It was a big week in May in the outdoor space, with CPAQ and CIAA hosting their conferences at RACV Royal Pines Gold Coast. We were so glad to be back, touching base with our parkies again in 2026 and grateful for all the wisdom shared across the week. We came away understanding one clear message: the caravan and holiday park sector needs to move - on revenue, on operations, and on how it shows up in a world where AI is becoming the world's travel agent.
The Revenue You're Already Sitting On
Across both conferences, the conversation about revenue kept returning to the same insight: the most accessible growth isn't in winning new guests, it's in doing more with the ones who are already there.
Dave Smith, GM of G'Day Parks, made the maths vivid. Fifteen years in the industry and a self-described advocate for passive income - "makes money while you're sleeping is my idea of a good time" - he walked the room through a deceptively simple calculation. Take a 50-site park at 60% occupancy, with an average stay of four nights. Get just 10% of those guests to stay one more night:
"That's $30,000 to your bottom line. And 80% of that flows right through."
The amenities get cleaned regardless of whether there are 100 guests or 150. The incremental cost of one extra night is nearly zero. The revenue isn't.
Amanda Dempster, who runs Stanthorpe Holiday Park in Queensland, took the same logic and applied it to in-park spend. She bought a rundown park with no bank funding and had to get creative fast. Two years later, the valuation had doubled. Her method: build the things guests would spend money on anyway, and make sure they spend it with you. A wine barrel bathhouse, a ten-meter sushi train serving local wines and produce for tastings, a saunas, firewood. "We're tripling or quadrupling our guest spend once they walk through the door."
Her most pointed contribution was on the question of profitable revenue versus raw revenue. "It's great to chase bookings sometimes, but if you're not making a profit because you're discounting too heavily, then is it really worth doing?" For regional operators facing softening leisure demand, chasing occupancy at any price is a strategy with a ceiling.
RMS's Frankie Bonadio framed to two leavers parks need to work together: increase the average spend from guests already coming through the gate, and improve the conversion rate for guests who are still deciding. The technology to do both already exists. The gap is operators actively using it.
Efficiency Is a Revenue Strategy, Not a Cost Play
Running a caravan park means managing a surprisingly complex operation (housekeeping, reservations, maintenance, guest communications), often with a lean team and tight margins. The temptation is to think of technology as a way to cut costs. The operators at these conferences made a different argument: the real value of efficiency is what you do with the capacity it frees up.
Amanda Dempster was an early adopter of AI-assisted front desk technology, and she put a number on the outcome: nearly 1,500 admin hours saved in the first year. “You can imagine that that wage is now put back into guest experience, which is obviously something that generates more revenue.” She called it a double-edged sword: pull the efficiency lever and the capacity it creates gets reinvested directly into the experiences that drive guest spending and repeat visits.
The gap between what modern property management technology is capable of and what most parks are actually using it for remains wide. Automating routine admin, surfacing the data that drives pricing and occupancy decisions, reducing the manual back-and-forth of guest communications; parks that do this aren’t just running cheaper. They’re running with more attention to the guest experience.
The AI Agent Is Already Searching for Your Park
5th Avenue, New York, in the summer of 1900: a street packed with horses and carriages. The same street in Spring 1913, barely a decade later: not a single horse in sight. Only cars. Disruption doesn’t arrive gradually. It arrives, and then it’s impossible to imagine things had ever been different.
The disruption campground operators are seeing today is agentic AI booking. The prediction was blunt: AI will transform the guest booking journey, with profound impacts to established distribution models. We explored a conversation with ChatGPT:
A traveller types: “Find me a romantic place in Paris for the weekend.” The AI doesn’t return a just list of links. It searches, selects, and presents options that feel personal: which hotel is nearest the Eiffel Tower, which one has a “boutique literary” vibe. It refines on follow-up and provides the traveller with 5–10 viable options. And when the traveller says “Righto, let’s book Vestay Montaigne”, it can complete the transaction. The contrast with a conventional Google results page (sponsored hotels, aggregator listings, OTA links) can be summed up in a single question: “Where did my personal travel agent go?”
This is already happening for caravan parks. Platforms like Mindtrip are operational now, and they’re searching for campsites. In a live demonstration of the platform, we asked: “Give me some campsites I can stay at in the last weekend of September in Western Australia. Close to beach, good snorkeling. I’m bringing a campervan.” The results included Jurien Bay Tourist Park and options around Cape Range National Park at Exmouth. But alongside those results was a note every operator in the room needed to read:
“Most caravan parks do not push their ‘unpowered site’ pricing to global systems. Expect to pay $40–70 AUD per night for a powered campervan site.”
AI agents are actively looking for your property to share with the traveller. Most parks are invisible to them — or visible only in outline — because they haven’t distributed their inventory, pricing, and availability into the systems AI uses to search and book.
The four channels through which AI agents discover accommodation are; Search: OTAs like Booking.com and Expedia, plus Google, which has already launched AI Mode for hotel searches; Agent aggregators: a new category of middleware platforms (DirectBooker, nuitee, Selfbook) that translate natural-language booking requests into actual reservations; Web: blogs, Instagram, Facebook, TripAdvisor; and Direct: a park’s own website, connected via API or MCP (Model Context Protocol), allowing AI agents to query live availability and pricing. That last channel is the one parks have the most control over, yet the one almost none are using.
For the hotel sector, the shift has already arrived. The parks industry is close behind. Parks that get their inventory visible, their pricing distributed, and their digital presence in shape stand to benefit enormously from AI-driven discovery. Those that don’t risk being passed over by a generation of travellers who increasingly let AI decide where they stay. The message wasn’t alarm. It was urgency — the kind that comes with a genuine opportunity still on the table.
Australia's Fastest Parkie Crowned
Across the CIAA conference floor, delegates were competing for a title of a different kind. The ‘Australia’s Fastest Parkie’ reaction button challenge: how many hits could you achieve in 20 seconds?
Friday brought a champion. Scott from Queensland posted 49 hits to claim the title and the $1,000 charity donation that came with it. Scott chose to donate his prize to Sharing Tulli’s Smile Fund, a community-run not-for-profit that brings music therapy to children on the ward at University Hospital Geelong.
We spoke with Benjamin Johnson from Kmac Powerheads, whose family is at the heart of the fund:
How would you describe Tulli’s Smile Fund to someone who has never heard of it?
“Sharing Tulli’s Smile Fund is a community run not-for-profit that brings music therapy to children on the ward at University Hospital Geelong. A registered music therapist works with kids during what can be a frightening, painful time, using songs, instruments and play to ease stress, support their treatment, and bring some joy back into the day for them and their families. We started the fund in memory of our Tulli Rose Seabert, and everything we do is about carrying her smile forward to other kids doing it tough.”
What does the fund mean to you personally?
“Tulli was my niece, and this music therapy program is named in her honour. So to me, the fund is a way of keeping her spirit alive and sharing it with other families. Tulli was non-verbal, but music reached her in a way nothing else could. Knowing that other children in hospital now get to feel that same lift, the same joy we saw in her, means everything to us. It’s Tulli’s smile, carried forward to kids who need it most when they are going through a difficult time.”
Is there a moment that captures why this work matters?
“We spent a lot of time in hospital with Tulli, and no matter how tired she was or what she was going through, the moment we played music or sang together as a family, she’d light up with the biggest smile. Tulli couldn’t speak, but when she heard music, she’d always try to sing along or communicate in her own way. Seeing that change come over her, that joy breaking through, even in hospital, lifted all our spirits every single time. That’s the magic music therapy brings, and it’s why we want every child on the kids ward to have access to this.”
If Tulli’s story has touched you, you can help keep the music playing. Every donation goes directly to funding the music therapy program for children in hospital. Visit www.sharingtullissmilefund.org.au to donate, shop, or find out about upcoming events. Please share her story, so her smile reaches even further.
The themes running throughout this year's conference all point in the same direction. Parks that will win over the next decade are those that are actively finding new revenue, using technology to free up their people, and making themselves discoverable in a world where the way guests search for and book accommodation is changing faster than at any point in the industry's history.
Want to know more about how RMS can help your park run smarter? Get in touch with our team here.
