OVERVIEW
With eight sites across Worcestershire, Shropshire, Herefordshire and Mid-Wales, Hillandale Caravan Parks offer high quality holiday homes for purchase as well as pitches for tourers and campers. They needed a digital platform to enable them to manage several key aspects of their growing business.
THE CHALLENGE
Hillandale used an outdated and unsupported Lotus Approach Database to manage their sales, pitches and pitch utility usage. It was time-consuming, inefficient and costly with too much room for error. The system was holding back their expansion, so they needed a new approach to managing the sites.
THE BRIEF
Build a cloud-based solution that would give Hillandale total pitch management across all eight sites from a central location, enabling them to work more efficiently, effectively, profitably and offer a better customer experience. So we built Latitude.
THE SOLUTION
Latitude is a cloud-based system that incorporates several processes into one seamless and integrated platform.
One of the main pillars of Hillandale’s business is the selling, purchasing and management of holiday homes. So Latitude enables the team to track the ownership, availability and sales process of every home on each of their sites. All the information for properties for sale is then available at-a-glance for them to promote on their website.
Outside of the sales and purchasing side of the business, Latitude also tracks the pitch occupancy and keeps owners’ details within the system for ease of contact. The system also handles the invoicing and tracks payment of pitch fees and insurance fees. Latitude also captures utility readings and invoices accordingly, creates schedules for planned maintenance to both the sites and individual holiday homes.
Although most homes across the eight sites are owned, there are a few pitches for holiday hire. The system logs all the rental information to ensure there are no double-bookings and holidaymakers can be contacted. In addition, several of Hillandales’ sites have a range of pitches for caravans, tourers and tents to suit all requirements including hardstanding or grass pitches, electric or non-electric, and many have water and waste connections. Bookings for these pitches are also handled through Latitude – whether the bookings are for just a few days or a whole season.
Finally, as many of Hillandale’s team work on sites spread across Wales and the West Midlands, it was vital to keep all employee data in one place. So we built a robust HR module for all staff details including absence and holiday information.
The development of Latitude has enabled Hillandale to manage several sites from a central location and, because it’s a digital system, they have been able to reduce their costs, increase efficiency across the whole business and, as a result, have reduced their carbon footprint.
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