By Kendal Stacey, Director, Parks & Hospitality, Wifinity
As Britain’s holidaymakers are opening the BBQ and their umbrellas in equal measures this Whitsun half term, Wifinity is popping celebratory corks as we continue to build momentum and launch fresh WiFi solutions for UK holiday parks.
A leading UK ISP and specialist WiFi managed service provider, we’re trusted by the biggest names in the holiday sector. This includes public and guest WiFi at Butlins, Bourne Leisure brands: Haven and Warner Hotels, Parkdean Resorts and PGL. We’ve hit several new milestones during the off-season.
Since summer 2023, we have added 11 new UK parks to our estate, which includes caravan parks, lodges, privately-owned homes. We have also delivered necessary infrastructure upgrades and evolving new consumer and enterprise connectivity needs. These allow entertainment venues to be created, new food and beverage areas to be supported and staff to be fully mobile. Our services now have the potential to be used by close to nine million holidaymakers over summer 2024.
Guest experience, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and maximising revenues during the intense peak season are priorities for park leadership in 2024. According to Wifinity’s own research of 2k holiday park guests over summer 2023, bad WiFi hurts a park’s reputation. 78% of guests said that ultra-high-speed WiFi everywhere across the property is valuable for their experience.
WiFi Performance
Holiday park WiFi is rated as the number one guest amenity. Where performance does not meet expectations, 45% won’t book where WiFi reviews are bad and 54% will lower their overall review score. Our priority is to deliver high-quality WiFi to set our park customers apart from the competition, attracting guests and high satisfaction levels.
Premium WiFi
We’re also seeing new emerging trends and have introduced solutions to enable park management. In our recent research, 45% of guests said that they’d pay extra for a premium WiFi experience. In-van, we deploy using direct to van (DTV) methodology using customer premises equipment (CPE) inside each unit for reliable, home-like WiFi.
Guest Self Service
We have seen demand for a WiFi experience that supports guests’ self-service tasks like digital arrival and checkout and provide a channel for booking park facilities. In our research, about 81% of guests said it was important to manage activities and reservations on their phone. 72% wanted to use digital arrival and checkout processes via their phone. 79% want to receive vouchers and special offers during their stay.
This is good news for park owners and management looking to maximise their revenue during the summer months. We’re working with experts at our sister company Vital WiFi, to offer new capabilities. These include flexible bespoke capture portal design to in-life self-serve content management system (CMS) features. During a busy peak season, these allow sales and marketing teams to launch concurrent marketing campaigns, agility to switch to new campaigns, post different promotions to different areas of the park or guest tiers, advertising on park facilities, as well as third party offers from local businesses.
Trusted WiFi Partner to Holiday Parks
With a history in the sector stretching back to 2013, Wifinity takes a bespoke approach to network design. We consider the quirks and unique features of each site, so connectivity reaches every cabin, caravan, and corner of the property. With secure home-like private networking, the family can also share devices. Perfect for first time visitors and pitch owners that spend several months a year on site.
“We offer a secure and an easy-to-use WiFi experience in hard-to-reach places, where people’s expectations for ‘home-like’ internet are high. We know that WiFi is the number one guest amenity at these parks. It’s essential to attract and keep loyal guests over the competition,” says Kendal Stacey, Director, Parks and Hospitality at Wifinity.
“Wifinity has served the caravan park market for over 10 years. We’re seeing more parks look to expand the quality of their WiFi connectivity and customer experience. As a benefit to CXOs, we provide an end-to-end managed service, from survey, to infrastructure, to delivery and management, so there’s no need to speak to different service providers. We have the experience and track record to support the sector.”
Download our holiday parks brochure or speak to our expert team.