Away Resorts Brand Guidelines: The UK Holiday Park Group Begun on the Isle of Wight in 2008

Three friends and an Isle of Wight park in 2008.

Away Resorts is a British holiday park operator that began in 2008, when Carl Castledine, Neill Ryder and Greg Lashley bought their first park, Whitecliff Bay on the Isle of Wight. GB News, profiling Castledine in January 2026, described him as the company’s chief executive and co-founder and as the third generation of his family to work in holiday parks, and said he launched the business with the two friends that year. The company’s own history gives the founding roles as Castledine chief executive, Ryder finance director and Lashley operations director.

Castledine told GB News that “UK holidays could be done better,” and that he had grown up around holiday parks and understood “both their magic and their flaws.” The timing was hard: he recalled competing with much bigger players during a credit crunch. The paper said the first park on the Isle of Wight kept the familiar comforts people expected while adding ideas meant to make a stay feel more contemporary, and described the aim as restoring the holiday park’s relevance rather than reinventing it.

The company says it then grew one park at a time. A year after Whitecliff Bay it bought Tattershall Lakes Country Park in Lincolnshire, and the year after that Mill Rythe Holiday Village on Hayling Island in Hampshire. Barmouth Bay Holiday Park in North Wales followed, then Mersea Island Holiday Park in Essex in 2015 and Sandy Balls Holiday Village, in the New Forest, in 2017.

Its own account presents all this as an attempt to update the British holiday park: to keep what people liked about it, drop the parts they did not and add modern touches. The company lists outdoor cinemas, festival-style entertainment, wakeboarding, spas and hot tubs alongside fish and chips and evening talent shows.

Private equity, then a run of acquisitions.

Outside investors arrived in 2015. The private equity firm LDC says on its website that it backed a secondary buyout of Away Resorts that year, working with Castledine on a growth plan built around demand for holidays in the UK. LDC says its follow-on funding supported the purchases of Mersea Island in 2015, Cosways Holiday Park in 2016 and Sandy Balls in 2017, which together formed a group of six sites.

In May 2019, LDC says, it and Castledine sold the business to Bregal Freshstream, with LDC keeping a minority stake. More purchases followed: the company names Boston West Country Park & Hotel in Lincolnshire, since renamed Appletree Holiday Park, and St Ives Bay on the Cornish coast. LDC says it sold its remaining minority holding in June 2021, and that Castledine’s team was continuing to grow the business with the support of CVC Capital Partners.

The CVC investment was followed quickly by two larger deals. On 4 August 2021 City A.M. reported that Away Resorts had agreed to merge with its UK rival Aria Resorts, two months after CVC took a stake, and said the combined group hosted around 750,000 holidaymakers a year across more than 20 holiday parks and a hotel. In a press release dated 21 December 2021, CVC said Away Resorts had agreed to buy Coppergreen Leisure Resorts, which had 370 lodges across four parks in Yorkshire, Scotland, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. CVC said the deal followed the Aria acquisition announced that August and took Away Resorts to 27 locations across the UK, and it described its own investment as coming from its Fund VIII.

The growth came at a time of strong demand for domestic breaks. City A.M. said both companies reported “unprecedented” demand in 2021, with Away Resorts citing a 41 per cent rise in annual bookings, as restrictions on international travel turned holidaymakers towards trips at home.

Holiday parks and campsites.

Holiday park and campsite operators sell a place before they sell a stay. Their websites open on photographs of the parks themselves: lodges and cottages among trees, pitches and mobile homes beside water, covered pools and play areas, published by each company as its own pictures of each site. The operators in this guide range from woodland villages built around an indoor pool to campsites with tents, pitches and wooden cabins, and their imagery follows those settings.

Naming does much of the branding work. Center Parcs renamed one of its early Dutch parks after customer research, according to Dutch Wikipedia, and later called its bungalows “cottages” and its pools Aqua Mundo; Landal pairs its own name with a local one, as in Landal Beach Park Texel. Accommodation is sold by type, from a pitch to a lodge, cottage or villa, and those type names carry through from park maps to booking pages.

The booking interface is where the parts meet. On the operators’ own sites a guest picks a park, then dates, party size and an accommodation type, and the site shows what is free. The journey can continue on a phone: parkurlaub.de reported in 2026 that check-in and a digital door key ran through the Landal app. Park maps show the layout of houses, pitches, paths and facilities, and are published by the companies themselves.

Behind the consumer brands sit corporate pages on owners, and these change often. Several of the companies in this guide have been bought and sold by brewers, insurers, listed groups and investment firms, and some share a name with a business they no longer own. This guide records those ownership changes as dated facts from named sources, and treats each company’s description of itself as its own claim.

Twenty-five parks, by its own count.

Today Away Resorts says it runs 25 parks across Britain. Its website groups them by region: Cornwall, Dorset, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Essex, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, North Wales and Scotland. It offers lodges, caravans, cottages and apartments, touring and camping pitches and glamping, and it sells holiday homes to owners who keep them on its parks. The company highlights any-day arrivals, themed accommodation, included entertainment and swimming pools, and names Kids’ Village as its official company charity.

In the GB News profile Castledine described a sector that is still changing, with families more selective, more focused on value and more interested in experiences that feel personal. “The focus now is on making UK holidays more accessible, more consistent and better value,” he said, adding: “We’re still shaking up the industry.” The same phrase runs through the company’s own history page, where Castledine says he wants an Away Resorts park to be “a couple of hours away from everyone” in the UK.

For a design guide, Away Resorts shows a holiday park group selling familiar seaside pleasures in a bright, playful voice. Compare Haven and Parkdean Resorts, two other British holiday park operators. For this guide we use a sea teal, a harbour navy and a sunset coral on sand with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Away Resorts’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.