How to Run Holiday Camps That Sell Out and Actually Make Money

For most coaches, school holidays are either a goldmine or a dead zone. There's very little in between.

The coaches who plan properly run a five-day camp over half term and take home what they'd usually earn in three weeks of regular sessions. The ones who don't stare at an empty calendar for two weeks while parents desperately search online for something to do with their kids.

Holiday camps are probably the biggest untapped revenue lever in the average coaching business. And they're not complicated to run. You just need to actually run them.

The maths on a holiday camp is wild

Let's actually do the numbers, because most coaches undersell this to themselves.

A five-day camp running 10am to 3pm, charging £35 a day, with 20 kids. That's £700 a day. £3,500 for the week. One pitch, one coach, maybe a second for safety, same drills rotated through a few blocks.

Now compare that to a normal week of weekly sessions. Five evenings, three or four groups, £8 per head, 12 kids a session. You're looking at £400-500 for a full week of evening work across multiple venues.

A single camp week can earn you five to seven times what a regular week earns. That's not a small optimisation. That's a completely different business model sitting in your calendar for two weeks every term.

Parents aren't just buying coaching. They're buying childcare.

This is the thing most coaches miss. When a parent books a Wednesday evening session, they're buying 45 minutes of good coaching for their kid. Price sensitivity is real, because it's one thing slotted into a full schedule.

When a parent books a holiday camp, they're buying a full working day without their kid. That's a completely different product with completely different value. You're not competing with the local grassroots club charging £6 a session. You're competing with a half-day at a trampoline park, a childminder, or a parent taking annual leave off work.

In that context, £35 a day isn't expensive. It's the cheapest option on the table, and the only one that actively improves their child at something they actually care about.

Once you understand that shift, your pricing gets bolder. Camps should sit in a completely different tier to your regular sessions. Not double, not triple. Properly different.

Plan camps weeks before the term ends, not after

The single biggest mistake coaches make is timing. They finish a busy term, take a breath, look up, and realise half term starts in a week. They scramble to put a camp together, post it on Instagram on Friday, and then wonder why only four kids showed up.

Parents plan holiday childcare weeks, sometimes months, in advance. By the time they're looking at Friday for something starting Monday, every other option is already booked. If you only announce your camp that late, you're catching the parents who are desperate, not the parents who plan.

The right rhythm is simple. Announce camps four to six weeks before they run. Open bookings immediately. Put the link everywhere. Tell every family currently training with you before you post it publicly. The families who already know you will book first, which gives the camp social proof from day one. By the time a new parent sees it on Instagram, it's already half full, and that's a much stronger pitch than an empty signup page.

Structure the day so parents see value, not just hours

A lot of coaches run holiday camps like they run regular sessions, just for longer. An hour of warm-up, a couple of drills, a match at the end. Repeat for five days.

That works. But it undersells what the day could be.

The best camps feel like a proper programme. Morning technical block with a clear focus, lunch break with structured activities, afternoon game-based block, end-of-day challenge or mini-tournament. Kids come home tired, parents see pictures of smiling faces, and coaches get to actually coach in depth instead of rushing through 45-minute slots.

You don't need to go wild. One or two small touches that a regular evening session can't offer make the camp feel worth it. A team T-shirt at the start of the week. Photos sent to parents each day. A small prize on the final day. Stuff that costs you very little but shifts the perception enormously.

Sell the camp as a complete package, not daily drop-ins

Offering "book any day you want" feels flexible. It's actually costing you money.

When parents can pick individual days, a lot of them book two or three, not five. Your revenue per family drops. Your planning gets harder because numbers change each day. And the kids who only come on Monday and Thursday miss the progression between sessions, which means the experience is weaker too.

A full-week package, priced properly, should be the default. Offer a per-day option alongside it if you want to, but price it higher per day so the full week looks obviously better value. Most parents will take the full week once the maths is pointing at it.

Half-days are a separate thing and can work well for younger age groups where a full day is too much. But they should be their own clean product, not a discount workaround on the full camp.

Capacity is what turns a camp from fine to brilliant

Running a camp at 60% capacity feels safe. It's not. It's wasting the biggest advantage you have.

Once you've committed to running the camp, the pitch is hired, the coaches are booked, and the equipment is packed. An empty spot doesn't save you anything. A full camp earns you more without meaningfully more work. The gap between 14 kids and 20 kids is almost pure margin.

This is where your booking system earns its keep. You need clear capacity limits that automatically close when the camp is full. A waitlist that captures demand past that. Age-specific sessions if you want to split a big camp into two groups. Parents who see "only 3 spots left" book faster than parents who see a page with no urgency on it at all.

If you're still taking camp bookings through DMs and bank transfers, you'll max out at around 12-15 kids before admin becomes your bottleneck. Proper coaching business software handles the capacity, payments, waitlist, and intake forms for you. BookNimble lets you set up camps the same way you set up weekly sessions — pick the dates, set the capacity, add the price, take bookings and payments in one flow. No spreadsheets. No chasing. No mixing up who paid and who didn't on day one.

Use camps to bring in new players, not just serve existing ones

A holiday camp is the best marketing event you'll run all year, and most coaches don't treat it that way.

A new player has probably seen your Instagram, thought about messaging you, and then forgotten. A regular weekly session is a big commitment for someone who hasn't met you yet. A one-off camp week is a much easier yes. They try you, the kid has a brilliant five days, and by the end of the week the parent is asking when your next regular session starts.

Price your camp so it's an obvious try-before-you-commit offer. Put a small discount on the first month of weekly sessions for every new player who comes through the camp. Capture their email and phone at booking so you can follow up after the camp ends. A five-day camp where even a third of new attendees convert into regular weekly players is worth an entire quarter of normal marketing.

Don't forget the parents who just came back from a camp

The days right after a camp finishes are the highest-intent moment you'll ever have with those families. The kids are still buzzing. The parents still remember what a good week it was. This is the cheapest revenue you'll ever earn, if you actually reach out.

A short message a few days after the camp ends, pointing parents to your next weekly sessions or the next camp, catches them when they're most likely to say yes. Leave it a month and you've missed the window. They've moved onto the next thing.

Some coaches run this as a simple follow-up. Others offer a small discount for booking the next block within a week of the camp ending. Either works. The point is to treat the end of a camp as the start of a conversion process, not the end of a delivery.

The camp calendar should be mapped out at the start of the year

The coaches who consistently sell out camps aren't lucky. They plan the full year in January. Easter camps, May half term, summer which is the big one and usually gives you four to six weeks of opportunity, October half term, Christmas. Dates in the diary before the pitches get booked by anyone else. Announcements scheduled. Pricing decided.

When camps are a surprise scramble, you get whatever's left. When they're baked into your annual plan, you're running the best-located venues on the best dates, months in advance, while other coaches are still trying to work out where they're hosting.

The bottom line

Holiday camps aren't a side project. For a coaching business run properly, they're one of the most profitable parts of the year. A single summer of well-planned camps can cover months of quieter periods and fund the growth of everything else you do.

The coaches who treat camps as a rushed afterthought earn rushed afterthought money. The ones who treat them as a proper product with proper planning take home real numbers.

Next time a school holiday comes up, don't just run a camp. Run it like it's the main event of the quarter. Because for your business, it probably is.