The pitch, the activities and the services,
on your campsite screens

Electric hook-up is the question that arrives before the tent is up. Ten amps or sixteen decides whether a kettle and a heater can run at once, and most people find out by tripping the bollard at seven in the evening — taking their neighbours with them. The amperage, what it will and will not run, and where the trip switch lives: three lines by the barrier save the warden the same conversation every changeover day.

Arrival and departure times are the other thing everyone gets wrong. No arrivals before one, off the pitch by eleven, and the gate on a code after ten at night. It is written in the booking confirmation, which is an email nobody reopens on the road. On a screen at the entrance it is read by the person who is actually arriving, at the moment they arrive.

And the weather changes the day here more than anywhere. A wet forecast turns the indoor room into the only place anyone wants to be, and that is when the quiz, the film and the shop hours matter — but the programme was printed on Monday. Being able to move an activity indoors and say so before lunch is worth more than the programme being pretty.

To be straight with you: we do not manage pitch bookings. You carry on with your PMS or with Booking and Camping.info; Digisini is the site's information and activities screen — welcome, map, programme, services — not a booking engine.

It is one of the few pieces of information on a campsite that genuinely changes daily and genuinely changes plans. Everything else — the pool times, the shop hours, the activity list — can be a week old without hurting anyone. This one is worth nothing by four o'clock. Put it where it is seen before someone drives: a line at the entrance for those already on site, and the identical line at the top of whatever page or message people check before setting off. Same sentence, two places, written once in the morning by the person who walked the field.

The related policy belongs next to it, and it needs writing long before the day it applies: whether you will pull anyone out. For most sites the answer is no, and for good reasons that have to do with insurance and with what happens to a chassis when a tractor gets it wrong. That is a perfectly reasonable position and an awful thing to discover at six in the evening with the wheels spinning. Stated calmly in advance — no towing, here is what we do instead — it stops being a refusal and becomes a rule that people plan around.

What this actually buys you is not fewer complaints, it is different arrivals. A guest who reads at nine that the grass is closed either brings the right expectations or moves the booking, and both outcomes are better than the version where they arrive angry and you spend forty minutes on it during your busiest hour. It is also, quietly, the clearest signal a site can send that it is run by someone who was outside at half eight looking at the ground.

To be straight about it: the screen shows what you type, and nobody but you can tell whether the field will hold a van today. What we take off you is the distribution: one sentence entered once, appearing at the entrance and anywhere else you point it, instead of being repeated down the phone until lunchtime.