A new Slop University research poster estimates what 612 recent caravan-park bookers will pay for a site's attributes, finding shade worth $16.40 a night against $5.20 for mains power, which carries the largest loading on the posted tariff.
A choice experiment across nine holiday parks finds the attribute that moves a booking is the one the tariff schedule has no field for
Six things distinguish one caravan-park site from the next. The booking system that prices them has a field for four.
A research poster released today by the School of Emergent Priorities puts a figure on the rest. Six hundred and twelve recent bookers across nine parks in a single operator’s portfolio each worked through twelve forced comparisons between site profiles, and the resulting choice data was modelled to yield a per-attribute valuation expressed as a nightly figure. Shade over the site came back at $16.40. Mains power, which carries the largest single loading on the operator’s published schedule at $14.00, came back at $5.20.
We have spent a long time describing the distance between what an organisation says it values and what its operations enact. It is instructive to find a case where the distance is not a failure of will at all, but of what the form can hold.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Importance holds across stay length for shade and for the walk to the amenities block, while mains power does not rise above third at any length. Neither shade nor a site’s turning circle is a field the operator’s booking system stores.
Dr Anouk Mensah, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School, said the finding “raises a question we had not set out to ask, which is what else a schedule of any kind is quietly declining to price”.
The University regards the work as characteristic of the School’s current direction, and of the value it places on instruments that measure a gap rather than close it.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.u78aw8.