Dave McRobbie and Elite Dynamics Sales Director Andrew Blackie discuss AI, Power BI, and operational data in the context of independent UK holiday parks.
The thread running through the whole conversation is that AI is only as useful as the data underneath it. Andrew is clear on this. If you have not got your reporting right, if you are not clear on what you are trying to achieve, pointing AI at your business will not fix it. It will just make the noise louder.
Elite Dynamics builds on Microsoft Business Central, and Andrew’s description of how that works is the most useful framing I have heard: think of your phone, and Elite Parks as an app installed on it. Microsoft is the operating system. Elite is the app, built entirely within their control, verified by Microsoft, shaped entirely around what parks actually need.
That architecture matters because it means Elite can move at Microsoft’s pace, integrating tools like Power BI and Copilot as they evolve, without operators needing to think about the plumbing.
The shift Andrew describes is from headline numbers to real margin. Not how many caravans Phil sold, but whether those caravans made money. Not whether you were full last August, but whether the offer you ran to fill those pitches actually held up when you looked at the nightly rate.
That kind of analysis used to take days of pivot tables. Done well, it now takes minutes. The point is not that the software is clever. The point is that operators can spend their energy on the decision rather than on building the case for the decision.
Andrew’s example of the owner upgrade campaign makes this concrete. Every park that has holiday home owners has at some point run what he calls a park exchange party — weeks of manual analysis, paper per owner, working out who is due an upgrade. Elite AI does that analysis automatically, builds the campaign, and pushes it out through the app. The time saved goes back to the customer conversation.
The best line in the conversation came from Andrew’s reflection on Mustafa Suleyman’s decision to call Microsoft’s AI product Copilot. Not because it is a clever name, but because it changes the entire framing. You are still flying. The AI is next to you.
Andrew uses Copilot every day. He asks it what his day looks like. He uses it to prepare for owner meetings, to interpret new licence documents from the council, to make sense of data he would otherwise spend hours reformatting. The tool handles the preparation. He makes the call.
That is the model he recommends, and it is the one that holds up when you push on it. Dave and Andrew both agreed: the risk is not that AI is too powerful. The risk is people using it without thinking, either throwing budget at tools without understanding what they are trying to achieve, or letting AI make decisions that still need human judgment behind them.
The conversation went somewhere more personal towards the end. Andrew’s 14-year-old son is a Man United fan and occasionally brings him videos that turn out to be entirely AI-generated. A few years ago you could spot them. Now Andrew is not always sure.
Dave referenced research from the Centre for Humane Technology – an ex-Google ethicist’s organisation – which has found that some younger users are developing real attachment to AI in ways that used to be reserved for friendships. Andrew has thought about this with his son. Dave has thought about it with his 22-year-old daughter, who is studying psychology and came through the COVID digital dependency wave in one piece, but knows it was close for some of her peers.
Neither of them said AI is a problem. Both said the same thing: embrace it, use it in the right way, but do not run away from the conversation about what it is doing to people.
That felt like the right note to end on.
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