Why the software says you are full when you are not: types, gaps and the false full house

It happens at every campground, on 20 July, on the phone.

"Hello, would you have a motorhome pitch from 12 to 19 August?" "I'm sorry, we're fully booked."

And then you open the planning board and see dozens of white cells. They are there, free, inside the period you just turned down.

It is not a software error. It is fragmentation, and it is a problem with a precise structure and precise solutions.

How a gap forms

A pitch is sold in blocks of consecutive nights. Every time you accept a booking, you cut that pitch's calendar into two pieces.

Pitch 47, motorhome-with-electricity type, August:

1 ─────── 8   [Rossi, 7 nights]
          8 ── 10   ← free, 2 nights
              10 ─────── 17  [Bianchi, 7 nights]
                         17 ── 19  ← free, 2 nights
                              19 ─────── 26  [Verdi, 7 nights]

Four free nights in August on pitch 47. But they are two two-night gaps in a period where the minimum stay is five nights. You will never sell those four nights.

Now multiply by ninety pitches.

The sum, on a real campground

Ninety motorhome pitches, first two weeks of August:

Available nights   = 90 pitches × 14 nights = 1,260
Average occupancy  = 88%
Nights sold        = 1,109
Free nights        = 151

A hundred and fifty-one free nights sounds like a comfortable reserve. But you have to look at how they are distributed.

At a campground with a three-night minimum stay in that period, a typical distribution of gaps looks like this:

Gap size	Gaps	Nights	Sellable?
1 night	34	34	no
2 nights	21	42	no
3 nights	5	15	yes, with difficulty
4+ nights	12	60	yes
Total		151

Seventy-six nights — the ones in the one- and two-night gaps — are dead inventory. Add that three-night gaps only sell if somebody calls asking for exactly those dates, and you comfortably reach ninety unsellable nights out of a hundred and fifty-one.

At €36 a night that is €3,276 lost in a fortnight. You do not see it anywhere, because in the accounts they are simply nights that were not sold, as though there had been no demand. But the demand was there: you turned it down on the phone on 20 July.

Mistake number one: assigning the pitch too early

This is the main cause, and it is almost always a choice made by the software, not by you.

Many systems assign the numbered pitch at booking time. It looks tidy: Mrs Rossi has number 47, we know where she is. In reality it is the decision that freezes the calendar three months before it needs to be frozen.

The guest, though, did not buy pitch 47. They bought a motorhome pitch with electricity. Which one you give them is a decision you can take the day before they arrive, when you know the rest of the picture.

Availability has to be calculated by type; the assignment has to be made as late as possible.

With availability by type, that phone call on 20 July sounds different: you have 90 motorhome pitches, on 12 August 84 are occupied, you have 6 free that day. The system only has to check that there is some combination of pitches covering the seven requested nights, not that one specific pitch is free for all seven.

Mistake number two: not being able to move things

Even with late assignment, gaps form. You need to be able to compact them.

A real situation:

Pitch 23:  free 10-14  (4 nights)
Pitch 61:  occupied 8-14, free 14-20  (6 nights)
Request:   12-19  (7 nights)

Neither covers 12-19. But if you move the booking on 61 (8-14) onto 23 — same type, same facilities — 61 becomes free from the 8th to the 20th, and the request fits.

This operation has to cost ten seconds, not a phone call to the customer and a manual rewrite. On a well-built planning board it is a drag. If moving a booking from one pitch to another is complicated in your software, fragmentation is structural and you will never solve it.

It goes without saying: you move within the same type. A guest who booked a pitch with electricity has to find a pitch with electricity. Compacting is not an opportunity for silent downgrades.

Mistake number three: using minimum stay as a rule for the whole year

Minimum stay exists precisely to avoid gaps: if in high season you only accept seven-night stays arriving on Saturday, the calendar stays in perfect blocks and fragmentation disappears.

The problem is applying it too broadly. A seven-night minimum from June to September means turning down every short stay in June and September, when you are at 40% occupancy and every night sold is pure margin.

The sensible rule:

• Peak weeks (the two central weeks of August, the bank holidays): high minimum stay, fixed arrival day. Defend the blocks.
• Shoulder season: no constraint, or two nights at most. Sell everything that comes past.
• The weeks in between: a medium minimum stay, and watch the arrival day — that is where the gaps that stay with you into mid-August are generated.

Constraints are not set once at the start of the season: they are set week by week, looking at the occupancy you have.

Compatible types: when a refusal is an own goal

The last source of a false full house, and it is specifically a campground one.

Types are not watertight compartments. A motorhome pitch with electricity can perfectly well host a large tent. The other way round, almost never: a 60 m² tent pitch with no hook-up will not take an eight-metre motorhome.

Availability is therefore asymmetrical. If the tent type is sold out and you have six empty motorhome pitches, turning down a tent request means leaving a pitch empty to defend a category.

The two rules you need, decided once and written down:

1. Which types can host which others. A compatibility map, not the instinct of whoever answers the phone.
2. At what price. If you put a tent on a motorhome pitch, you take the tent rate: you took €24 instead of zero, you did not lose €12. But the rule has to be decided in advance, otherwise it becomes a negotiation at the desk and every member of staff does it their own way.

On overbooking: no

In hotels, controlled overbooking is an established revenue technique: you sell beyond capacity counting on no-shows, and if the sum breaks you move the guest to an equivalent property and pay the difference.

At a campground it does not work, and it is not a matter of nerve.

There is no equivalent site ten minutes away with a free pitch in mid-August. The guest does not arrive with a suitcase: they arrive with a seven-metre caravan, three children and the shopping done. You cannot move them anywhere.

At a campground overbooking is not a technique: it is an incident, and you manage it by not letting it happen. The way to increase revenue is not to sell beyond capacity, it is to sell all the capacity you have — that is, to remove the gaps.

The end-of-season checklist

Take the busiest period of the year just closed and answer these five questions:

• How many free nights were there, by type?
• How many of those were in one- or two-night gaps?
• How many requests did you turn down in that period? (if you do not know, start recording it: it is the most valuable figure you can collect)
• Does your software assign the pitch at booking or on arrival?
• How much time does it cost you to move a booking from one pitch to another?

If the second number is high and the last is "more than a minute", you have found where August's money went.

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On CampinGate availability is calculated by type, the pitch assignment can be decided right up to arrival, and moving a booking on the planning board is a drag. See how a campground's inventory is modelled.