After a terrifying start to the season, ACSI has recorded encouraging results for the associated campsites, especially thinking to the future. The sales performance of the famous printed guide and all digital activities was excellent. We talked about it with Ramon Van Reine, CEO of the company.
Camping Business: How was your 2020?
Ramon Van Reine: We saw basically 3 phases. We thought, for the first three months after the explosion of the pandemic, from march until the end of June, that the whole industry would collapse. We didn’t see any perspective. Then, after the end of June, we had a good season but, by September, the situation turned negative again: many countries went back to close borders and campsites couldn’t receive orders and guests. The season has been short for everybody. The South of Europe – Spain, Italy, Croatia and Greece – suffered mostly from the situation, while the North of Europe has seen quite a good season. They raised their prices and they had a longer window, until the end of September.
Camping Business: How ACSI acts, especially on the Italian and Croatian markets, where the most of your readers comes from?
Ramon Van Reine: We have two clients, consumers and campsites. We sell our product in 15 countries, 7 languages for the print version and 14 languages for the online, including Chinese. We started to create a scenario in which we can survive ourselves this year and we can also help campsites to continue their promotion with us. In order to do so, we gave a discount for the promotion in 2021, differently shaped by the zones of Europe. Increasing from North to South. For example, on average, a campsite in Sicily had 55% discount and one from Northern Italy had 35%.
We also did calls to our network in order to monitor the situation. First call was to know how our friends and collaborators, not only clients for us, and their families were, and what was the business situation. A second-round call was intended to know how it was going after a while, what they expected, and which were the results at the time. In the third call, our survey revealed that our campsites were first very relieved by an unexpected good summer season and then very positive about our help in this difficult situation.
Camping Business: What are your main markets?
Ramon Van Reine: Germany is currently our biggest market, for sure. We can include in it also Switzerland and Austria. A second market is the Dutch, speaking about Holland and Belgium. Then we have the French, Spanish, English, Polish and Scandinavian markets. Italy is a relatively small market for us because our clients travel most in Europe by camper and caravan and the Italian market is more a domestic market. We are a European player, and only 35% of our turnover comes from Dutch market. The main advantage for the campsites, indeed, is that we are a European platform, and therefore with their budget, they advertise all over the continent. We have 5,300 campsites advertising with us with this discount we offered in 2021, and we lost only 6% of campsites doing their promotion with us, due to economic problems. Even our discount was not enough to keep them going.
Camping Business: Do you have an idea on how many Dutch came to South of Europe last summer?
Ramon Van Reine: We did three researches on traveller’s intention focused on German, Dutch and French markets: in May, they revealed that 45% of campers wanted to leave and go abroad. In August, 55% wanted to go outsides their borders. I expected that the travellers from these countries wanting to go abroad were 55% less than normal and I think this correct.
Camping Business: How did you see the demand of the German and Dutch travellers for Italian campsites?
Ramon Van Reine: The situation was very hard at the beginning, but we saw in the end a reasonably good booking for the “Bel Paese”. But Italy had an advantage on Croatia last season, because this country closed borders to Dutch and German people. 30% of them booked then for Italy or Spain, even if also Spain later closed its borders. This is, indeed, the main danger I see for the next season: European governments don’t cooperate on the decisions. This is the big risk for tourism, because the campsite is the best place to be in this Corona situation. Better than a hotel, a cruise or a flight journey. You can travel with your car, holding or towing your own house. There’s no better solution! Governments have to decide on one policy, because this year we saw some irrational decisions, like in Spain and Croatia. They suffered a lot because they closed early, and they had a very small domestic market. These government decisions affected tourism much more than in the Northern European countries. We know that campsites hope to get back to normal and to get back their guests and they will be back for sure as soon as they can travel. The problem is the political decision that, often, ruin the business.
Camping Business: Do you think the raising average temperature also in North of Europe are generating some rebalance of the touristic traffic for these countries?
Ramon Van Reine: Yes, in some way. For example, last year in France there were 14 days with over 40°. It’s too much. Many campers from North Europe went back home! We also saw that in the recent years more and more Dutch and German campers seem to enjoy vacations in their own countries. But they all want to go back to holiday in Italy, Croatia or Spain and Greece. They will be back, for climate, for food, for these different cultures. As soon as they will be allowed to freely travel again.
Camping Business: How did you improve your online guide, compared with the hardcopy version in the last 5 years?
Ramon Van Reine: We are the exception in the market: our print portion is still growing! We printed 45,000 copies more this year, reaching, in 2020, 700,000 sold all over Europe. Nearly the same as 2019. The sales to the consumers were also very good. Our app also knew progress and increased sales and visits to all our websites were more than last year. This is because we did a lot of information on Corona, for all countries: where we can go, which campsites were open and so on. And we updated it every day, with all the information from every country. So, we develop our platform continuously in the quality of the contents and we always did like this, even before the pandemic. We constantly improve our sites, and this includes the apps.
We developed, in the last three years, a platform in which we have inspections, editing, operations, sales, finance and marketing. From this year, completely, we can work digitally with contents and campsites can update their information on the platform.
Camping Business: How your guide gets distributed?
Ramon Van Reine: We have many channels: first, some hundreds of thousands of subscribers, who automatically get the product before Christmas. I thought we were decreasing in the number of subscribers, this year but, in reality, we have grown by 8%: simply fantastic. We distribute also by retail everywhere, our partner in Italy is PleinAir. Our distributors are not only publishers, but the guide can be bought, for instance, also in some camping or bookshop. But not so many in Italy, because of the smaller market, compared with Germany and other countries. Also, some camper and caravan dealers are our sales partners. And of course, we have our online shop, really important and very well performing in sales. But, in the first part of March, our sales were zero and it lasted like this until the 3rd week of June. Then, the market started to grow again until it re-dimensioned again in the last period. After the end of June, sales tripled! And we had back what we had lost in the first period.
Vittorio Dall’Aglio – Assocamp