What could a holiday park look like in five to ten years? Dave McRobbie sat down with Rhian Hughes and Stephen Brown from Lady's Mile to find out.
Stephen’s opening answer set the tone for everything that followed. The holiday park of the future is a smart, personalised leisure resort. The winners will be the operators who use technology to enhance relaxation, not to industrialise it.
That framing matters. Technology that removes friction and gives guests what they need before they ask for it is one thing. Technology that replaces the feeling of being looked after is another. Stephen was clear on the difference, and unambiguous about where the line sits: if someone has a complaint and they have to talk to a chatbot before they reach a person, they will arrive at that person angrier than they started. AI handles routine queries well. It does not handle complaint resolution well. Knowing which is which is the whole game.
One of the sharpest moments in the conversation came when Stephen described the future of park reception as something like a Sainsbury’s checkout. Not a fully automated experience, not a fully staffed one, a spectrum of options that guests choose from based on what they want that day.
Scan everything yourself and walk out. Use the assisted checkout for a bit of both. Go to a full till with a member of staff. The same logic applies to check-in. Some guests will want to arrive, go straight to their accommodation, and have handled everything digitally before they left home. Others will want to talk to someone, especially after a long drive. Some will want a bit of both. The point is that the choice belongs to the guest, not the operator.
Rhian made the equally sharp observation that this works both ways: if you want people to adopt the digital route, you give them an incentive to do so. You do not charge a premium for the human option. You discount the self-serve one.
The conversation moved into personalisation, and then quickly into one of its less-discussed risks.
Stephen pointed out that if you personalise a guest’s experience too tightly around what they already know they like, you start filtering out the things they would have discovered and loved. Holiday is one of the few contexts where people actively want to be surprised. They try things they would never choose at home. Over-personalisation, taken too far, makes a stay feel predictable rather than special.
Dave’s response was personal: when he and his wife were in Madrid earlier this year, they turned the maps off and just walked around. That instinct – to leave space for the unplanned – is something the best park operators have always understood. The platform can give guests 16 interest categories to choose from, but that does not mean every guest should use all 16 as a filter. Sometimes you leave a few doors open.
Before the recording started, Stephen and Rhian had been talking about Abba Voyage – the hologram concert that people pay serious money to attend. The conversation came back to that during the episode.
Stephen’s observation was practical, a larger park group could theoretically have one exceptional live entertainment team performing at their flagship site, with that show broadcast as a hologram to other parks in the group. Fewer staff per site, but a higher-quality experience than each site could produce independently.
Dave’s counterpoint was that things which feel novel become normal faster than anyone expects. The mobile phone. The internet. What feels like an extraordinary idea in 2026 tends to feel unremarkable by 2030. The National Theatre has been broadcasting live productions to cinemas around the UK for years – Ian McKellen on stage in Bridport. It is already happening, just not yet in holiday parks.
Rhian and Stephen were equally direct about pricing. Lady’s Mile does not do flash sales. The reasoning is not purely commercial, it is about trust. Their repeat guests book early because they know that is when the best prices are available. Undermining that promise, even once, breaks something that takes years to build.
Rhian described how a particular OTA’s last-minute discounting strategy played out: the OTA trained guests to wait, and operators ended up with empty inventory and lower rates. Lady’s Mile took the opposite approach – reward early bookers, hold the price later – and the data has borne it out ever since.
Dave made the connection to software: the temptation to discount when the market is uncertain is real, but confidence in what you are selling is the thing that holds the price. Discounting is always easier in the short term and more expensive in the long run.
The final stretch of the conversation went somewhere further… Stephen raised the question: how far is too far with tracking? Knowing where a guest is on the park, what facilities they use, what time they go swimming, that is useful data for the operator. It might also feel like surveillance to the guest.
Dave’s response was a product idea rather than a defence: an off switch in the app. Not a hidden setting. A visible, easy-to-use pause button that lets a guest say, I want two hours on the beach with my family, and I do not want anything from anyone. No notifications, no suggestions. Just off for a while.
His instinct was that an operator who gives guests that option builds more trust than one who does not. The guests who use it will feel looked after in a different way, respected rather than marketed to.
Stephen pushed further: what about under-18s? What about data breaches? The more you know about where someone is on the park, the more responsible you are for protecting that information. Dave did not dismiss it. The answer involves on-device AI – the work Apple and Google are already doing to keep personal data on the phone rather than in the cloud – but it is not a solved problem yet. Being honest about that is more useful than pretending otherwise.
Both Stephen and Rhian named the same priority when Dave asked where they expected to see practical change: guest choice at the point of arrival.
A huge thank you to both Rhian and Stephen!!
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