Bradley Bear and Rory the Tiger must be exhausted. In this summer's exceptional heat, the two mascots of caravan park operator Bourne Leisure are being worked off their furry nylon feet.
While business at guesthouses and small seaside hotels continues to decline, family caravan holidays, of which Bourne Leisure is the undisputed champion, have seen consistent growth for a decade or more.
For the young hopefuls sweltering inside their Bradley and Rory costumes (apparently Duncan James from boy band Blue was Rory in a former career) that means a constant round of Smartie Parties and Tiger Clubs, with a screaming rabble of pre-teens permanently in tow.
Bourne's British Holidays and Haven Holidays brands dominate the premium end of the family caravan market, where the prices, unlike the daytime entertainment, are definitely not kids' stuff. At Bourne's best sites, like the flagship "all-action" Devon Cliffs park, south-east of Exmouth, eight-berth vans costs as much £1,058 per week to hire.
These are not the cramped tin boxes some of us remember from childhood. The walls might be wafer-thin but the interiors are swish enough that private owners - of which there are many at Devon Cliffs - will pay upwards of £40,000 for a new van. A top-of-the-range 12ft-wide unit will include separate sitting and dining areas, shower room, microwave, colour TV and video. Some even feature en suite bathrooms and range cookers. Increasingly, they have mains gas and sewage - about as far as you can get from the "bucket-and-chuck-it" facilities of 1950s caravan camps.
As the park's senior managers hurriedly point out, whether you rent or buy, what you are paying for is a complete holiday experience. At Devon Cliffs, this means three swimming pools, a non-stop programme of children's activities (mostly featuring the overworked Bradley and Rory) and family entertainment ranging from pantos and wrestling to seasoned seaside celebs like Joe Pasquali and Cannon and Ball. It also means a food offering easily comparable with the high street.
Last winter, Bourne invested £6.5m at Devon Cliffs in a radical redevelopment that saw virtually all its catering and entertainment facilities brought under one roof. It was part of a £35m programme of capital investment in caravan parks by the company this year.
The sprawling hillside site is piloting a concept code-named Bourne Supreme. Described in an internal document as "the brand of the future", it is part of a strategy to "reach new customers with greater spending power, whilst meeting the needs of existing customers".
Of the 2,000 vans at Devon Cliffs, more than 1,300 are privately owned, although many of these are let to tourists for part of the summer. A further 500 are in Bourne's own hire fleet. At peak, 10,000 people will be on site. All these customers have full use of the site's facilities. There are also up to 130 touring vans, whose owners can pay extra to use the entertainment centre. Allowing for the different price structures through the season, that adds up to a wide demographic mix.
However, Bourne reckons that 10% of its traditional C1-C2 target market has moved into the ABC1 bracket. Hence the Supreme concept: an attempt to match the aspirations of a generally more affluent client with "an improved product offer all round".
That's why the bulk of last winter's £6.5m spend at Devon Cliffs went into its central Funworks complex. As well as housing the main park reception and offices, this now incorporates bars, an all-day caf‚, three hot food take-aways and three entertainment venues linked by a Las Vegas-style walk-through amusement arcade that alone should take more than £1.3m during this year's 30-week season. Before the redevelopment all these elements were carved down the middle by the main park access road. Now only one major venue - the cliff-top Beachcomber bar-restaurant, handy for the park's private beach - is outside this one enclosed complex.
Funworks is a brand within a brand. Most Bourne parks have one and, while they have not yet all been integrated under one roof, it is one of the company's strategic goals, according to head of group retail Mark Harper.
The aim is to provide all-day, all-weather facilities in a secure environment for kids, so that no one ever need leave the site. There's even talk of security-tagging youngsters so parents can let them wander freely, without fear they'll get outside the front door.
Like all but three of Bourne's 40 caravan parks, Devon Cliffs is self-catering. There's a reasonable-sized supermarket, and most holiday-makers eat breakfast in their vans. The trick is to ensure that they then stay on site and use the bars, shops and restaurants instead of heading for Exmouth or the nearby "English Riviera" resorts.
As standards have improved in high-street and pub dining, park operators have increasingly relied on the holiday-induced laziness of customers to hold them on site. "The mentality was that you'll stay within the confines of the park and take what we give you," admits Harper.
"For the past two or three years we've been playing catch-up with the high street. But now I think we've got something that's as good as you'll get anywhere."
Devon Cliffs' two biggest Funworks venues, the 1,300-capacity Bugsy's family cabaret club and the 1,400-seat Capone's show bar, have remained largely untouched by the revamp. Instead, the centrepiece of the development is the Boardwalk. This new venue offers plated food, a bar, and on-stage entertainment for kids during the day. Then it switches to family entertainment in the evening, staying open until the early hours in peak season. "It's two venues in one, like the classic high-street chameleon bar," says Harper, a former Allied Domecq retail operations director who joined Bourne in 2000.
This is only the second Boardwalk to be opened by Bourne (the other is at Kiln Park in Pembrokeshire). But the dual-purpose format already looks like superseding the Aqua Bar concept that was introduced across the group a few years ago and which operated until early evening only.
The Boardwalk is now Devon Cliffs' main plated food outlet, with a US diner-style menu including nachos (£5.95), chilli (£5.75), steak sandwiches (£4.95) and burgers (£4-£7.25). Customers order from the bar and meals are served to their tables, either inside the venue or on an outdoor terrace.
The venue itself is split-level, with the bar and seating area looking down on to further seating, a dance floor and a stage. "We've tried to make it quite interactive," says Harper. "The bar team are all trained in basic magic tricks and there's a head mike for use behind the bar, so it becomes almost a second stage area."
Another new facility for 2003 is the caf‚-bar. Here, breakfast is served until noon (£5.95 for a full English), then baguettes, jacket potatoes and snacks through to 5pm, with a separate evening menu offering more substantial meals at up to £10.25 for a 10oz rump steak. The bar selection here is heavy on bottled beers and alcopops, but there's also a short list of wines at £8.95-£10.45.
Nationally, all Bourne's bars work to a generic plan, fitting products into existing space as best they can. But starting from a blank canvas with the Boardwalk and café-bar has allowed a much more integrated approach. To help, Harper brought in Patrick Huggins of merchandising specialists BHMA, which deals in "guest communication and the merchandising of hot spots". "We get Patrick to work with our designer to create the ideal bar and merchandise it to best effect," says Harper. "Then, once we have got the basic structure, we slot the products in on the basis of highest gross margin."
Pricing in the Boardwalk, as throughout the site, is towards the premium end of midmarket, or "Brewers Fayre-plus", as Harper puts it.
This year's £35m capital investment across Bourne caravan parks group follows similar spends in 2001 and 2002. Further millions have been sunk into the Warner hotels and Butlin's resorts bought, along with Haven Holidays, from Rank in autumn 2001. This audacious £700m acquisition propelled Bourne from a respected but low-profile player to the largest group in a highly fragmented industry.
Despite the household-name status of Butlin's, its three resorts contributed just 7% of Bourne's £622.5m group turnover in 2002, compared with 51% from Haven and British Holidays. The two caravan park brands are the big family-holiday businesses and are now integrated in all but name.
Their common strategy includes tie-ups with powerful high-street brands. Bourne already has five Burger King and three Harry Ramsden's outlets, and will switch its in-house burger and fish and chips offerings at Devon Cliffs and two other sites to these brands this winter. In each case, Bourne itself has become the franchisee. This is partly about quality control, says Harper, and partly about driving sales - in-house managers display more "ownership".
Even before the new franchises arrive at Devon Cliffs, general manager Joan Thomas is budgeting for a 13.8% rise in food sales this year, to just over £1m. Wet sales are forecast to rise 5.8% to about £2.4m. In the first six weeks after reopening for 2003 growth of more than 9% had been achieved in both wet and food sales.
Evidence from the security cameras on the main gate is that fewer people are leaving the site for the day and - despite the scope for Butlitz jokes - it's not because they're frightened to leave. "As soon as people enter the site now they're wowed by it," claims Funworks complex manager June Donnery. "They're saying it's like Las Vegas or Disney, which is good feedback to hear."
More importantly, advance bookings for next season have doubled, suggesting that last winter's £6.5m was money well spent.
A touch of disney
Service has become a key theme for Bourne Leisure as it ratchets up the quality of its caravan holiday "experience". This includes a complete overhaul of staff training, which Harper admits was previously "a bit flat".
Last year Bourne recruited Liam Dolan, a nine-year veteran of Walt Disney's UK retail operations, who is now head of learning and development for all caravan parks.
Dolan has already transformed Bourne's staff selection and training. Annual recruitment of team members has been switched from one-to-one interviews to a party format, with a focus on attitude rather than skills. An eight-week "very interactive" training programme, mainly on the job, is completed by a game-based team event devised with promotions agency Pure Leisure Marketing.
If new recruits pass this "Starmaker" audition, they'll receive a certificate and bronze badge at a formal ceremony. After this they can progress to "Shining Star" level, described as halfway between team member and supervisor, and then on to management training.
Emphasis is now given to multiskilling so, for example, team members can be switched between bars and foodcourt. At Devon Cliffs, team-building activities have also extended to the site staff outside the complex. Funworks manager June Donnery says: "We're trying to get everyone acting as part of a generic team, looking after customers' needs regardless of whether it's part of their area or not."
At management level, each park has also been given a budget to use Lane 4, the training consultancy run by former Olympic swimmer Adrian Moorhouse, for Outward Bound-style courses.
Last year, says Mark Harper, only 37% of team members group-wide completed their full eight-week training programme. "We're committed to achieving 100% this year, and we're currently at 97%. Only four parks have not yet delivered 100%, and those have just had a massive round of recruitment for the peak season."
Park life
The regimented image of 1950s holiday camps like Butlin's and Pontin's, as parodied in TV's Hi-De-Hi, was never true of caravan sites, where self-catering rather than half- or full-board remains standard.
But the fragmentation of the industry means there's no such thing as a typical caravan site, and facilities range from the non-existent to the Bourne Leisure-style "all-action" experience.
The British Holiday & Home Park Association represents 1,800 holiday parks - about three-quarters of the industry. Its records show only 600 sites having a bar, and 522 a restaurant. Others have just a shop and toilet block and rely on a neighbouring pub to provide a bar meals. Spokesman Murray Browning says he has visited sites with … la carte and bistro-style restaurants, but confirms that fish and chips is closer to the norm. "It's all part of the great British holiday, isn't it?"
Even at Bourne Leisure, Mark Harper says menus have tended to be dominated by deep-fried foods and burgers provided from deskilled in-house restaurants. "We've avoided steak, for example." He is currently trialling a new main menu which is "a lot more female-friendly". "There's a greater concession to chicken, light bites and wraps. There's still a burger element, but balanced with more salads and pasta. And we're also installing chargrills. To me, this menu is more in line with the high street."