Essential Safety Tips for your Caravan or Holiday Park

Essential Safety Tips for your Caravan or Holiday Park

Becoming a victim of crime is a miserable experience and even petty crime can spoil a holiday and put guests off both coming back and recommending your site to their family and friends. In fact, it might even cause guests to leave you bad reviews and these days that can really damage your business.

It’s worth considering, especially across the summer months, if your business is at risk of crime and if your security needs heightening to ensure the safety of your guests. Especially as back in 2016, the months of June, July and August saw higher levels of thefts for caravan-goers than any other time of year, this could be a trend to be aware of.

Making the connection with seasonal peaks and larger volumes of guests, there may always be a small risk of theft and/or damage. The good news is that there is a lot you can do to protect your site. Here is a quick guide as to how to go about it.

Everything starts with securing your perimeter

In simple terms, you want to channel everyone through a limited number of entrances/exits (in many cases just one is fine), which you can effectively monitor and control, preferably remotely. The good news is that the appropriate security solutions are now priced within the budget of even smaller holiday parks and caravan parks.

Barriers such as bollards, rising and swing-arm barriers and gates (sliding and swing) can all protect against vehicles gaining unauthorized access to your site. Gates will also protect against unauthorized entry by humans. Bollards and arm-barriers will not, so they will need to be supplemented by an additional deterrent such as a security camera.

Security cameras are great for deterring criminals but remember the law

Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) has been of huge benefit to the security industry (and the parking industry). Guests can be asked to register their number plate when booking and this can then be used to open the gate for them automatically when they arrive.

Many systems will also allow you to create whitelists and blacklists of number plates. Just remember that people can and do change vehicles so it is important to keep these lists up-to-date.

Security cameras can also be used the “old-fashioned way”, to detect people who are where they shouldn’t be. Just remember that biometric data (essentially a person’s likeness) is covered by GDPR. This means that it can only be collected with informed consent and that all collection, processing and storage must be proportionate to the purpose for which it was obtained.

Also remember that any camera is only as good as the lighting, which can itself be a deterrent as well as a health-and-safety precaution. If you want to keep costs down, try using motion-sensitive lights.

Make sure all employees wear some kind of uniform and a name badge

From a security perspective, it is ideal if employees can wear some form of branded clothing plus a name badge. In practical terms, however, this could be a challenge to organize.

First of all there would need to be clothing bought for each staff member and then there would need to be a process by which the clothing was collected when they left the company, which would then raise the question of what to do with it.

Larger holiday parks and caravan parks might just swallow up the expense (and/or change the design of their clothing from year to year), but for smaller ones, the most pragmatic approach to “squaring the circle” is likely to be to have a distinctive dress code and provide staff with branded name badges.

Author Bio

Adrian Rickersey is the Sales Office Manager at Newgate, which are specialists in providing businesses through the UK and around the world with secured access solutions such as security barriers and gates, bollards and road blockers.

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