Great Aussie Holiday Park Success Story | Lets Go Caravan and Camping

Great Aussie Holiday Park Success Story

Category: News, Date: 9 December 2014

The Diffey’s bought a caravan park in November of 2012 and named it the Great Aussie Holiday Park. Since they took over, many things have changed. In her own words, Melanie Diffey talks about what they did, how they did it, and why their park is special.

We purchased the park in November 2012 after selling the family farm. My husband Russell wanted a change from farming and we had always been interested in tourism. We initially leased the farm out and moved to Kununurra, WA for 18 months and looked at different tourism businesses up there. After a while we saw that the Wymah Valley Holiday Park was for sale. We have been holidaying there for about 30 years, so we started our due diligence and settled 12 months later.

We attended a Caravan Park Training Course at Hastings Point. This was definitely worth doing as it was a big eye opener as to what is required to actually manage a successful park business. It is a lot of work, but if you have good staff it takes the work load off yourselves.

We have 60 camping sites and 40 cabins. We also have a 108 bed dormitory with four self-contained studios. We host school camps for primary and high schools and are currently registered to become ACA accredited.

We have a range of activities for guests at the park, including a bike pump track, animal nursery, water spray park, solar heated resort style pool, tennis court, games room, jumping pillow and playground, and a disc golf course.

We are on Lake Hume so water sports and fishing are popular activities. During our peak times we run Kids Club, movies in the movie theatre, cafe, archery and flying fox sessions, bingo and trivia nights. We have additional activities for school groups such as mystery orienteering, boomerang throwing, damper making, low ropes course, team challenges. We are looking at adding canoeing for the school programs in 2015.

Because of how big it is and the number of activities, we need a lot of staff to run the park successfully, so we have to balance staff hours and workload and all staff need to be multi-skilled.
Another challenge for us was to improve the business. We bought this business which wasn’t making money and the facilities were run down. We have done a lot of work to improve and update the facilities. We have increased occupancy rates by 20 percent in the first 18 months and we are working on improving this figure.

We have tried different marketing strategies which have been costly but it has helped us to focus on a more strategic marketing program for the future now understanding what works and what hasn’t. We have a marketing consultant that we work with closely as marketing is very expensive and needs to be budgeted and strategic.

Taking on a business in a new industry to us has been rewarding simply in the challenge itself! It’s challenging of course, but I love working with our staff, we are like a big family. I like seeing them growing in the business and seeing the financial rewards of all of our hard work. I also love hearing positive comments from our guests and on Facebook. Russell and I really enjoy providing a great destination for people to have a holiday to remember.

One of the most memorable guest stays was a 60th birthday party we held in our function room. The birthday girl decorated the room with a colour theme and  a picture board. They had a band on the stage and we provided finger food throughout the night. It was a 60’s dress up theme and most guests stayed at the park for the weekend and attended in their costumes, enjoying the good food and music. The next morning was a self catered breakfast cooked on our BBQ facilities in the entertainment area. Everyone had a fun and relaxed weekend catching up with friends and family amongst our beautiful, peaceful lake setting.

We have a guest comments sheet that guests can complete for us with their positive and negative comments. Customer service is very important to us. We deal with all complaints immediately and work to resolve the best possible outcome for the guest and the park.

My advice to others would be: do your research as to what type of park you want to run. Our park is not the average park as there are many different aspects of this, business from running activities for guests, hosting school camps, running a cafe, and hosting group events as well as tourists.

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