Happier times: Chris Jeff with wife Ida and baby Theo at Doniford Bay Haven holiday park

Press release - 9 June 2025 07:10

Bedworth grandfather's £45,000 Haven holiday park nightmare

Haven Holidays purchase leaves family £45,000 out of pocket as annual ground rent is increased to almost three times caravan resale value

Holiday memories

Retired lorry driver Christopher Jeff and wife Ida took their first holiday together 13 years ago in Haven Holidays, beachfront park Doniford Bay and the place held fond memories for the couple.

In 2023 they decided to return to the site for another holiday with their grandson Theo who now lives with them. The holiday was a great success and out of curiosity, Christopher decided to ask about owning a caravan at the Haven park.

Expensive

A Haven salesman was only too keen to show the Chris and Ida around the park. "We knew we couldn't afford a brand new caravan but we found what we thought was a nice one that was a bit older for £14,859," says Christopher. "I had to cash in a good chunk of my pension to pay for the caravan. I thought it would be worth it for some family holidays away from the rat race.

"We were told that we would be able to resell it back to the park, or we could resell privately but pay the park 15%. We had no intentions of reselling at that point, we wanted the holidays.

What we didn't realise was how much all the other costs were going to be."

Holiday home sweet home. Until it wasn't

"We had to re kit the caravan with things like a microwave, fridge freezer and bedding. Altogether this came to around £5000. We were also encouraged to buy some side decking for another £4,500 plus a storage box for £300 and a bench for £120"

The Jeffs paid £3127 for the first year's fees. But what they didn't realise at the time was that was a partial payment for the rest of the year. "The total cost for a year was over £6000," says Christopher. "And since we bought that has gone up to £8161. More than half the cost of the caravan itself!"

Poor site management?

A national grid outage caused damage to electrical items in many of the park's caravans. Initially Christopher was told that his boiler was damaged and would need replacing.

After three months and three visits from the site engineers the Jeffs were finally informed that their boiler was actually a water heater and therefore not affected.

Christopher became frustrated with getting what he describes as "very little help from the site. They would not accept responsibility, and they would not help us fix the issues.

"Communications were just lacking. Everyone we spoke to seemed to pass the buck. Obviously if everyone's electrical goods were blown by this outage, then there was insufficient protection from power surges. But we were getting nowhere when we tried to discuss it.

"The whole operation just smacked of incompetence. Not the standard we expected from a huge national brand like Haven."

Undercut

In order to cover the expensive annual costs, the Haven salesperson told Christopher and Ida that they could rent out their caravan privately. But in order to cover annual costs, the Jeffs would have needed to rent out the caravan every single week of the season for £450 including passes.

"So if we were using some weeks for ourselves we would have had to charge even more than that," explains Christopher. "Haven were undercutting us by renting their own caravans cheaper all season long. Sometimes £150 for a week in the off season.

"We managed to rent out a few weeks in 2024. 5 in total. But my wife Ida is still working in sales and all of her commission from last year was used up covering the shortfall in rent.

"Also the park is closed for three months. That's a quarter of the year we can't even advertise it for rent.

"It's just too expensive to own one of these units. We have only holidayed in it for ten long weekends. Around 30 days onsite has altogether cost us £45,000. That's one and a half thousand pounds a day!"

Resale disaster

Chris remembers being told that if he and Ida needed to they could either sell the caravan back to the park or sell it privately.

"Being unable to pay the ground rent this year, we are in the position of needing to sell the caravan," says Christopher. "We went back to Haven as they had said they often buy caravans back, but they swiftly told us they had too much stock already and could not make us an offer. Not unless we upgraded to a more expensive unit.

"We are trying to sell privately but he best offer we had so far was £3000. Out of that have to pay the park a 15% commission on private sales. So we would have only got £2550 which is a £12,450 loss in a year and a half.

"Even that offer fell through due to the costs involved (as well as incorrect information from the park regarding the water heater). Nobody wants to buy a caravan and take on the commitment of paying over £8000 for a 9 months of caravan access. Especially when you can't rent it out and break even because its cheaper for guests to go directly through Haven."

European Consumer Claims

With nowhere else to turn, the Jeffs looked to a Henley based consumer claims firm for help.

"We had been hearing European Consumer Claims adverts on the radio for a few weeks," says Christopher. "In the end, we had nowhere else to turn. We got in touch with ECC and are hopefully on the way to getting our money back."

Greg Wilson, CEO of ECC comments: "When we first started looking into holiday park consumer abuse we were aware that there were issues. However, the sheer scale of wrongdoing was shocking even to us."

"The good news is that a competent claims company, working with leading consumer lawyers, has multiple tools available to seek significant financial redress for people like Mr and Mrs Jeff."