Thinking of using a Havens site - I wouldn’t

We last used a Havens Holiday site in 2010 when we booked a week at their Reighton Sands site. We chose Havens as at that time we had a teenage son so having the on site leisure facilities was a good bonus, and having stayed previously at their Wild Duck site, we thought we would be ok. How wrong we were and vowed never to use a Havens site again as  we were treated very much like second class citizens, and when we tried to complain about the toilet facilities (or lack there of) we were fobbed off with lame excuses. In the end we came to the conclusion that for the extra cost of the facilities, it would have been cheaper to stay on a nearby Caravan Club site and pay for a day pass for the facilities.

A friend of ours, decided to give us a holiday treat and kindly gave us a free weeks holiday at Havens Kiln Park site near Tenby South Wales, and as Havens are now owned by the Boirne Group, hope things will have improved.  

i have to say that as sites go this is more like Wild Duck than their Reighton Sands site, but still leaves a lot to be desired. The relatively new toilet block was much better, but the sink cubicles do not give any privacy, and were not adequate for the number of pitches. So much so that they often looked like they hadn’t been serviced within an hour of having been done, and we often had no soap for the hand wash facilities.

The grass pitches are not spaced out correctly, so often you have tents and tourers quite close to each other and whilst I recognise the difficulty in the use of grass pitches in the recent hot weather, nothing seems to be done to advice people on how to help with this so that the pitches are first more than they are grass.  The worst thing however was the lack of water supply and waste water disposal. For some reason the fresh water taps had all been removed from the stands, leaving you to find a vacant super pitch to draw water from.  The only way to dispose of waste water was either to use one of the drains by the removed water points and although they did have a marked ‘grey waste water’ disposal point marked, this was a sink about 80cm from the ground next to the Elsan emptying point, so how you were supposed to lift a waste water tank to that height is anyone’s guess.

All in all a very disappointing week and we were glad that we have booked our next holiday at a Caravan & motorhome Club site and will definitely not be returning to a Haven site again.