Camping Vision is a Swiss/Danish/Dutch group specializing in the campsite booking market with a European market share that is constantly growing. founded three and a half years ago, as a result of a merger of the well-known brands Allcamps and LuxCamp, as well as the more specific DanskBilferie and FriFerie, it has gone from a turnover of just over €30 million in 2016 to almost €70 million in 2019, and had a projection for 2020 – pre-covid – of about €80 million.
In 2019, Camping Vision recorded a total of approximately 65,000 bookings, of which 35,000 were for the Italian market and 15,000 for the Croatian market. We talked with Ralf de Bruijn, managing director of the group, about the strategy, what has happened in recent months and the expectations for the new season.
Camping Business: Tell us something more about your company and brands…
Ralf de Bruijn: When we created the company, we thought that it was better to not merge the consumer brands, so we kept them alive. The idea was to build a group, one contracting organization, to create the biggest supermarket for camping holidays in Europe. With these four brands, we sell in 14 countries in Europe in 10 different languages and we actually have 25 different websites.
We started in 2015 with a bunch of campsites and now offer 750. Looking at the growth in turnover, I must say that 2020 was obviously not the year we all expected. Before March 1st we were 50 percent ahead of 2019, so we thought we were really heading towards a great season, but we know what happened last season…
The majority of our customers come from Germany (31 percent) and Denmark (24 percent). In those two markets we are actually the leader. The third one is Holland, with 21 percent.
Last year, we launched new websites in Spain, Italy, Hungary and the Czech Republic. We published the last two when Corona started, because we didn’t know what was about to happen last year, but we had a very successful launch of the Allcamps brand in Spain and Italy. Obviously, the main reason for that was that most people decided to have a camping holiday in their own country. Domestic travelling was by far the most popular tourism last year.
We have two brands in most European countries and two dedicated Danish brands. LuxCamp has been out there for eight years now, and Allcamps for a little bit longer.
Camping Business: Why did you decide to have two different brands?
Ralf de Bruijn: It’s historically driven. When we merged as a company, we got partly the same shareholders and the four brands were already there, which were complementary. We decided to keep them because we already had quite a strong presence in most of our markets. Never change a winning team: it was too risky just to ‘kill’ a brand. We don’t do that, but in some countries we do focus more on one brand than the other. For example, in France we decided to put all focus on Allcamps and in Hungary, Italy, Spain and Czech Rep we took the decision to launch only one brand, because when we enter a new market it’s more efficient from a business perspective and obviously easier to manage.
Another point is that our strategy has always been to expand and invest most in markets that are stretching the season. The European camping season starts with Easter, where in Spain and Germany people have long holidays. Then, we have the May holidays in Holland and after that things go on in Poland and Ireland, followed by Denmark in half of June. We try to invest most in markets where we cover low season periods, because at the end we would like to be a strategic partner for all the campsites and tour operators that we sell, and they don’t need that much support for the high season. Some of them do, but some of them just need a formula for the low season. This is why we invest much more in countries like Poland and Hungary: those two countries have holidays in June, and this is a difficult period. It’s the same story for Ireland, Germany and Denmark.
Camping Business: How do you work with your partners?
Ralf de Bruijn: Basically, we have three different ways of working. The most updated and modern one is, of course, to establish connections between systems. So, we connected our own reservation system with many of the other systems used by campsites, such as BookingExpert, Qenner, NextPax, SequoiaSoft, eSeason or Phobs, to name a few. This has been our strategy from the start. We like to automate and limit the manual work on both sides. We (ourselves and our partners) don’t want to have to do too much work on each booking – for a supplier, partner or ourselves.
But we also work with allotments, or allocations, like many of our Italian partners still do, and free sale. Both ways are ok, but there is much more manual work involved. A connection between systems means our system reads, searches and takes the availability and pricing from our partner automatically. If we make a booking, this will automatically be sent to the campsite’s reservation system. This is why most of our partners prefer to make a connection using an XML file format and an API.
I think this is the future, but we do both, and if a campsite prefers to work on an allotment basis, in the manual way, we have also built our own extranet. Here the campsites can manage their own allocations: they can login, they have their own system where they can see exactly where they still have availability in the calendar.
To give you some references, we have connections with The Human Company, Happy Camp, Delaini Group, Vacanze col Cuore, Vacanze di Charme. In Croatia, all campsites and groups like Valamar, Maistra and Arenaturist are connected through Phobs.
Camping Business: Do you have an account for each country or do you work from your headquarters with English-speaking personnel?
Ralf de Bruijn: We have a commercial team that speaks many languages, including Italian. We have a very personal way of working. Our partners have a single point of contact, the contract manager, available 24/7. They travel a lot, so they visit most of the campsites twice per year to have personal meetings to evaluate the season. We don’t treat our partners like a number. There is always a personal relationship developed over the years.
I deal with most of our camping tour operator partners. We work with many of the bigger campsites and operators. In general, you can say that we work with most four and five star campsites, plus some three stars in regions that are popular in our key markets: Denmark, Germany, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, France and Holland.
Camping Business: Which countries give you the greatest satisfaction?
Ralf de Bruijn: For us, Croatia is the fastest growing destination. Of course, we grow in every destination, because we are winning market share everywhere and we are on-boarding new partners. Croatia is showing the strongest growth, but Poland and Germany are showing a good trend.
Camping Business: What are the elements that distinguish you from the competition?
Ralf de Bruijn: There are mainly two things. One is that we try to think globally but act locally. We have three main offices – in Denmark (Copenhagen), Switzerland (Geneva) and Holland (Waalwijk) – where for the best customer service we have native speakers in-house for each language.
The second is that we do the booking and the client handling from A to Z. We deal with the complete booking, we send invoices, we send the voucher to the client, and we offer an aftersales service if there are any complaints to manage. Our service level is pretty high. That is our strategy.
We like IT and like to automate the booking process, but our clients can still reach us directly even in the evening or over the weekend. We try to be on the ball.
Most of the 45 people we have in the company are real camping fans. We travel a lot, and we go camping with our families. We like to know the products because we know it is very complicated for families to choose a campsite. There are so many variables to choose from so this is why we really want to be camping experts and why we do not sell anything else. We are 100% camping experts.
Camping Business: What are your expectations for 2021?
Ralf de Bruijn: I’m very optimistic. I think there is a very big need for holidays in general, more specifically for holidays in the open air. I think the corona pandemic has made people feel much safer travelling by car in Europe, and maybe still will this summer, depending on how things are. In 2020, most of our clients and markets were very affected by what we saw in the media about the COVID situation in Italy. Eventually, Italy had a normal high season, with no problems at all. That’s also why I have a very good and positive feeling about 2021.
As I said before, in a normal year, more than 50 percent of our bookings are made for Italy. I can see already, in the website traffic and in Google search volumes, that there is still the biggest demand in our key markets for Italy. Yes, we have not sold as much as we should have done by now, because of the lockdown and Corona, but once again, we are selling a lot for Italy and Croatia, so it’s recovering: small numbers but looking at the mix of destinations, it’s looking like it was in 2019. In 2020, we saw Dutch and German people actually stayed in Holland and Germany, or even went to Croatia or France, because they didn’t trust Italy at that moment. But, it seems that someone pushed the reset button… ?
Gloria Oppici – Salone del Camper