Updated 7 October 2026 · Reading time: 8 minutes
Three businesses in one set of accounts
In the Italian statutory income statement of a campsite or holiday village, all revenue ends up in a few lines and costs are grouped by nature. Yet three very different businesses live inside those accounts:
- Pitches: serviced space for tents, caravans and motorhomes. Little labour per night sold, a lot of infrastructure (toilet blocks, utility networks, roads).
- Accommodation units: mobile homes, chalets, bungalows, glamping tents. They work like small hotel rooms: cleaning at every changeover, linen, maintenance, booking-site commissions, and a significant investment per unit.
- Services: bar, restaurant, shop, pool, entertainment and activities. Each has its own margins, staff and opening hours.
As long as they stay mixed together, the overall result can hide a department that loses money. Management control separates them, measures each with its own indicators and compares them over time.
A departmental P&L adapted from USALI
The reference scheme is USALI, the international standard of the hotel industry, described in the USALI guide. For a campsite I adapt it like this: pitches and accommodation units become two separate lodging departments, each main service becomes an operated department, and overheads stay below them as undistributed expenses.
| Level | What it contains on a campsite |
|---|---|
| Pitches department | Pitch revenue (pitch, guests, car, electricity, extra visitors); direct costs: toilet-block cleaning, a share of reception staff, commissions. |
| Accommodation units department | Revenue from mobile homes, chalets and glamping; direct costs: changeover cleaning, linen and laundry, supplies, booking-site commissions, minor unit maintenance. |
| Service departments | Bar, restaurant, shop, pool, activities: revenue, cost of sales, departmental payroll. |
| Undistributed expenses | Management and administration, sales and marketing, information systems, general maintenance, energy, water and waste. |
| GOP | The operating result, before rent, property taxes, depreciation and financial charges. |
I work from the exports of the software you already use: the accounting system (Zucchetti, TeamSystem, Dylog, Mago, eSOLVER or others) and the booking system with statistics by accommodation type. There is no need to change software.
Campsite KPIs, with formulas
A single “occupancy” figure makes little sense on a campsite: a pitch and a mobile home have different prices, costs and seasons. Indicators should be calculated separately for pitches and accommodation units, and based on opening days, not the 365 days of the year.
| Indicator | Formula |
|---|---|
| Pitch occupancy | Pitch-nights sold ÷ (pitches × opening days) |
| Unit occupancy | Unit-nights sold ÷ (units × opening days) |
| Average rate per pitch-night | Pitch revenue ÷ pitch-nights sold |
| Average rate per unit-night | Accommodation unit revenue ÷ unit-nights sold |
| Revenue per available pitch | Pitch revenue ÷ (pitches × opening days) |
| Revenue per available unit | Accommodation unit revenue ÷ (units × opening days) |
| Total revenue per opening day | Total revenue ÷ opening days |
| Services revenue per guest-night | Services revenue ÷ guest-nights (nights × people) |
| GOP and GOP margin | Total revenue − departmental expenses − undistributed expenses; GOP ÷ total revenue |
| Payroll ratio | Payroll cost ÷ total revenue |
| Cost per opening day | Operating costs for the year ÷ opening days |
Revenue per available pitch or unit combines occupancy and rate: it is the campsite equivalent of hotel RevPAR. Services revenue per guest-night tells you how much each guest spends on average per day across bar, restaurant and shop. You can try these calculations with the free campsite calculator.
Opening days, seasonality and seasonal staff
A campsite earns its revenue in five, six or seven months, but part of its costs runs for twelve: management, administration, insurance, off-season maintenance, minimum utility charges, software fees. That is why I use opening days as the base: cost per opening day shows how much each day of the season must produce to cover the whole year.
Seasonal staff are usually the largest cost after overheads. To read them properly you need hours worked by department, not just the payroll total: that shows whether unit cleaning, the bar or reception absorb more hours than planned, and lets you compare the payroll ratio season on season. Opening and closing dates deserve the same attention: low-season weeks often cost more than they earn, and per-opening-day figures help set the dates.
The campsite budget follows the same scheme and should be built before bookings open: the method is in the budgeting guide.
Accommodation units or pitches: comparing margins
Many campsites consider replacing pitches with mobile homes or glamping. A sound comparison has two levels.
The first is departmental profit: units command a much higher nightly rate, but also have higher direct costs (cleaning, linen, commissions). Compare departmental profit per available unit with departmental profit per available pitch.
The second is investment. A mobile home or chalet is bought and depreciated over several years. In the USALI scheme depreciation sits below EBITDA: it appears in neither GOP nor EBITDA. That is right for reading the operation, but it means an accommodation units department can show an excellent operating margin while the investment earns little. To decide you need two figures read together: the unit's operating margin and its annual investment cost (depreciation, and financial charges where relevant).
A worked example
Illustrative example, invented figures. A campsite with 300 pitches and 60 accommodation units, open 150 days, with 90,000 guest-nights in the season.
| Line | Pitches | Accommodation units | Services | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Available nights | 45,000 | 9,000 | ||
| Nights sold | 22,500 | 6,300 | ||
| Occupancy | 50.0% | 70.0% | ||
| Average rate per night | €40 | €120 | ||
| Revenue | €900,000 | €756,000 | €450,000 | €2,106,000 |
| Departmental expenses | €270,000 | €302,400 | €315,000 | €887,400 |
| Departmental profit | €630,000 | €453,600 | €135,000 | €1,218,600 |
| Departmental margin | 70.0% | 60.0% | 30.0% | |
| Revenue per available pitch / unit | €20 | €84 | ||
| Departmental profit per pitch / unit (season) | €2,100 | €7,560 |
With undistributed expenses of €586,800, GOP is €631,800 and the GOP margin 30.0%. Total revenue per opening day is €14,040 (2,106,000 ÷ 150), cost per opening day €9,828 (operating costs of €1,474,200 ÷ 150) and services revenue per guest-night €5.00 (450,000 ÷ 90,000). With payroll of €700,000, the payroll ratio is 33.2%.
If each accommodation unit cost €40,000, depreciated over 10 years, depreciation would be €4,000 a year per unit: departmental profit per unit would fall from €7,560 to €3,560 after depreciation. That is still above profit per pitch, but the gap narrows a lot, and the pitches' own investment must be considered before deciding.
What you need to get started
- Booking-system statistics by accommodation type: nights sold, availability and revenue, split between pitches and each type of unit, plus guest-nights.
- Chart of accounts and trial balance from the accounting system, with ledgers for the main costs.
- Staff hours by department, estimated if necessary for the first season.
- Opening days for each season and each department (pool, restaurant and shop may open for different periods).
- Till takings from the bar, restaurant and shop.
With this data I set up the departmental scheme once, then update it every month of the season. The services are described on the Services page. The first meeting is free: at your premises if the property is in Lombardy, online via Microsoft Teams in other regions.
This matters most in areas with a lot of open-air tourism. Veneto has 181 open-air sites in operation, with over 228,000 beds, 17.7% of Italy's open-air capacity; in 2023 they accounted for 28.3% of the region's overnight stays. Area pages: the Veneto coast and Venice and Lake Garda.
Sources: HFTP, Uniform System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry, 12th Revised Edition (usali.hftp.org); Regione Veneto, Statistiche flash, October 2024. Adapting the scheme to campsites is a methodological choice and must be checked against each property's chart of accounts.