More than 4,500 European campsites now stay open past the summer season. That is the headline from new figures published by campsite specialist ACSI, and on its own it sounds like a continental story with little to say to a UK operator.
Read it the other way. Those sites are opening in October and February because the people who own caravans and motorhomes have stopped treating them as summer-only kit. That shift is happening here too.
The question is whether your part of the trade is set up to catch the spend, or watching it drive past to France.
What ACSI Has Actually Reported
ACSI inspects close to 10,000 campsites across Europe every year, visiting each one in person. It has done this since 1965, so its numbers are a reasonable read on the shape of the market rather than a one-off survey.
The company says 4,513 of those sites now trade during the low season, a 4.3% rise on six years ago. France leads with 1,549 sites open in autumn and winter. The Netherlands is second, with 544 of its 1,063 inspected sites staying open. Italy, Germany and Spain fill out the top five.
Those site counts come from ACSI’s own inspection data, so treat them as solid. The driver behind them is the part worth your time.
ACSI puts the growth down to two things moving together. More people own caravans and motorhomes since the pandemic, so the customer base is bigger and no longer tied to July and August. And operators have spent money to pull those owners in outside peak months.
The spend is going into comfort. ACSI counts 1,581 low-season sites with wellness facilities such as saunas, steam rooms and whirlpools, a 68.9% jump on 2020. Around 600 now put private bathrooms on the pitch itself.
Ramon van Reine, ACSI’s CEO, says campers want comfort and quality all year, and operators are building for it.
Hold the exact percentages loosely. They are ACSI’s figures and we have not seen the underlying dataset. The direction, though, matches everything else in the market.
Why the Off-Season Shift Is Real, Not a Blip
The ownership base this is built on has grown hard, and the UK sits right inside that trend.
New motorhome and campervan registrations hit a record 16,668 in the UK in 2025, on NCC data from DVLA figures. That is a bigger pool of vehicles than the country has ever had, and motorhome owners tour for far more of the year than a family packing a tent for the summer holidays.
The season is stretching to match. In the Netherlands, ACSI and the ANWB recorded a 22.5% rise in off-season overnight stays in the first five months of 2026 against the year before, 6.6 million nights between January and May. Warmer, longer shoulder seasons and steep peak-season prices are pushing people to travel in spring and autumn instead.
So the pattern is consistent. More vehicles, owners who want to use them year-round, and sites investing to serve them when the schools are back. This is a structural change in how the product gets used, not a soft summer rebounding.
For a UK operator, that is the opportunity and the warning in one. The demand to trade your site harder outside peak is real and growing. Whether you can meet it is a separate question, and for much of the UK the answer is still no.
The UK Has the Demand and Keeps Failing the Supply
Here is where the continental good-news story turns into a UK problem.
France can lean into year-round camping because the infrastructure is already there: thousands of cheap, serviced aires and a dense campsite network that keeps motorhome tourism moving and spending in small towns. British tourers feel that gap every season, and the trade has tracked it for years through guides like the Vicarious Media French aires directory.
The UK keeps proving it has not built the equivalent. Exmouth nearly doubled its overnight fee and watched paid motorhome stays fall 43%. Redcar went looking for somewhere to put an aire and found no business or landowner willing to host one.
The brighter case, Blackpool weighing a central aire on its arena site, is one idea among several and still unbuilt.
So the UK owns the vehicles and the growing appetite to use them off-season. What it often lacks is the serviced, affordable place to stop when the main sites have shut for winter. A season that could stretch gets capped by a map that runs out.
That gap is not only a problem for councils and aire campaigners. It is a direct commercial opening for any site or park that chooses to stay open and serve the owners who are already out there looking.
What This Means for UK Parks and Site Operators
This is not a touring-dealer story first. It lands on campsites, holiday parks and any operator who controls pitches and could trade them harder outside July and August. Three moves worth making before next season.
Price your shoulder season to fill it, not to skim it. ACSI’s European sites are opening in the low season because the sums work at a lower nightly rate with the right facilities. Exmouth is the warning in reverse: push the off-season price too high and the visitors simply stop coming. Model what a February or October weekend actually earns you at a rate that fills pitches, against the cost of staying dark.
Invest in the facilities that make winter trade possible, in that order of payback. You will not build a spa this year. You can heat a shower block properly, add hardstanding that drains, fit electric hook-ups that cope with winter load, and make one indoor space usable in the cold. ACSI’s data shows comfort is what pulls off-season campers. Fix the basics that stop them booking first.
Put your winter opening where a searching owner will find it. An owner deciding on a wet October weekend searches for a site open now, near where they want to go. If your opening dates sit in a PDF or your booking system quietly blocks off-season dates, you are invisible at the exact moment the booking is live. State your winter and shoulder-season availability plainly on the page.
What It Means for the Touring Trade
If you sell the vehicles, this feeds straight into the objection that stalls a sale.
A first-time buyer worries the van will sit on the drive ten months a year. A growing off-season network, here and across the Channel, is the honest answer to that fear. The more places there are to go in spring and autumn, the more weekends a year the purchase earns its keep.
Brief your sales team to use it. Know which local sites stay open through winter, point buyers at the apps that map year-round pitches and aires, and be straight about where UK provision is thin. A buyer who can picture using the van in March, not just August, is a buyer who signs.
This is the same read we took from motorhome volumes outrunning caravans. The demand is there for the trade that meets owners where they actually are.
The Signal for Next Year
ACSI’s number is a read on where camping is heading. The season is widening, the vehicles are bought, and the operators who invest in off-peak comfort are the ones catching the extra nights.
Europe is already building for that. Parts of the UK are still arguing about whether motorhomes should be allowed to stop at all. The owners are not waiting for that argument to finish. They are out there in October, looking for somewhere open.
So here is the question for your site or your forecourt. When a caravan or motorhome owner goes looking for somewhere to stay next February, do they land on your open gate and your honest advice, or on a French aire and a competitor who decided winter was worth trading?
