BDO recognised for nation-leading caravan industry services
It has been a long time coming for the minds behind BDO’s caravan and holiday parks industry services, with the team recently recognised with the sector’s highest honour.
BDO’s Adelaide office has been recognised with one of the holiday park industry’s top honours, winning the Caravan Industry Association of Australia’s Eric Hayman OAM Award for Excellence.
The award recognises more than two decades of leadership and specialised work in research, data and analytics and BDO’s long-standing contribution to the caravan and holiday park sector.
BDO’s Rudy Pieck, Angus Strachan, Sean Augustin, Talis Evans and Tyler Ward were all recognised. This powerhouse team is the force behind the industry’s evolution in data capability and evidence-based decision-making.
Since 2004, BDO has been developing tools used across the caravan and holiday parks sector.
The team first created the Accommodation Pricing Tool, which became an important industry resource when the Federal Government ceased collecting data for the sector in 2010.
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In the years since, the team has tapped into technological improvements to better the tools used by the sector, and to deliver more sophisticated industry reporting.
Strachan said winning the award was a “complete shock”, and that it recognised what had been a “genuine 20-year team effort”.
“We just do our job and try and look after the clients as best we can, and service the industry and do whatever we can to help,” he said.
“It’s very apt that it got awarded to the team and not any individual within it.
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“We are very humbled, flattered and honoured. It only serves to motivate us to go above and beyond.”
The team’s tools analyse trends across the sector, prepare quarterly reports for the top holiday park operators, conduct surveys on the industry and consumers, and set benchmarks for industry profit and performance.
Now, artificial intelligence was “supplementing” the work done by the team.
“We don’t want to be just running things through AI and shipping them out to our clients. There needs to be some review and some human judgement, but it has certainly provided a great deal of time savings,” Strachan said.
BDO now works with a broad cross-sector of industry leaders including Discovery Holiday Parks, Summer Star Holiday Parks Group and independent owners of caravan and holiday park businesses.
This is on top of work done for the Caravan Industry Association of Australia.
BDO is expanding into land lease communities on the back of the team’s success in the holiday parks industry, given the similarities between the two corporate models, Strachan said.
Strachan described parks as “a bit recession-proof”; when times are good, visitors book high-end beachfront cabins, and when budgets are tighter, they opt for more affordable accommodation or campsites.
But recent concerns around “range anxiety” had been problematic for the industry, affecting the March to April 2026 period for some destinations, Strachan said.
“Overall, the industry is healthy and doing well. Up until March it was growing. There was a little bit of uncertainty around March and April, and it seems to be doing better again now, but I think grappling with uncertainty is the biggest issue they’ve got to deal with at the moment,” he said.
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