How Much Does a Campsite Earn? Revenue and Margins Explained

What campsite revenue comes down to

Campsite revenue is four numbers multiplied together: the number of pitches, the number of nights you are open, your average occupancy, and your average rate per night. Everything else, rentals, extras, the shop, sits on top of that core. If someone quotes you a turnover figure without those four numbers behind it, the figure tells you almost nothing.

The honest answer to how much a campsite earns is that the spread is enormous. Two sites with 100 pitches each, in the same region, can differ by a factor of two or three in turnover, and even more in what the owner actually takes home. One runs a tight season with sensible pricing and full peak weeks; the other opens the gate in April and hopes.

There are no reliable public statistics that cover the whole European sector, and anyone who claims a precise industry average is guessing. So every number in this article is an illustration, built the way we would sketch it on the back of a beer mat when someone asks us to sanity-check their plans. Treat the arithmetic as a method, not a benchmark.

A worked example: 100 touring pitches

Take an illustrative site with 100 touring pitches, open March to October, roughly 210 nights. Occupancy is never flat. The six or seven peak weeks in July and August run close to full, the shoulder months sit somewhere between 30 and 40 percent, and early spring and late autumn are quiet. Rates should follow the same shape, from perhaps €24 a night in March up to €34 or more in high summer.

Multiply it out and the shape looks like this. Every figure is invented for the example; your region, star rating and facilities will move all of them.

That comes to roughly €293,000 in pitch revenue, with a blended occupancy of about 46 percent across the season. Notice what drives it: the eight or nine peak weeks deliver well over half the total. A site that stumbles in July and August cannot repair the year in September. In our experience a realistic overall range for a site like this is somewhere between €250,000 and €350,000 in pitch fees alone, and plenty of sites sit below it.

Revenue beyond the pitch fee

Most sites do not live on touring pitches alone. Rental accommodation, safari tents, chalets, mobile homes, earns far more per unit: €90 to €140 a night in season is common where a pitch brings €30. A row of six rentals can add €60,000 or more to the top line, but the units cost €25,000 to €70,000 each to buy and place, and every changeover Saturday needs cleaning hands.

Seasonal pitch contracts, the Dutch vaste gasten or German Dauercamper, bring stable money paid early in the year, often €1,500 to €2,500 per pitch per season. Per square metre it is the lowest-yielding use of your terrain, but the cash arrives in February when you need it, and a loyal seasonal field fills the shoulder weeks with life.

Extras are the third layer. Individually they look trivial, a few euros here and there, but across two thousand bookings a season they behave like a rate increase nobody complains about. As a rough rule of thumb, a site that offers extras well can add €10 to €25 to the value of an average booking, and most of that is high-margin because the cost of a linen package or a late checkout is small.

Then there are the small extras that quietly add up across a season.

• Bike and e-bike hire, typically €10 to €25 per day per bike
• Linen packages and made-up beds for rental guests
• Late checkout and early check-in fees
• Firewood, barbecue hire, washing machine tokens
• The shop and bread service: margins are thin, often under 20 percent on groceries, but fresh croissants at 8 a.m. buy more goodwill than any advertisement

Where the money goes

Turnover is the fun half of the story. On the cost side, staff is almost always the largest line. In our experience it commonly swallows a quarter to a third of turnover once you count reception, cleaning, maintenance and seasonal animation staff honestly, and more if the owners pay themselves a market wage, which many do not.

Energy usually comes second, and it has climbed sharply in recent years. Sanitary blocks with hot showers, a heated pool and dozens of 10 or 16 amp hook-ups are hungry. After that come maintenance and repairs, insurance, marketing and software, and the quiet administrative burden of municipal charges and tourist tax collection, which varies by country and municipality, so check your local rules rather than budgeting from someone else's spreadsheet.

What is left over is often a modest single-digit to low-double-digit margin, plus whatever wage the owners manage to pay themselves. The uncomfortable truth about many family-run sites is that the business looks profitable mainly because the family underprices its own labour. When we help people value a site for sale, adding a realistic owner wage back into the costs regularly turns a healthy-looking profit into a thin one.

The levers that actually move campsite revenue

The instinct of many owners is to add pitches. That is usually the weakest lever, because the new pitches inherit the same empty shoulder weeks as the old ones. The levers that work operate on the other three numbers in the formula.

Season length first: a handful of well-marketed shoulder weeks in May, June and September, aimed at retired couples and motorhome travellers who do not care about school holidays, adds open nights at rates that are already decent. Occupancy in existing weeks second: filling Tuesday to Thursday gaps in June is worth more than any expansion. Rate structure third: a single flat price all season leaves money on the table in August and scares off bargain hunters in April; a proper seasonal pricing structure fixes both ends at once.

Finally, direct booking share. Every booking that arrives through an intermediary platform costs commission, often in the range of 10 to 15 percent, and every booking you win directly through your own website keeps that money. Commission saved is pure margin, because the guest, the pitch and the work are identical either way. On the illustrative site above, shifting €100,000 of bookings from platforms to direct saves €10,000 to €15,000 a year, which is more than most sites spend on their entire website and booking software combined.

How seasonal pricing works in practice

The trade-offs nobody puts in the brochure

Rentals raise revenue per square metre dramatically, but they also convert a low-labour business into a hospitality operation. Six units mean six changeovers every Saturday in peak season, a cleaning rota, linen logistics and capital that depreciates whether the units are booked or not. The first summer we ran rentals ourselves, the Saturday changeover took the whole family until 3 p.m. and we still had guests waiting at reception.

A longer season sounds like free money until you price it properly. Heating a sanitary block through a cold April costs real energy, staff still need to be rostered for a half-empty site, and maintenance that would normally happen in the closed months gets squeezed. Extending the season pays when the shoulder marketing is done well; it quietly loses money when the site simply stays open and waits.

And the shop: almost every owner dreams of a bigger one, and almost every accountant winces. Grocery margins are thin, stock spoils, and a supermarket five kilometres away beats you on everything except convenience. Keep the bread service, keep the essentials, and resist the mini-market unless the nearest alternative is genuinely far away.

Benchmarking yourself honestly

If you run a site, write down your own four numbers: pitches, open nights, real occupancy and real average rate, and compare the result to what your accounts say. The gap between the theoretical maximum and the actual figure is your to-do list, and it usually points at the shoulder season and the rate card rather than at anything expensive.

If you are looking at buying a site, run the same arithmetic on the seller's numbers before you fall in love with the trees. Ask for occupancy by month, not the season average, and add a market wage for your own labour to the cost side. A realistic view of campsite revenue at the start saves painful conversations with the bank later.

The formula is simple. The discipline of applying it to your own site, honestly and month by month, is what separates the thriving 100-pitch site from the struggling one.

What to check before buying a campsite