A holiday park on the Zeeland coast with 240 pitches runs at full capacity through August. The barrier opens four hundred times a day. By early September most guests have left, while 31 residents live there year-round. Those residents need to reach their own home on a Tuesday evening in November just as easily as on a Saturday in July. Without that distinction baked into the system, the first weeks of autumn mean daily manual intervention.
Revtek · 11 August 2026
A holiday park typically has three categories of people with access rights: seasonal guests on the basis of a reservation, permanent residents who actually live on site year-round, and staff. In the high season almost everyone on site is a guest staying a short while. From mid-September that picture changes.
A guest who booked a chalet for two weeks in August has no right of entry after their departure date. That is the contract: time-limited access. More complex is the resident who has lived on pitch 83 for four years and needs to park there in November just as much as in July. Those two groups use the same barrier but have different access rights, and a system that cannot tell them apart works poorly for both.
Alongside closing the pool, cutting restaurant hours and winterising the facilities, the move into autumn means sorting out access: who may still enter after 15 September, when annual pitch-holders' passes expire, and how guests who left months ago are kept out.
Without automated expiry dates, the answer comes down to one of two bad options: everyone who ever had a pass keeps it until someone manually revokes it, or the barrier effectively stands open for anyone and access control no longer exists. Expiry dates in the system avoid both.
An ANPR system with time-limited plate lists handles this automatically. A guest with a week's booking in August has access from Saturday to Saturday. That expiry date is in the system at the point of creation, linked to the reservation. On departure day, access lapses without anyone needing to do anything. For a park with two hundred turnovers a week, that is the only practical way to keep the system accurate.
On 3 July 2026, the Dutch Minister for Housing reached agreements with municipalities on protecting people who permanently reside on holiday parks. The agreements cover legalisation and safeguards against displacement, and they show how seriously the government now takes this group. According to CBS figures from early 2024, more than 60,000 people are registered as living permanently on recreation parks in the Netherlands.
For the park operator, that has a direct operational consequence. Permanent residents are not seasonal guests and cannot be managed as though they were. Their access does not end when the park closes to tourists. They need to get home at 10 pm in February without calling the barrier intercom.
One large whitelist mixing guests, residents and staff breaks down under these conditions. It becomes unmanageable, ages quickly, and makes enforcement impossible. The answer is a separate plate list for permanent residents with no expiry date, generating alerts only for exceptions. This gives the operator a clear view of who actually lives on site and prevents residents from inadvertently losing access when seasonal lists are archived.
Most holiday parks already have a barrier. ANPR adds configurable plate lists and a connection to the reservation system.
When a guest books online, the system collects their licence plate as part of the process. The plate becomes active on the arrival date and lapses on the departure date. The barrier recognises the vehicle on arrival and opens without any staff involvement. For annual pitch-holders, access runs until the agreed season end date, for example 15 October. After that the plate is inactive, unless the contract has been renewed. That renewal can be processed in the dashboard in a single bulk action for the whole group.
Permanent residents sit on a separate profile with no expiry date. If a resident gets a second car, they register the new plate through the resident portal or via WhatsApp. The plate is active within minutes. When a resident leaves, for instance because they have found other housing, the profile is removed and access lapses immediately, with no pass to collect.
The dashboard shows in real time which plates are on site and which group they belong to: guest, pitch-holder, or resident. An unknown plate, such as a delivery driver or a resident's visitor, triggers an alert; the operator can grant temporary access or open the intercom from the dashboard without leaving the office.
A transition without communication generates complaints. Guests who assume their pass is still valid. Annual pitch-holders wanting to retrieve belongings after 15 October. Suppliers who need to reach the site while the barrier is closed to unknowns.
WhatsApp messages almost always get read. A message to all active guests and annual pitch-holders a week before the closing date ("Your parking access expires on 15 October. Questions? Message us.") prevents dozens of calls to reception. Exception requests, such as a guest needing a one-off return trip after season, are handled through the chat: the operator sees the request, grants temporary access via the dashboard, and the barrier opens when the vehicle arrives.
The WhatsApp concierge for holiday parks, with check-in, fault reporting and out-of-hours communication with residents, is covered in our article on the WhatsApp concierge for holiday parks.
August is the right moment to prepare your access management for the changeover. Four concrete steps:
Separate your plate lists. Check whether permanent residents are on a dedicated list with no expiry date. If they are mixed into a general seasonal list, correct that before you archive the seasonal list in one sweep.
Set expiry dates for annual pitch-holders. Choose a date per group, usually the end of the recreational season, and enter it in the system. Renewals can then be processed individually or in bulk.
Test the rejected-plate message. Check what someone sees if they try to drive in after the season ends, whether the display is clear and whether they can easily contact the park. A barrier with no explanation produces frustrated former guests.
Communicate proactively. Send a WhatsApp message to all relevant contacts the week before the season closes, so nobody is caught out at the barrier.
With well-structured lists this is an afternoon's work in the dashboard. If everything currently sits in one mixed list, the weeks before the changeover are a good time to fix that. More on how the Revtek platform works for holiday parks is on our holiday park page. Pricing starts from €175 per month per location.
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