It is a pleasant bustle at the Hof van Saksen holiday park in Nooitgedacht. It’s Monday and that means changeover day. In the morning the people who have finished their holiday check out, in the afternoon the new guests arrive. The park is quite full with holidaymakers and now booking a farm for the coming weeks can rightly be called a challenge.
“We are 90 to 95 percent full,” says general manager Eric van der Heijden. “So you can still book, but we are very satisfied with the occupancy rate. So bring it on this summer.”
After two corona years, the foreign tourist also manages to find Drenthe. In fact, holidaymakers from Curaçao, Australia and Kuwait have even settled down in Nooitgedacht. To the great surprise of Van der Heijden. “Our market is really the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and a bit of England. So that they are now coming this way from Curaçao or Australia is special. We have never experienced that, but it is nice to see.”
Last weekend the center of the Netherlands got a holiday, the rest of the country will follow in the coming weeks. Yet it has been busy at the holiday parks for a few weeks because the Belgians and the Germans have already been off for two weeks. They also see this at Westerbergen in Echten. “We still have a few houses available, but then it’s just a few nights,” says co-owner Jules Klein. “If you now want to book another week or even two weeks with us, then you are really out of luck. We have been full for about two weeks and that will continue until the end of the summer.”
In addition to a holiday park, Westerbergen also has a camping site, which the holidaymaker can still enjoy. “We still have a few spots available during the high season,” says Klein. The cottages are often reserved in advance, but campers often book last-minute. “They wait for the weather first. But the expectations for next week look good, so we can already see that the number of reservations is starting to increase. They also often have people from the north of the Netherlands at the campsite and they still have to wait a week before the summer holidays start.