Actually, the Vital Holiday Parks program of the province of Drenthe should be completed this year, but it will continue for another two years. Improving and making holiday parks in Drenthe more sustainable is not over yet. The steering committee is committed to improving the middle segment and to revitalize vital parks that are still far from vital as recreational parks.
More than six million euros is available for the remaining programme, the years 2023 and 2024.
The Vital Holiday Parks program has been active since 2018. It states, among other things, that Drenthe wants to have fifty parks that excel next year and that fifty parks must enter a transformation process. In a nutshell, this means that those parks then have to undergo a complete metamorphosis or are no longer known as holiday parks. The program has now been extended by two years.
“What went well is that in Drenthe our interests have been widely endorsed”, Henk van de Boer looks back on the program so far. He is chairman of the Vitale Vakantieparken Drenthe steering committee. “By the province, municipalities, Recreation Board Drenthe, HISWA-RECRON (an entrepreneurial organization for water sports and recreation, ed.) and especially the entrepreneurs. It mainly revolves around the latter group.”
The presented course for the coming years focuses, among other things, on improving the quality of existing parks. Vitale Vakantieparken uses the Drenthe Uitblinkers trajectory, in which entrepreneurs are helped with making plans. A coach is then deployed, so that the plans are actually realized. “The intention is to have parks that now score a five or a six, get a seven or eight”, explains deputy Henk Brink.
Van de Boer: “The aim is to increase the quality of holiday parks in the broadest sense. The accents are on innovation, sustainability, entrepreneurship and the Drenthe feeling for tourists.”
Other tasks include transforming vital and non-vital holiday parks. If a park is no longer viable, another destination is looked at: “There are holiday parks where you have to ask the question: what kind of future do they have? Entrepreneurs should also ask themselves that. It can mean that a park is so run down that we can only give one advice: stop it, have a bulldozer drive over it and give the site back to nature.But it is also possible that the municipality sets a residential destination on it.In short, you have to look at the possibilities per park. But the owner must decide in consultation with the person issuing the permits,” explains Van de Boer.
On the other hand, people who live in parks, which are intended for recreation, are expected to leave. The housing shortage is a problem with the change to a full recreation park, which is causing delays. “The demand for places to stay for asylum seekers is high, as is housing for young people who enter the housing market, student housing is a problem. However, we must continue to look at what we want with a park and what the purpose of this park is. But it does have some constraints.”
The objective in 2018 was to double the number of vital parks and to halve the number of non-vital parks. It will remain in effect for years to come. “It is difficult to give a figure for this, but we want to give it an extra pace. In two years’ time, the Vital Holiday Parks program will be on everyone’s mind. Entrepreneurs must find each other. Municipalities must provide even better insight into what they can do. The quality of the parks must be improved and the undesirable things in the parks will then have been hit on the head,” Van de Boer expects.