Thomas Scarrott of Vale Holiday Parks on a hot, extreme summer, why guests now ask AI instead of Googling, and the case for a shared holiday park loyalty scheme.
Good weather is the best marketing campaign a park can have, until it isn’t. Thomas describes a season that was, overall, really good for Vale, but one where extreme heat occasionally worked against them too, guests too hot to sit in a beer garden, and for the first time, guests bringing their own portable air conditioning units on holiday. His takeaway for the sector: stop planning for average weather and start planning for extremes. Guests have stopped Googling and started “AI-ing.” Thomas draws the Blockbuster-to-Netflix comparison: people are increasingly asking an AI chatbot where to go on holiday rather than searching for it, and using AI to help write reviews and feedback too. He sees the smartphone becoming a genuine digital concierge, with the big tech platforms layering assistants over booking, payment and planning.
Hospitality stays a people business, and that’s the protection, not the risk. Despite the pace of AI adoption, Thomas is clear that guests still want to talk to the person behind the bar. He uses AI at Vale to stay “small and light and agile,” starting with Copilot inside Office 365 and sense checking against ChatGPT or Grok, but sees the technology that works best as the technology nobody notices.
No UK holiday park, Vale included, has a proper loyalty scheme. Thomas’s most direct point: the sector hasn’t cracked loyalty the way hotel chains have, and it probably won’t be solved by any single operator alone. He floats a shared scheme across a group of like minded parks as the more realistic route, and names the sector’s lack of collaboration as part of why nobody’s got there yet.
Thomas Scarrott
Keep listening: our earlier conversation with Thomas Scarrott, the partners and suppliers directory and the Help Centre for guest app and loyalty features.
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