Booking late availability without losing money
I was trying to book a week away starting in the next few days and realised this is quite difficult now.
If e.g. you are going Wednesday to Wednesday and the Saturday night is not available, it used to be possible to book Wednesday-Saturday and Sunday-Wednesday separately, then keep refreshing to see if anyone cancelled the Saturday night.
I would then either get the Saturday night or have to try another site.
Unfortunately my wife and I have jobs which mean this is the only viable way for us to do holidays, our work is very unpredictable so it is very difficult to plan months in advance. That's why we have a caravan!
With the new system you now have to wait for all of the nights to become free at once (not likely!), or risk losing the entire deposit.
I suppose there won't be many cancellations now anyway so no chance of picking up a last-minute getaway if one or two of the nights are full, which is a shame really.
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Gosh, yes that is a predicament. The new system is very much forcing us to set our plans in stone. The new 21 day rule for return of deposits may go in your favour. If, as you say, you are unable to plan very far ahead, your cut off point is going to be 21 days. If there's no availability then, it's unlikely there will be nearer the time (from 1 June 2023 when deposits applied from) and you will have to look elsewhere. It makes for uncertain plans for you though.
It's sad that your patterns of booking has been altered, I guess there are many who similarly used the flexibility that no deposits gave us - I for one used to book up my whole season in one go (I only cancelled twice for solid reasons in 20 years) but I won't/can't do that now as I can't spare the lump sum cash to do that in one go.
Hope you manage to work something out in your favour.
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I admire those who can map out their lives a year ahead. But I can’t. Even now I am long since retired things still crop up, and if I booked ahead and paid ahead I would quite probably lose money during the final three weeks.
Why? One of us would catch COVID again, the hospital would call me back for a cancer check up, my daughter would ask if we can look after the 8 year old at short notice as she has to work away from home, the car would need TLC , or the weather man would tell me another storm is brewing. Things happen in my life.
But there are always some vacancies one day ahead and I have a phone.
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I'm anticipating that maybe the difficulties of using the new booking system, the price of sites, the requirement for a deposit and the cost of living crisis is going to free up space on sites. You may find it isn't as hard to get a booking as you are expecting......?
Sure, the handful of "honey pot" sites will remain busy/fully booked, but the more medium popularity might be a different matter.....
Time will tell with whether the club got it right or not........
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As we all get older and our health starts to need more attention ,with the system that we had before we could book a tour early in the year before sites started to fill up and made it difficult with the knowledge that if either of us had problems we hopefully could do a fill in to cover any NHS appointments
With the new system it would mean large amount of money In deposits which we could well lose quite a retrograde step for us
As for many of the retired members who with the previous system kept this club solvent at off peak periods when the USP was operating
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Strange, I thought you were an honorary life member jvb.
JK
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Life Member or Honorary Life Member? I thought it was the former🤔. Not that it matters in the context of this thread 🤷♂️
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If deposits do what they were introduced for we are not going to see bookings made so far in advance. It is more likely members are going to leave booking until nearer the time and I think you will have more chance of finding slots that meet your requirements at least that is my experience with the C&CC who have been using a deposit system for some time.
peedee
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That might be OK for all HS sites. However, for ones with significant grass pitches, I suspect the HS pitches to book up first. Leaving it later you may not get the choice. Whilst under the old system I would get there just after 13:00 and normally get a HS, with booking pitch type I would look elsewhere if only grass was available.
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Can anybody tell me how you look for late availability now it was so easy before where you could put in the area you want to go and see what was available for next six weeks I found it so easy and convenient. Now I can only seem to bring each site up separately to check availability not good 😌
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I have just looked for availability over Easter 2023 by starting to look for sites in the New Forest, Black Knowl is FULL the Centenary site isn't. From there I dragged the map around southern England looking at the availability of Club sites. Very few are FULL. Note: If you zoom out too far you lose the information.
peedee
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I think I'd prefer to see a late availability page rather than go in via booking, I hope this awkward search route gets adjusted. I would like to be able to type in late availability on the website and find a direct answer as previously. See the C&CC web site as an example which will state low, medium, high etc over the months ahead. It's something I'd like to do quickly to get an idea of what's available in general if I needed to book somewhere.
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