Every so often a CL or CS owner gets a phone call from a club rally officer asking whether their field could take twenty or thirty units for a weekend, instead of the usual five. It's a flattering ask and a genuinely good earner, but it also throws up a question most site owners haven't had to think about before: does hosting a club rally on a CL or CS site actually work under the same exemption you're already operating on, or is something else going on? The short answer is that rallies sit under a separate exemption of their own, and once you understand how it works, saying yes can be one of the more profitable weekends of your season.

This isn't a loophole or a grey area. Recognised clubs, the Caravan and Motorhome Club, the Camping and Caravanning Club and a handful of similar organisations, hold their own exemption certificates that let them organise a rally or meet on land that isn't licensed as a caravan site at all, provided a few conditions are met. Your CL or CS licence and a club's rally exemption are two different things, and a piece of land can quite happily host both across the course of a year.

What Actually Counts as a Club Rally

A rally, sometimes called a meet, is an organised gathering of a club's members on a piece of land for a short, fixed period, run by the club rather than by you as the landowner. The organising club applies its own exemption certificate to the event, which is what allows far more units on site than the five van or five unit limit that governs your CL or CS on an ordinary week. You're not applying for anything yourself. You're agreeing to let the club use your land, on terms you both settle in advance.

That distinction matters because it changes who's actually running the show for the weekend. The site owner still controls access to the land and sets the terms of use, but the day to day organisation, marshalling units into position, managing the attendee list, running any club activities, sits with the rally marshal and the club's own volunteers, not with you.

The Legal Bit: How the Exemption Actually Works

The exemption that lets clubs run rallies comes from the same broad piece of legislation that gives CLs and CSs their own five unit exemption, but it's a distinct category with its own conditions attached, typically covering things like the maximum number of nights a single rally can run and how many times a year the same piece of land can be used this way. Those specific limits are set by the terms of the organising club's certificate rather than by your own CL or CS agreement, so the honest answer is: don't guess them.

Before you agree to anything, ask the club's rally officer to confirm in writing exactly what their exemption permits for your land, how many nights, how many units, how many times a year, and whether your local authority needs to be told anything. A well organised club will have done this dozens of times before and will hand you the answer without a second thought. If a club can't answer that clearly, that's worth treating as a warning sign before you commit your field for a weekend.

Getting the Site Ready for a Much Bigger Weekend

A rally is, by design, a very different weekend to your normal five units. Suddenly you're thinking about access for a convoy of arrivals rather than a trickle, temporary parking for towing vehicles, and whether your ground can genuinely take that many units without turning to mud if the weather turns. A few practical things worth working through with the marshal ahead of time:

None of this is more complicated than running your site normally, there's just more of it happening at once, and it helps enormously to agree who's responsible for what before the first caravan turns up rather than working it out on the day.

Money, Bookings and Keeping Track of a Big Temporary Group

How you get paid for a rally weekend varies. Some clubs pay a single site fee direct to the landowner for the whole event, others expect each unit to pay the site owner individually on arrival, much like a normal booking. Either way, agree the figure and the payment method with the club well in advance, and put it in writing.

If you're taking payment from individual units, it's worth setting the rally up as its own block in your booking diary rather than trying to track thirty separate arrivals from memory, and using your invoicing to keep a clean record of what each unit paid, particularly useful if you also run the site as a CL or CS the rest of the year and want your accounts to stay tidy. It's the same discipline that makes the five van rule and five unit rule straightforward to manage day to day, just applied to a much bigger, shorter event.

Insurance and a Proper Risk Assessment

Check with your site insurer before the rally, not after. Public liability cover that's perfectly adequate for five units on an ordinary week may have conditions attached when the numbers on your land jump into the dozens, even for a weekend. A quick call to confirm you're covered for the event, and for the specific number of units expected, is a five minute job that avoids a genuinely bad conversation later.

A simple written risk assessment for the weekend is worth doing even if nobody asks to see it. Cover ground conditions, access for emergency vehicles, fire safety and spacing, and who the marshal and first aider on site are for the duration. Most rally marshals will already have their own version of this from the club's side, so it's often a case of comparing notes rather than starting from scratch.

Working With the Rally Marshal, Not Around Them

The single biggest factor in whether a rally weekend runs smoothly is how well you and the marshal communicate beforehand. The marshal's job is to get units onto the land in an orderly way, manage the club's own programme of activities, and be the first point of contact for anything that comes up during the event. Your job is to make sure the land, access and facilities are ready for them to do that.

Get a phone number for the marshal, not just an email address for the club, and agree who guests should go to first if something goes wrong at 11pm on a Saturday. Most rallies run without a hitch precisely because this line of communication is sorted out in advance, not because nothing ever needs fixing.

Should You Say Yes to Hosting a Rally?

For most CL and CS owners, the answer is yes, provided the practical groundwork gets done properly. A rally fills your land with paying units for a weekend in one booking rather than five separate ones, it introduces your site to a much wider group of potential future direct guests, and a good relationship with a club's rally officer often turns into repeat bookings year after year. The trade off is a busier, more logistically involved weekend than your usual week, and it's not something to say yes to on the phone without checking the exemption details, your insurance and your ground conditions first.

Once you've hosted one rally successfully, the next one is considerably easier. You'll already know your access points, your ground's limits and which parts of the conversation with the marshal actually matter.

The Bottom Line

Hosting a club rally on a CL or CS site is a well established, entirely legitimate way to make good use of your land for a weekend, running under the organising club's own exemption rather than your everyday five unit limit. Get the exemption details confirmed in writing, sort out access, ground condition and insurance ahead of time, and work with the marshal rather than trying to run the weekend yourself, and it can become one of the more enjoyable and profitable bookings in your calendar.

If you run a CL, CS or small touring site and want an easy way to keep rally bookings, invoices and your normal week to week diary all in one place, sign up for CampSuite's free plan. It takes about 15 minutes to set up, it's free for CL and CS sites, and there's no card required to get started.