‘Look, if I sell ten frikandels, it’s nothing. But if I sell four hundred thousand, that’s just money. Mass. Mass is the cash register,” says holiday park king Peter Gillis in the first episode of his reality series Gillis family: Mass is Cash.
That episode was broadcast on SBS6 in August 2020. You see the family preparing the holiday parks for the high season. “What a mess, man! Who chose those colors?!,” says the sturdy, bald Peter, as he walks into a café in one of his parks. Renovations are underway and Peter inspects everything. “What find about it yourself?” he asks his son Mark Gillis, who is leaning on the bar and seems a bit uncomfortable. “Yes, I don’t like the way it looks either,” says Mark. “Yes, then you have to intervene!” says Peter. “I still think it’s a total mess here.”
It is now in its eleventh season Mass is Cash on television and Brabander Peter Gillis (61) is a well-known Dutchman. Gillis is the owner of Oostappen Group Holiday Parks. The company offers holidays in the cheaper segment. The parks – in 2023 there are eleven of which one has recently closed – are mainly located in North Brabant and (Belgian) Limburg. Gillis has earned well from it; he was in the Quote 500the list of the richest Dutch people, compiled by business magazine Quote.
Gillis has also become a brand himself, with catchphrases such as “hatseflats” and “foxwild”, the term he uses when he is frustrated (“that makes me foxwild!”). He profiles himself as brutal, dominant, and straightforward, but with a small heart. In the series you see him barking at his staff – including his three children – but you also see him lighting a candle for his deceased mother and crossing himself in every church he encounters.
The program’s production company became interested in Gillis through an article about him and his holiday park empire, SBS6 said when asked. It thought he was a “colorful” figure. His image of the direct, but secretly sweet entrepreneur seems to be catching on. The new season of Mass is Cash attracts an average of more than 800,000 viewers per episode. His biography, written by journalist Mark Koster, was published in 2021, and his cookbook was published last month Hatseflats! out, including a recipe for sausage rolls.
In real life, Gillis is also that hard-working, brutal entrepreneur you see on TV, as appears from conversations with the ten people who NRC spoke. A very talented entrepreneur too. But a small heart seems a bit exaggerated.
What Gillis does not show on screen, but which the local media does write about, is that he systematically breaks the law. He has been at odds with the municipalities in which his holiday parks are located for years, mainly because of the illegal housing of migrant workers. Gillis is also being prosecuted for a range of tax offences.
At the National Bureau Bibob, which conducts integrity investigations for governments, he is known as an alleged criminal entrepreneur. On this basis, municipalities can withdraw permits – which they are now doing en masse for the catering establishments in its parks, which form an essential part of the Oostappen holiday experience. Gillis is also being prosecuted for the abuse of his ex-girlfriend Nicol Kremers, who appeared in many seasons of the reality series.
Gillis’ empire was already slowly crumbling, but earlier this month it really suffered a blow when he was forced to close the Prinsenmeer holiday park by the municipality of Asten, near Eindhoven. It is his first and dearest park, his showpiece.
From conversations that NRC The image emerges of a man with whom you have a problem if he gets the feeling that you are not on his side, or if you are an obstacle. He also takes a business conflict personally. The result is that he has mainly gathered yes-men around him, or so it sounds.
Jacquelien van der Linde – the wife of a former employee of Oostappen and friends with Gillis’ ex Nicol Kremers – summarizes it this way: “He has traits of a narcissist. Things have to go the way he wants, otherwise he will become very angry.”
She also says that when her husband became ill as an employee at Oostappen, Gillis had to sign a settlement agreement. “My husband had to declare that the work situation had become untenable. He didn’t have the energy to make a case of it, so he signed. Then Peter got rid of him and my husband stopped costing him money.”
Gillis was born in Rijen, a village between Breda and Tilburg. His parents ran the Kampzicht campsite there, a campsite in the woods. He grew up there with his older brother and sister. Before Gillis started working in the holiday park world, he worked at a butcher’s shop, Van Oirschot, in Rijen for ten years, until 1985.
The following year his parents bought a new campsite: Camping Strandbad Oostappen in Asten. The children moved with them and became co-owners of the park. In 1989, the then 27-year-old Gillis and his father were the only shareholders, because his brother and sister had dropped out.
Gillis worked hard to make Oostappen a success, together with his parents and his then wife Treesie Michielsen, with whom he had three children: Ruud, Inge and Mark. In the late 1990s he started to expand his Oostappen empire with the purchase of new parks.
He made his rounds through the parks every day. He often got up at five in the morning and was not home until eleven at night, as can be read in his biography Peter Gillis: Mass is Kassa (2021), written by journalist Mark Koster. In the book he also says that at one point he had several extramarital affairs. Once he accidentally sent an email to the manager of one of his parks, intended for his wife, at that time Gillis’ mistress: “I want to fuck you.” His then wife Michielsen found out and became “fox wild”, according to Gillis.
Gillis often talks about his “pussy youth” as an explanation for his zest for work. And perhaps there is also something of an explanation for his inappropriate behavior. The Gillis family was not well off. His father beat him, Gillis says in his biography, and showed little affection. “If you gave him a present on his birthday, he would leave it on a shelf in the hallway and the present would still be there two years later, unwrapped.”
Son Mark Gillis (28), on the phone: “He didn’t have a good relationship with my grandfather, he was like: he’s not going to make it. That is his motivation now. He wants to prove every day that he can do it.”
But it is clear that entrepreneurship is simply in Peter Gillis’ blood. And he’s having fun with it. He often tells the same anecdote, that one day he came home without a moped, because he could have sold it to someone for a good price. With that he bought another moped, which he then sold again.
“He is a man like many in Brabant. A somewhat robust trader who has become big,” says Jan Bosch, former tourism councilor in Asten. In that capacity, he was in conflict with Gillis in 2005, because he had parked a group of caravans in a place where this was not allowed and refused to remove them. “If there was a tree in the way, he would cut it down and say: ‘I didn’t know you had to apply for a permit for that’.”
Bosch thinks that Gillis is “not a bad man”, but someone who finds it difficult to separate things and people. “If he doesn’t get his way in a business conflict, then he is really angry with you.”
If you are on Gillis’ side, and you are not in the way in business, then you can count on him. His weight loss coach Dick Sandbergen says that his son was allowed to borrow Gillis’ Rolls-Royce for his graduation gala. And Gillis’ childhood friend Frans van Gool says that his critically ill neighbor wanted to see Gillis and his then girlfriend Kremers. Within two hours they were at his bedside.
But Gillis’ company is number one. He is a workaholic and always wants more. More parks, more success, more money.
If you stay at a Gillis park, there is a chance that you will end up in a run-down and dirty house. Guests complain a lot about the holiday parks on the internet. That is why Gillis called in the well-known cleaning expert Rob Geus earlier this year. He was also not happy with the hygiene at the parks, as can be seen in the episode in question Mass is Cash.
The advantage is that you pay little for an overnight stay in an Oostappenhuisje. Gillis’ “mass is cash register” means in practice that he offers a lot of sleeping places, about thirteen thousand, for a small price. For three nights with two people you now pay around 200 euros in the spring.
Daughter Inge Gillis (29) says that her father advocates this business not only for the ‘cash register’, but also based on the idea that holidays should be for everyone. “He believes that people who have little to spend should also be able to come here.”
Gillis also tries to show charity in other ways. For example, during the 2016 refugee crisis, he received 1,200 asylum seekers in a number of his parks. And for many years he was the main sponsor of the ‘Pamper Event’, an annual, free weekend for disabled children at Oostappenpark Prinsenmeer. Including ice cream, clowns and a magician.
It seems difficult to reconcile: the alleged criminal entrepreneur who wants to do something good for disabled children. Yet most people think so NRC also said to people with whom he is not on good terms, that he really did it out of kindness and did not earn anything from it.
Things seem to be different with the refugees. In a video from 2016 he leads Quote around one of the parks where refugees are accommodated. Asked where they come from, Gillis says, looking at a group of asylum seekers: “I think Syria. I think Iran. Iraq, by the looks of it.” He also believes that they should eventually return “to the country they came from.”
In the same video he says that he mainly provides childcare for “social reasons”. “I am a man with a heart.” But in one article calculated Quote that Gillis must have earned around 5.7 million euros from the reception of the asylum seekers.
Gillis recently lost the Prinsenmeer holiday park. At the end of 2022 he already had two of his holiday parks enfeoffedreported Quote. And according to that magazine, the parent company of the Belgian Oostappenparken had less than 800 euros in cash. It is not clear exactly what his Dutch financial picture looks like, because Gillis has not submitted annual accounts to the Chamber of Commerce for years (which is required by law).
In the meantime, his reality soap is still flourishing. In the first episode of the new season he is on holiday in Italy with his new love Wendy van Hout. He sits in front of his camper in the morning, reading something on his phone.
“I was just reading another shitty article from the Quote”, he says to Van Hout who walks out of the camper. “SBS6 star Peter Gillis suspected of tax fraud.”
He lets Van Hout read it. That sigh.
Gillis: “Yes, they are trying ooh just to write it down, because look: you have actually already been convicted.”
Van Hout tries to reassure him and says that that is just how the media work.
Gillis makes a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Yes, that’s why I’m happy to be in Italy for a while. We’re going to have breakfast, honey.”
Reading list