The Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK holiday parks has just been published. Learn how the top 12 UK holiday parks perform across the digital space.
The latest Q1 2025 benchmarking report for UK holiday parks has just been published. It covers the largest 12 national holiday parks, including Haven, Butlin’s, John Fowler, Cove UK, Pontins, Parkdean Resorts, Away Holidays, Park Holidays, Hoseasons, Break Free Holidays, Center Parcs, and Forest Holidays.
The research gives an inside track on who is winning the biggest share of voice online, and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for other holiday parks to win brand exposure, drive online enquiries, and generate holiday bookings. The report highlights year-on-year digital performance, plus winner and loser comparisons across 20+ online performance metrics and quantifies the gaps, risks and missed opportunities for holiday parks to win brand exposure, online growth and sales.
To see a preview and contents page of the Q1 report, click here. To get a copy of the full report and the key takeaways, please complete the enquiry form or schedule a call.
For a glance into just 6 of the metrics, we evaluated these top 12 holiday parks on, check out our quick-look table below;
Continue reading for further detail on this quarter's top and poorest-performing UK holiday parks, or request a copy of the report for the full review.
The 70+ pages of research benchmarks each retailer based on 50+ metrics and indicators of successful digital strategy, including organic visibility, domain authority, paid media ads, conversion performance, technical performance, site speed, universal search, content, social ads, accessibility, and mobile performance.
Some of the leading players in the space are high spenders on paid media channels such as Google, Bing & Facebook - but have a poor or sub-optimal conversion improvement strategy. Without an optimised, sophisticated conversion strategy that maximises the conversion rate, the return on investment is unsustainable or will underperform. Scaling spend on paid media is not achievable unless the conversion rate delivers optimal performance in the sector. Some in the space have paid media spend levels from 30k+ per month but dedicate minimal resources and budgets to conversion testing. Given the cost per clicks on ad networks will continue to rise, we recommend spending at least 10% of your paid media budget on ongoing conversion optimisation testing schedules to ensure your paid media ROI maintains long-term viability, competitive advantage, and sustainability.
Pay-Per-Click marketing is constantly evolving, with more and more advertisers being forced to hand over a lot of control to Google's algorithms as the push for automation grows ever stronger. There are still key elements of control that we have though, the main one of these being budget which is ultimately something the algorithms can't take from you. That's why being smart with your budget and ad coverage is essential to achieving strong results and bettering what your competitors have to offer.
For Q1 2025, the average budget wastage across these UK holiday parks was £7,794 with some of the top players in the market spending a considerable amount on areas and audiences unlikely to deliver a return. We can see this in more detail when looking at the average monthly cost per cost-per-click (CPC) amongst advertisers, with the average of this metric being £8.50 . This highlights how competitive the market is and how important it is to control your budgets effectively. In this quarter, Pontin’s has the highest budget wastage at £36,150, and Hoseasons has the lowest budget wastage at £42.
There are varying monthly ad budgets across the competitors in the report. While this gap highlights the competitive advantage that larger budgets can provide, it's not just about spending more; it’s about spending smarter. By focusing on driving efficiency in campaign management, targeting, and budget allocation, businesses with smaller budgets can still effectively compete with larger players. Investing in data-driven strategies and refining ad performance can help close the gap and maximise the return on every pound spent, enabling growth even in a competitive landscape. Relative to their spend, Haven has the lowest monthly cost-per-click (CPC) at £1, and John Fowler Holidays has the highest at £76.
The report highlights the importance of budget efficiency by comparing monthly ad spend with estimated CPC in relation to your competitors, see who has the highest and lowest CPC. To maximise the effectiveness of your budget, it’s essential to focus on driving CPC down while maintaining or improving campaign performance. In this report, Pontin’s has the highest estimate monthly ad spend at £241,000, and Haven has the lowest at £283.
By optimising targeting, refining ad copy, and leveraging data to identify high-converting opportunities, you can ensure every click delivers maximum value. This approach not only stretches your budget further but also boosts your return on ad spend (ROAS), enabling you to achieve stronger results without simply increasing expenditure.
Savvy digital marketers know that having a technically sound website is an essential component of a successful fully integrated digital strategy - plus a site capable of maximising conversion performance. Holiday parks will want to ensure key information such as pricing and activities are clearly signposted, and that important content is not hidden behind broken links and 404 error codes.
Forest Holidays reported the most 4xx errors (103). These errors can have a negative SEO affect for websites, as they lower search engines. In particular, search engines may penalise websites with numerous 4xx errors, as they indicate a website is poorly maintained or has many broken links. These errors can also reduce crawl efficiency.
When 62% of consumers are less likely to convert if they have a negative mobile site experience, ensuring that your site is quick and easy to load makes a significant improvement on your overall conversion rates. In a competitive field where prospective holiday goers will be looking to snap up deals quickly, having a fast-performing site is essential for holiday parks to generate bookings and provide a positive brand experience.
The mobile site speed for this quarter ranged between 84 and 8, with Park Holidays UK reporting the lowest mobile speed. This UK holiday park should aim for at least a 50% score. Mobile site speed is important for users, as a website that takes more than three seconds to load cause make visitors impatient, resulting in them leaving the website and potentially resorting to a competitor.
Domain authority is an essential metric for measuring the effectiveness of SEO performance, and helps create a reliable overall gauge of how effective your site is at achieving organic traffic, i.e. ‘free’ traffic that isn’t gained through sponsored ads. Holiday parks could look to collaborate with and outreach to local & national publications, travel sites, and family bloggers to gain valuable backlinks from high-authority sites.
A ‘good’ DA really comes down to how your competitors are performing, however it is generally considered average between 40 and 50, good between 50 and 60, and excellent above 60. The DA score for this quarter ranged between 72 and 34, with Breakfree Holidays reporting the lowest DA score. While this UK holiday park secured the most backlinks, they should aim to receive backlinks from a variety of sources to increase their DA score. When backlinks come from multiple sources, search engines see this as a website being trustworthy, whereas few sources can make backlinks look unnatural and/or manipulative.
A strong organic performance is strategically important as it ensures your site ranks above competitors for key, transactional keywords. When 93% of your customers won’t go past the first page of Google, your absence or lack of targeting for essential keywords will cost you conversions. As consumers are cutting back on treats and expendable items due to the cost of living crisis, you might expect general, overall traffic towards the holiday sector to have fallen year on year. However, with families potentially looking to UK breaks as a cost-effective alternative to holidays abroad, park brands who are capitalising on this change in consumer habits will see much stronger performance than competitors.
Two of the holiday parks saw a decrease in organic traffic on desktop, whereas 8 reported a decrease on mobile. Some industries will naturally see more traffic on desktop compared to mobile, but there are still steps holiday parks can take to increase their traffic on mobile. For example, a mobile-optimised website with an easy-to-use interface and a minimalist navigation can help encourage users to visit the website from their mobile.
Google Universal Search Results is an evolving opportunity to make your pages visible on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Universal results often appear before traditional listings and are eye-catching for users. Universal search results refer to rankings on a SERP that are not the traditional ‘blue line’ Google link, and a retailer can appear for universal search results without being strong in standard rankings. 'Reviews', 'images', and 'local pack' results are all ways for holiday parks to gain trust, and share eye-catching content about their locations, directly from the SERP.
Hoseasons secured the most Universal Search appearances (133,537), with the majority of these coming from ‘reviews’ and ‘images’. Securing plenty of Universal Search appearances can enhance brand credibility, such as appearing in areas like ‘people also ask’ and in rich search features.
Longtail keywords are often considered high intent and potentially more likely to convert as a searcher is being more specific. Optimising for longtail keywords also puts your content strategy in a strong position to rank for retailer new search terms as they enter Google’s index. Holiday parks should be looking to optimise for keywords with high purchase/booking intent, that indicate a user at the lower part of the conversion funnel.
Haven received the most longtail keyword appearances for position 3 (8,774), while Hoseasons reported the most appearances for positions 4–10 (13,781). Securing appearances for positions 4–10 isn’t a wasted opportunity for brands, as they’re typically close to reaching the top three spots in search engines.
With the number of Facebook users in the United Kingdom (UK) hitting over 44 million users in 2023, it is not surprising that companies have jumped at the opportunity to advertise on the social media platform. Facebook’s UK digital advertising revenue has been estimated to have breached 2.6b GB pounds in 2019.
We’ve included examples of Center Parcs UK & Ireland, sponsored posts. This UK holiday park included videos, which can increase engagement on social media.
When it comes to social media and on-site content strategies, it is important to release content that has a longer shelf life. An article is considered 'Evergreen' if it has maintained its relevancy to an audience for longer. It's great for your retailer engagement, but great for Google too, who will recognise content which achieves traffic over a long period of time. Holiday parks can create content based on their activities, local area, or even to-do lists for families in the run-up to their break away.
Center Parcs UK & Ireland has the most Facebook Likes (471,000) and the most Instagram followers (246,500). UK holiday parks should use social media as an opportunity to engage with their target audience and not solely use it as a platform to sell.
20% of people in the UK have a disability – 2 million of which are people living with sight loss. In addition, 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some degree of colour vision deficiency. When websites are not designed to meet these needs, retailers lose customer interest as they turn elsewhere. Holiday parks must be accessible for all, as poor accessibilty on-site may even indicate to a partially sighted user that the park itself may be unsuitable.
Cove UK reported 106 accessibility alerts, closely followed by Forest Holidays with 95 alerts. These holiday parks should assess their websites for these alerts and make updates to enhance the users’ web experience, no matter what device they’re using or if they have a colour vision deficiency.
To get a copy of the full report, please complete the enquiry form. If you want to talk to us about accelerating your digital performance, please call us on 01543 410014 or schedule a call with Mike Movassaghi.
Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash