter in February. They search whale season, wildflower season, football finals weekends and the long weekend in June, and they search all of it with the season and the region in the same query.

The standard park website answers all of that with one page called "Rates", usually holding a tariff table or a PDF that was last updated two seasons ago, listing peak, shoulder and off-peak without saying which dates those are. The OTA answers it with a live calendar showing the exact price for the exact nights, which is why the OTA gets the click and the booking.

The fix is a set of real seasonal pages, each one written for the way the demand actually arrives: what the park is like at that time of year, which dates fall inside the rate period, what the minimum stay is, when it typically sells out, and live availability for those dates. That's content with a genuine purpose, not filler, and it's the kind of page that earns a position in search for a query the park would otherwise pay an OTA to have won on its behalf. If a park's pages aren't showing up for those seasonal searches at all, the causes are usually structural rather than mysterious, and we've written a full diagnostic on why an Australian business site doesn't show up on Google.

The same logic applies to minimum-stay rules, deposits and cancellation windows. Parks are stricter than hotels on all three for good operational reasons, and burying that until the payment screen sends a half-committed guest back to the tab where the terms were stated upfront.

Choose the booking engine on its API, not its demo

Park-specific booking software exists and it's worth using. RMS Cloud, based in Keilor Park in Melbourne's north-west, runs booking and property management for more than 6,000 properties across 70-plus countries including holiday parks and campgrounds, and publishes an open API. That last part is the part that matters for the website.

The choice that determines whether a park website converts isn't which engine you pick. It's whether the engine's availability and pricing can be pulled into your own pages, or whether you're stuck embedding a hosted widget that looks like a different business, sits on a different subdomain, and dumps the guest out of the brand at the moment they were about to pay. A map-first booking interface is only possible on the first path. On the second, the map stays a PDF forever.

So the question to ask any provider before signing is unglamorous and specific: can we read live availability and rates through the API and render them in our own interface, or do we have to use your widget? The answer decides what the website can ever become.

The maths, using your own statement rather than ours

Airbnb's host service fee documentation states that the single host-only fee structure — most hosts pay 15.5%, the remainder typically 14% to 16% — is mandatory for listings connected through property management software and for traditional hospitality listings. A holiday park running a PMS is both. Commission on the other major channels is contract-specific, and the real figure is on the monthly statement sitting in the office rather than in an article like this one.

Take a hypothetical park doing $2.4 million AUD in accommodation revenue with 45% of it arriving through OTAs, which puts $1.08 million AUD through commissioned channels. Using 15% purely as a placeholder for the blended rate — substitute your own the moment you have the statement in front of you — that's roughly $162,000 AUD a year handed over. Shift five percentage points of total revenue from OTA to direct — $120,000 AUD of bookings — and the park keeps about $18,000 AUD a year that it was previously paying away, every year it trades, plus the guest's email address and the right to market to them for the next decade.

That sum decides whether a rebuild is an expense or an investment, and it's the same arithmetic we've laid out for hotels weighing direct bookings against OTA commissions. For parks the numbers tend to be friendlier, because the repeat-visit rate is higher and the guest relationship runs longer.

Reviews are the other half of the job

One more number from the guest review report is worth sitting with: the sector responded to about 50% of eligible reviews last year. Half of guest feedback going unanswered hands the reputation layer to whichever platform hosts it, and since Booking.com hosts most of it, that's where the trust accumulates. Google's 33% share is the portion a park can genuinely own — those reviews sit next to the business in local search, they're the first thing a family checks, and they can be surfaced on the park's own pages beside the price the way OTAs do it. The sector's national review index sat at 85.6% for 2025, so the product is rating well. It's the display and the response being left to someone else.

What we'd say honestly about the OTAs

They earn their cut. For a regional park an hour off the highway with no email list, OTA distribution is how a first-time guest finds the place at all, and that's worth paying for. The argument isn't to leave the channel. It's that a park with a strong repeat rate should be paying commission on discovery and almost nothing on the second, third and fifth stay, and most park websites are set up in a way that quietly pays it on all of them.

If you run a park and want to know what your site would have to change to hold onto more of that revenue, book 20 minutes with us or call us on 0421 933 907. Bring your occupancy, your channel split and last month's commission statement, and we'll tell you straight whether the fix is a booking-flow rebuild or a few pages you're missing. Our accommodation web design page covers how we approach the build itself.