Australia and New Zealand: the most booked luxury campsite here is a holiday park

In Australia, eight of the nine most booked entries belong to the same three holiday park chains, and of the nineteen most booked Australian and New Zealand places not one goes above 9.0 points, while on the "ten best" list of both countries all ten entries are above 9.0.

Beyond Europe · October 2026

Australia and New Zealand are two mature, English speaking holiday markets, so the question here is not whether glamping exists but what gets into the most viewed spot under this label. From the two country pages we collected the data of 39 accommodations by machine, and set beside them the other twelve measured countries of the same page family, to have something to measure against.

In most such selections the two lists of ten, the "ten best" and the "most booked this month", bring at least partly the same places. Not here. In Australia and New Zealand the two lists do not overlap on a single entry, and there is no overlap between their scores either.

The two lists are two separate worlds here, and 9.0 divides them

On the "ten best" list of both countries all ten entries have 9.0 points or more. Among the most booked, however, not one goes above 9.0: the top of the Australian list is 8.8, that of the New Zealand one exactly 9.0.

Of the fourteen measured countries, it happens in three that no entry on the most booked list steps above 9.0: Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The other eleven also have entries between 9.2 and 9.9 on the booking list.

Looking at the median, the score difference between the two lists is 1.25 points in New Zealand and 0.80 in Australia. Of the fourteen countries, Canada (1.55), the USA (1.30) and New Zealand (1.25) lead this ranking, so the phenomenon is not an Australian peculiarity: it is on the English speaking markets that the gap between "best" and "most booked" opens widest.

In Australia three chains carry the booking list

This is the sharpest finding of this article, and of the fourteen countries it shows only here. On the Australian most booked list the collection found nine entries, and of these eight belong to the same three brands:

Together the three brands supply 12,353 of the list's 14,019 reviews, that is 88 percent of the booking mass. The ninth, the only non chain entry, is Parklands Resort Mudgee, with 7.8 points, the lowest of the nineteen entries on the entire Australian page.

On the booking lists of the other thirteen countries there is practically no repeating brand: in Chile and Tanzania two entries each share a name, in the remaining eleven countries none. So the chain presence is not a feature of the page family but the data of this one country.

In the Croatian article the same duality came out, only from the other side: there the chain-like players were in the lower score band of the list, the small, independent places in the upper one. The chain can do traffic, the small place can do the rating. In Australia this separates so sharply that the two things ended up on two separate lists.

Sample depth: Australia is the only one with no small sample entry

The main finding of our Asian article was that on a "ten best" list an average of ten is possible from six reviews. Australia stands out from this: all nineteen entries on the page have at least 128 reviews, and this is the highest lower threshold among the fourteen countries. The median of the most booked entries is 1,666 reviews, the highest value among the measured countries, and 65 percent more than the next one, the USA (1,011.5).

New Zealand, however, does NOT belong here, and this matters for the axis of the article. In the last two places of the New Zealand "ten best" list stand two entries with 9.8 points, from five reviews each: Go Glamping NZ Ltd and Cruzo The House Bus. On the same page, in the same list, where in second place the Danseys Pass Lavender Farm Domes received 9.9 points from 152 reviews.

The latter is a finding in itself. Of the fourteen countries, in eleven the top entry of the "ten best" list has 9.8 or higher, and in eight of these a review count below twenty stands behind it. There are three exceptions where the top score rests on a three digit sample: Costa Rica (429), New Zealand (152) and the USA (134).

Here too the label says nothing about the type of accommodation

All 275 collected entries of all fourteen countries have the same type label: "Luxuskemping", Hungarian for luxury campsite. Not a single other category occurs. We retrieved the page from a machine in Hungary, which is why the label is in Hungarian.

How much this filters can be seen from the names. Of the ten entries on the New Zealand booking list, five have another accommodation type in their name: two backpackers, one motel and three holiday parks. Among the fourteen countries this is the largest share, together with Brazil (five hostels there). In Australia two of the nine call themselves a holiday park.

In the other direction: the word "glamping" does not appear in a single name on the booking lists of the two countries. On the "ten best" lists it does, for two entries in Australia and four in New Zealand. What is glamping by name gets onto the well rated list; what gets onto the booking list is holiday park and backpackers.

What can be taken from this

1. "Most booked" is not the antechamber of "best". The two lists have no common entry here, and 9.0 points divide them. Anyone choosing an example from such a list should first decide whether they want to see traffic or rating.
2. Chain and small place do not win for the same reason. In Australia 88 percent of the booking mass belongs to three brands, and their scores are between 8.45 and 8.6. The entries of the list above 9.0 are small by comparison, but better rated.
3. A mature market does not mean a deep sample on every entry. In Australia yes, in New Zealand no: there two five review entries are in among the "ten best".
4. Here too the label cannot be used as a filter. Backpackers and motel appear under the same "luxury campsite" label as dome glamping.

Sources, and what CANNOT be claimed from them

• Booking.com national glamping selections: `booking.com/glamping/country/au.html` and `booking.com/glamping/country/nz.html`, and pages of the same title with the codes `ar`, `br`, `bw`, `ca`, `cl`, `cr`, `ke`, `mx`, `na`, `tz`, `us` and `za`. Retrieved 2026-10-09.
• The data was produced by machine processing, not from reading: fourteen pages, 275 entries in total, 39 of them on the Australian and New Zealand pages. Every figure in the article was recalculated from this saved collection. The separation of the two lists was done on the basis of the section titles displayed on the page, and the order of the entries was checked back.

What these pages do NOT tell us: how many glamping accommodations there are in Australia or New Zealand, how big the market is, what the average price, occupancy or seasonality is. They are edited, ten item selections, not supply inventories. We draw no conclusions from this on market size, growth or the true ratio of chain and independent supply.

And what cannot be claimed about the entries: a row on the list is not the same as the operator. Several sites may run under one brand name, and one site may have several rows, so the entry count per brand is not company size. And the scores above 9.0 on the "ten best" lists are not the market averages of the two countries but those of the places taken into the selection, in New Zealand in two cases from five reviews.

We did not measure price in this round, so the article contains not a single price figure. What we measured about prices at all stands in the price section of the Asian article, together with its own limitations.