Entrepreneur reveals how growing up in a holiday park helped build his £500m camping business empire

Dan Yates was born into camping. Raised above the clubhouse of his parents' Devon holiday park, he grew up watching a family business built one pitch at a time and by his teens, he was already building its website, skipping university lectures to do it.

Nearly three decades later, that same instinct for spotting what the outdoor accommodation world was missing has turned into Pitchup.com: a booking platform listing 5,648 sites in 67 countries, which has handled £500million worth of bookings and 44 million bed nights since launch.

Speaking exclusively to GB News about his business success, Mr Yates said: "I was brought up on a holiday park in Devon, living above the clubhouse, so it was probably inevitable I wouldn't stray far.

The idea for Pitchup did not arrive overnight, with the seed instead being sown years ago; first at his family's business and later inside the travel industry itself.

Working with local web designers on the holiday park's first website in the late 1990s, Mr Yates saw early proof of concept: number-one Google UK rankings and half of all bookings coming in online by 2002.

"After the business was sold, I kept wondering why holiday parks and campsites, the biggest type of domestic holiday accommodation by nights, were still so neglected online."

While high-profile travel agents were racing to dominate hotels and other accommodation types, camping was at risk of being left behind following the dot-com age.

By 2008, working at lastminute.com, Mr Yates was watching that new world of online travel take shape from the inside and had the epiphany that "failing to act would be something I'd regret". A year later, he founded Pitchup.com.

Getting the business off the ground was, in the entrepreneur's words, "like trying to start a campfire by rubbing a couple of twigs together".

The risk for the growing business was having either too many campers and not enough campsites, or vice versa, and the whole thing failing to catch on. Thankfully, family was on hand to help.

Mr Yates's father, a former holiday park owner turned accountant, would visit every quarter to do the VAT, and the conversation would inevitably turn to the same question.

"'Is this actually going to work?' was debated in a good proportion of south-west London's restaurants, well into the company's first decade," Mr Yates recalls.

The turning point came once Pitchup had built momentum in the UK, signing up all four of the country's biggest holiday park groups (Haven, Parkdean, Park Holidays and Park Resorts), alongside thousands of independent sites.

On this early success, the businessman shared: "I am biased, but Westcountry sites were most receptive to the idea: as soon as we hit 25 per cent share of campsites in the south west, we were off."

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

• Major charity reveals first round of store closures with 150 shops to shut - full list
• Andy Burnham ally blasts 'out of touch' Keir Starmer over 11th-hour World Cup pub decision
• Morrisons issues major update to customers after store closures announcement - full list

One memorable dinner with his folks cemented how far Mr Yates and Pitchup had come, and where the business could continue to grow.

"I well remember sitting in a pizza restaurant, putting my phone on the table and watching bookings pour into my inbox at the rate of about one every 10 seconds. My dad's jaw hit the floor: he couldn't believe it was actually happening while we were having dinner."

That moment reshaped strategy. Rather than chasing listings everywhere, the business narrowed its focus to building maximum choice in the locations customers wanted most.

"From then on, we focused on creating as much choice as possible in the locations our customers were most interested in, rather than a scattergun approach of campsites dispersed all over the world. Our booking rates shot up."

With his years of experience in the sector, Mr Yates believes the outdoor accommodation industry he entered is almost unrecognisable today.

"Camping, caravanning and glamping have attracted millions of new customers, and customers expect to be able to find and book outdoor stays online as easily as any other holiday."

He puts today's demand down to a mix of factors: the cost of living pushing people toward good-value breaks, a post-pandemic appreciation for rural getaways, and families wanting to escape from screens to enjoy the great British outdoors.

Beyond the business itself, Mr Yates has become one of the loudest voices campaigning for landowners' rights to run temporary campsites.

England extended its permitted development rules from 28 to 60 days in 2023 after years of lobbying; a change the founder welcomed. But he says Wales's new 60-day rule, introduced from June 1, risks doing more harm than good.

"The problem with the new rules in Wales is that they risk turning what should be a simple permitted development right into a slow, uncertain and bureaucratic approval process."

Where operators could once simply run a short seasonal campsite without formal permission, Welsh landowners must now apply to their council, submit detailed plans, and wait to find out if further approval is needed.

This is a process Mr Yates warns could bring delays and extra costs during a very short camping season. He is particularly critical of a new rule stripping rights from any site within 100m of someone else's building — a restriction England chose not to impose.

"This new rule... strips most pubs of the right to open a temporary campsite when they need to diversify more than ever," he said, adding that the Welsh government has removed or restricted 75-year-old rights across 40 per cent of the country.

With the UK market well established, Pitchup's next chapter is about exporting that success to continental Europe and beyond.

"There is a huge appetite for outdoor holidays, but many campsites, holiday parks and rural businesses still need better ways to reach customers online. Our goal is a level playing field."

Technology sits at the centre of that plan, including the AI search tool launched last Christmas, alongside a push into fixed accommodation such as pods, lodges and cabins — all while Yates continues campaigning on planning rules and tourism tax.

Asked what success looks like a decade from now, his answer is as much about the industry as it is about his own business.

"Success would mean seeing camping, caravanning and glamping take a much larger share of the travel market.

"It is one of the lowest-impact ways to holiday, but also one of the most rewarding, bringing people outdoors, supporting rural communities and offering a real break from busy, screen-heavy lives.

"For Pitchup.com, success would mean replicating our market-leading position in the UK camping and touring sector in other major markets around the world. I would love to see more people discovering the simple pleasure and value of a holiday outdoors."

Please write at least 4 paragraphs

Our Standards: The GB News Editorial Charter