Ask most campsite owners how business is going and they will tell you their occupancy rate. Ask them their average daily rate and you will often get a blank look. That is a shame, because average daily rate, or ADR, tells you something occupancy never can: whether the bookings you are taking are actually worth having. A site running at 90 percent occupancy on prices that are too low can earn less than a site running at 60 percent occupancy priced properly. Average daily rate is the number that shows you which one you are.

This guide is a plain English explanation of ADR for UK campsite owners, CL and CS site holders included. No spreadsheets full of jargon, just what the number means, how to work it out for your own site, and what to actually do once you know it.

What average daily rate actually means

Average daily rate is the average amount a pitch earns per night it is occupied. You calculate it by taking your total pitch revenue for a period and dividing it by the number of pitch nights sold in that period.

So if your site took £9,000 in pitch fees over a month, and you sold 300 pitch nights across that month, your average daily rate is £30. That is it. No hidden formula, no accountancy course required.

The reason it matters is that it strips out the noise of occupancy and tells you purely about price. A site that suddenly sells a lot more pitch nights because of a heatwave has not necessarily got better at pricing, it has just got lucky with the weather. ADR lets you see the underlying rate you are actually achieving, separate from how busy you happened to be.

ADR is not the same as your advertised rate

Your advertised rate is the headline price on your website or listing. Your ADR is what you actually took, on average, once discounts, midweek offers, seasonal pitch deals and long stay reductions are all factored in. On plenty of sites the two numbers are a long way apart, and that gap is worth knowing about. If your advertised rate is £35 a night but your ADR comes out at £24, discounting has quietly become the default rather than the exception, and it is worth asking why.

Why occupancy on its own can mislead you

Our guide on how to calculate and improve your campsite occupancy rate covers that metric in detail, and it is genuinely useful, but occupancy answers a different question to ADR. Occupancy tells you how full you were. It says nothing about whether you were full at a price worth having.

Picture two small touring sites, both with ten pitches. Site A runs at 80 percent occupancy all season at £20 a night. Site B runs at 55 percent occupancy at £38 a night. Site A looks busier and, on paper, feels like the stronger business. Work out the actual pitch revenue over a thirty night stretch and Site A takes £4,800 while Site B takes £7,980. Site B is quieter, less wear on the grounds, less laundry, less mess in the shower block, and it earns considerably more. That is the entire point of tracking ADR alongside occupancy rather than instead of it.

Bringing the two together with RevPAR

If you want one number that captures both occupancy and rate in a single figure, that is what revenue per available pitch, or RevPAR, is for. It is calculated by multiplying your ADR by your occupancy rate, or equally by dividing your total pitch revenue by the total pitch nights you had available, occupied or not.

RevPAR is the number that tells you how hard each pitch on your site is actually working for you, night in and night out, across the whole season rather than just the nights it happened to be booked. Two sites can have identical ADR and look similar on price, but if one is consistently fuller than the other its RevPAR will be higher, and that is the site making better use of the ground it has. For a CL limited to five units or a CS with its own unit cap, where you cannot simply add more pitches to grow, RevPAR is often the clearest single measure of whether the business is actually improving year on year.

Using ADR to decide when to raise your prices

Our guide to raising your campsite prices without losing bookings walks through the mechanics of an increase itself, but ADR is what tells you when one is overdue in the first place. A few signs worth watching for:

None of these signs mean you should raise prices blindly. They mean you have real evidence to look at before you decide, rather than a gut feeling either way. Our broader guide on pricing your campsite pitches covers how to set rates by pitch type and season if you want to go further than ADR alone.

Common ADR mistakes on UK CL, CS and touring sites

A few patterns crop up again and again on smaller UK sites specifically:

Tracking it without a spreadsheet headache

You do not need a finance background to keep an eye on ADR, but you do need your booking and payment records in one place rather than scattered across a paper diary, a bank statement and a memory of what you charged that one group in July. Our reports and insights pull pitch revenue and pitch nights straight from your bookings, so ADR and occupancy sit side by side rather than needing to be pieced together by hand at the end of the month. Taking card payments through the same system your bookings live in also means every pitch fee is recorded automatically, so the number you are looking at actually reflects what was paid rather than what was meant to be paid.

The bottom line

Occupancy tells you how full your campsite was. Average daily rate tells you whether being full was actually worth it. Track both, and RevPAR alongside them if you want the two combined into one figure, and you will have a far clearer picture of how your pricing is really performing than occupancy alone can ever give you. If you would rather see these numbers appear automatically as bookings come in, instead of building your own spreadsheet each month, CampSuite® is free to get started with for CL and CS sites, no card needed.