Notably... This business owns a lot of forest in the UK.
The UK doesn't have much forest.
So, they can make themselves appear more valuable by pushing up the price of forest land.
Forest land used to be priced based on the lumber value - which is almost nil. There was also the pricing element of the possible agricultural value if it were to be cut down (which is also almost nul, because the land is usually unsuitable for agriculture). There is also the very high value if you were somehow able to build houses on it, but the very low probability of being able to secure permits to do so.
However, I have noticed odd real estate transactions in the last ~decade for forest land. Specifically, a few companies have been buying up lots of forest land, dividing it into tiny parcels, often just a few hundred yards in each direction, and selling it for 10x the price.
Most don't sell, but a few do - and thats all you need to make the basis of a new market price.
Now when you value all of center parcs land, it looks way better!!!
And there is a 2nd factor... Center parcs usually get permission to build lodges on their land as temporary forest huts, and since they aren't made for anyone to be resident in, this is normally seen as an okay use of otherwise protected forest. Gradually over many years they can slowly turn it into a brownfield site by trimming out trees. 20 yrs down the line they might get permission to build actual houses on the land. Suddenly it's worth 100x as much.
I would 100% not be surprised if center parcs end up making more money by this conversion of forest land to residential (skirting laws designed to protect forests) than they make from decades of running the parks.
It's also because an exception to inheritance tax that covers farm land and forests. Rich people have been buying up both (Dyson owns several counties now).
Literally yes - generational farms are expected to go out of business when the head of the family dies as a result, and have to sell up to massive farm businesses.
Excluding any type of income from taxation means every other type of income needs to be taxed at a higher rate, all to protect whatever is being carved out. Thus we tax income from investments, salaries, and yes inheritance.
Inheritance tax has positive externalities as inherited wealth discourages people from being productive members of society. Meanwhile taxing salaries discourages work, and taxing investments discourages savings.
That reductionist analysis treats people as individualised economic drones. What do you mean by "productive" - earning a salary? Contributing to civic society? People don't just do nothing if they have means.
Inheritance tax damages filial peity and encourages the disintegration of society.
A hobo is less damaging than an unproductive trust fund kid. Many people contribute nothing which directly disintegrates society no encouragement required.
If a moderately larger inheritance seems to impact filial piety then it didn’t exist in the first place.
You seem to be very cynical about the input of people with money. This "unproductive trust fund kid" seems to be a sort of caricature which is easy to rely on because it evokes the "undeserving rich".
In reality, inherited wealth leads to the security which can result in great feats in music, the arts, new business, and the growth of civil society.
And encouraging generations to rely on one another directly, rather than via a welfare state, ensures that people take care of each other properly.
The alternative is the sort of degenerate individualism which has so severely weakened western society.
It might occasionally have positive outcomes but this is rare enough I’ve never seen it. I have seen the far more likely destruction personally and repeatedly. You may assume there are close family bonds with such situations, but for someone who’s never worked child rearing is an unpleasant shift, time for nanny’s etc.
People picture retirement just early, but there’s many social structures built to support people leaving the workforce in their 60’s. A 15 year old who knows they will never need to work is set adrift, why exactly go to college or even get good grades in high school? In their 20’s it’s hard to maintain relationships with people who are unavailable most of the time and can’t suddenly travel on a whim. Spending time with others set adrift can be fine, but tends to result in extremes like BASE jumping, drugs, etc. Even hobbies like general aviation can get surprisingly deadly when you have extreme amounts of free time for decades.
Honestly, the negative impact on the individual is seriously underappreciated. It’s bad enough I am not handing personal wealth to family and advise everyone else to do the same.
PS: A possible exception is matching income. 1$ of inheritance per 1$ earned seems like it would mostly solve these issues, but I don’t have enough examples to know if it actually works and I am not willing to experiment on family members.
> "Inheritance tax shouldn't be a thing in the first place."
The problem with entrenched intergenerational wealth is you eventually end up with a feudalistic society, with a small population of extremely wealthy families controlling all the capital but essentially just becoming rent-seekers, with no incentive or need to innovate in order to maintain their wealth (on the contrary, they will seek to suppress innovation and disruption in order to maintain the status quo). In the long run this leads to violent revolution or other forms of societal collapse.
Some states call it different things but most call it in "Current Use." [0]
If you want to take the land out of Current Use, you'll usually have to pay the back taxes first.
Around my parts, it's seen as a very good program as it promotes natural growth. It's also great for protecting wetlands that wouldn't be buildable anyways but can now be protected at a lower cost.
> Most don't sell, but a few do - and thats all you need to make the basis of a new market price.
That seems like an elementary mistake for a buyer/lender (who would be appraising the property for use as collateral). Unless the lender has a too big to fail guarantee where everyone but the taxpayer wins as long as a plausibly deniable deal is made.
As an aside, the linked article has no substance to support its theory.
The banks don’t care because they package the loans up as securities and sell them to investors. The investors don’t care as long as they’re packaged up with a bunch of other healthy mortgages.
This was one of the causes of the ‘08 financial crisis.
PE is terrible, but this isn't a good example as there's plenty of competition for Center Parcs. Plus they raise their prices during school holidays when there's greatest demand, that's not an unfair practice, that's rationing out a limited resource when demand is greatest, economics 101.
Bad PE looks like private equity trying to corner the market in vets[1] and dental practices[2], services that you don't really have a choice over.
If the government want to help (and the new government has shown a strange attraction to price interference), they could simply let schools choose their own holidays, as long as they have the right number of school days in the year.
It would be a bit harder for families with kids in different schools, but probably most schools would be _more or less_ the same, with just a bit more variation to spread it around a little bit.
You can change it up slightly, but there is just no way to go from a delta distribution around the same weeks to a uniform distribution around the year. People want to have summer vacation in summer, and they often want it to overlaps with the vacation of relatives and family.
You’ll never get a system where demand for vacation options is independent of period.
> Plus they raise their prices during school holidays when there's greatest demand, that's not an unfair practice, that's rationing out a limited resource when demand is greatest, economics 101.
You will never get people to understand this concept. Never. People genuinely think that they would be able to causally login a month before holidays and book a cabin at normal pricing for a week.
The reason PE is often viewed as terrible is that it seems to be strongly correlated with short-term-optimized business practices which end up being destructive to most stakeholders.
The general playbook: Borrow a bunch of money and use it to buy an existing company, pay yourself a bunch of money, extract a bunch of profit by ripping off customers and not reinvesting in the company, sell or go bankrupt. Everyone loses except for the people who paid themselves handsomely along the way.
As described in this story, Center Parcs doesn't seem to be following this playbook. Charging money for peak demand is not something unique to them, to PE companies, and not even remotely new. However, underinvesting in the company and hiding that behind financials that look good at a superficial glance -- as done in this article -- well let's just say I wouldn't be eager to buy without doing some extreme due diligence.
The issue with private equity (PE) at Center Parcs UK (CPUK) is that the debt that was used to buy CPUK is being serviced by the company itself. The PE used debt they're not paying to pay for them getting to profit off something.
If CPUK was just spun off and IPOed, the money from the sale of shares, and/or loans with shares as collateral, could have been used for the capital investments needed.
Instead, there's a private equity firm providing nothing of note, taking profit and saddling the actually productive enterprise with debt for the privilege. For another popular example from the UK, check Manchester United. That's the other big issue with PE, other than the fatal short-termism.
I've just come back from Center Parcs and have been many times over the past 15 years (but took a break between COVID and now due to their policies over that period). It was fantastic as always, but I'm not sure everything is well.
The park has demand-based pricing for the accommodation, but this doesn't apply to activities or restaurants. We dined out every day, yet despite the park being full, the restaurants were at 25-50% capacity, whereas on earlier pre-COVID visits you'd have to reserve weeks in advance. The same was true for the activities - except for the cheapest options like pottery painting. The cost of living crisis seems to have truly hit Center Parcs' guests, and I'm wondering if it has the ability to adapt to this, as well as it adapts the prices of the accommodation.
I remember going to Center Parks maybe 25-30 years ago with my parents and another family (all in one lodge). I also remember humping in bags and bags of food and drink and getting the bikes off the car roofs.
Perhaps it's just a return to the ancient British Dad tradition of not paying for the optional extras after briefly convincing we millennials that every worthwhile experience has an uplift fee. Even, perhaps especially, if it means organising the stocking of the cars like Captain Scott preparing for a zombie apocalypse.
Of course, the best bit of the holiday was never going to be a manky old restaurant, you can have those anywhere. It was the forest, the cycling without threat of being turned into chunky salsa on an A-road, the unusual accomodation, the pool, the lodge bubble baths and most of all the fact that blocky-cushioned sofas disassembled into amazing fortress construction materials.
That's a popular way to do it! But I think it may end up being the way to do it, at this rate. The restaurants used to be very popular in spite of the prices. We eat out as we don't want to cook (enough of that when we go camping!) and the quality of the restaurants is genuinely good (especially their gluten free provision). Whoever buys CP will need to adjust to a new reality though and go much further down the price scale for purchases within the park (one place that was always extremely busy was the Starbucks!)
I love Center Parcs, it's great place to go with the family. But we always just bring our own food, pack our bikes on the car and usually eat out at one of the restaurants maybe once per stay as a special treat. I assumed most people did the same? The restaurants are hugely overpriced(imho).
A lot of people certainly always did that, but now it feels like most people are. The restaurants have kept their high prices while seemingly losing most of their clientele. I wouldn't be surprised if they introduce cruise-style dining credits or something with the higher priced lodges to mitigate it.
Based on the tone of the article, I think "price-gouged" is how this gentleman would describe any holiday based spending. He doesn't seem to like spending money on his holidays one bit. Every time he actually go into detail the practices seem normal and the prices fair.
It took me a while to realise that this article does not seem to involve any price-gouging of any sort but is actually about pricing a private equity deal. Still an interesting read.
Author of the article here. That's not what I mean at all. As I said in the article, I love Center Parcs. And I've been on a cruise and spent a ton of money there, and it was totally worth it. The point in here was just that it's interesting to look at the market dynamics of a captive hoilday business like this and how that flows through the P&L and balance sheet.
E.g. Center Parcs makes insane gross margins e.g. food and drink because prices for those ARE insanely expensive relative to other places you could go out and eat. BUT that doesn't actually lead to crazy levels of profitability because it's a capital intensive business that requires lots of capex and/or debt financing to sustain.
The whole point is to take a deeper dive than most surface-level commentaries of "bloody hell Center Parcs is expensive" and see what's actually going on under the hood of the business.
And calling it 'price-gouging' is a bit of a nod to that, and it's a bit of a joke about how expensive a crap steak is there, and it's a way to get people's attention. Like other people have said, Center Parcs is mostly just a function of supply and demand. They have a great product, and people like me are willing to pay for it.
I've never been to Center Parcs and have no plans to go, despite it looking pretty nice, because it is just eye-wateringly expensive. We can debate what 'price-gouging' means, but their prices are insanely high compared to other holiday options. Of course, they can do that. I just find it pretty astonishing that anyone ever goes there.
I've only been once and didn't really enjoy it (family with two kids, 6 and 3, at the time). I can see why people do, though.
You could do all the activities (apart from the swimming pool), better, cheaper and in nicer surroundings, in a cottage in Wales or similar, but that would take planning and effort and (as the article points out) probably involves some driving rather than cycling/walking everywhere.
You are trapped in centre parks and they control the prices for everything. On a normal holiday you have choice of where to eat or what activities to do etc. You don't get that at center parca - it is like a stationary cruise ship where you can only leave when they allow it.
But it's a trap you've chosen to walk into, when there are literally millions of alternative ways to spend your holidays that don't involve staying on a company's private estate whose main attraction is a wide range of chargeable activities which it's the only provider of in the area. As with activity prices on cruises the natural response isn't "gollygosh how did you survive?" it's "if that sort of thing bothers you why did you pick that holiday?". As the rest of the article goes on to clarify, it isn't even like the operators are actually making a killing when you consider the amount of investment involved in buying woodland and waterslides (and that the half-term surge prices for accommodation are the bookends for months of low occupancy).
Plus if you really hate their catering prices, there's nothing stopping you driving to the cafe or supermarket in the next village and bringing your own bikes
Well, yes. That does appear to be what the people are paying for. The point here seems to be a sort of naturalist luxury experience in a carefully over-managed environment. I see this as similar to getting on the cruise ship and then being surprised that there isn't an independent marketplace on board.
If someone goes to a luxury accommodation experience and then become perturbed at being charged luxury prices, that seems to be a problem with their expectations.
Not really. You can walk to your car, hop in and drive out anytime.
They just have security to check who is coming and going, not to stop anyone.
Better still, you can cycle out with their rental bike no problem. Thetford is a nice cycle from Elveden... though the rental bikes maybe aren't the best for those sort of distances.
The experience on the ground is very much one of you being price gouged. It is galling to spend so much on the booking, then sit down at a rubbish Italian chain restaurant and pay twice what you would do in the nearest town.
I don't mind spending a lot on holidays and travel, but we didn't return to Centre Parcs for this reason. It crossed the line from expensive to unreasonable.
> which is why it’s spelled in the somewhat Francophile Center Parcs, and not Centre Parks. (I thought this is why we did Brexit?)
Pardon me?
The French for center/centre is centre - the 're' ending of British English spelling is either taken from the French, or sometimes a direct reference to French spelling (i.e. 'prestige' spelling - like how some American publications will use British English spelling because they 'look more posh' or similar).
I imagine the "Francophile" comment is referring to "parcs" instead of "parks", but it's fascinating that they swapped out both spellings rather than choosing to be consistent with a single style.
"Centre" is still not French if you pronounce it "Center" though. In French it's more like Train, where the vowel is after the R. But the real French R sound is hard to prounounce for Englishmen.
I assert that if the occupancy rate is 80%, they're charging exactly what they should be charging.
If you own a hotel in the US, you are over the moon if you achieve a >70% occupancy rate. You are a hotel god. You are a master of the hospitality domain, Cornell will give you an honorary degree in Hotel Management, and you have made both supply and demand your bitch.
"Oh my! Why is this four bedroom luxury lodge with hot tub and pool table, very obviously meant to be split amongst four couples eight ways, an entire fourteen hundred bucks ($175 ea.) per night?"
Based on the three YouTube tours of four bedroom exclusive lodges in Woburn I skimmed through prior to making my comment to be sure I understood the context of the lodge, it appears to me to be configured for adult use.
Each of the four "bedrooms" is more like an attached suite, the dining room is configured for eight adults, and three children and their parents do not seem to require a sauna that large.
Children can't be ruled out, however, as one of the videos noted that a high chair is available in a storage closet.
“Price-gouged” is sort of a dog-whistle for me these days… most often when it is used it is a person complaining about a limited resource costing more when in high demand. It’s not always 100% that but usually leans heavily that way on the spectrum.
There is a real (and sometimes large) but also subjective distinction between price gouging and market (supply & demand) pricing. The article discussed higher prices during peak demand school holidays, which isn’t price gouging on its own, and only suggests normal market high-demand pricing. Most importantly, the high demand pricing is regular and predictable: everyone knows when the school holidays are coming and they know in advance when the prices will be higher. Price gouging is most often used to describe selling basic needs at very extreme prices during an emergency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_gouging
Also important to note here, the UK has anti price gouging laws. This doesn’t mean Center Parcs isn’t violating them, but without any specific evidence, I’d guess a good default assumption is that what they’re doing isn’t price gouging by the law’s definition.
> The article discussed higher prices during peak demand school holidays, which isn’t price gouging on its own, and only suggests normal market high-demand pricing. Most importantly, the high demand pricing is regular and predictable [..] Price gouging is most often used to describe selling basic needs at very extreme prices during an emergency.
This is more a defense of price-gouging by bringing in market-based price fixing arguments than a strong argument to defend a "fair" price.
We can take the price of insulin in the US as an example fitting that description:
- It is a "normal market" high-demand pricing
- The demand is regular and predictable.
- There no emergency (except for the diabetics that cannot afford the medicine they desperately need)
And yet, at 10x the average price of insulin on the European market, it is clearly price-gouging.
Aside from emergencies, there are other scenarios where the term price gouging is justified, as described in the Wikipedia article I posted. Those include monopoly pricing, and excessive beyond fair market pricing, and more. Your example of insulin is one of monopoly pricing. Obviously monopoly pricing of insulin isn’t subject to seasonal demand and wasn’t caused by an acute geographic emergency, which is why calling it price gouging is justified in that case, and why your example isn’t very relevant to this article.
The article wasn’t even about price gouging anyway, that’s a slightly click-bait title, and it never provided evidence and instead went off discussing investment financing at length.
It’s absolutely standard practice, and considered “fair”, for hotels to charge more money during busy seasons and busy weeks, globally. You need more evidence than the existence of high-demand market pricing in order to justify calling what’s in the article ‘price gouging’. I have in no way defended price gouging. If you’re anti-free-market and don’t believe prices should change based on demand, that’s fine, but that’s a different debate entirely.
This is not price gouging, but rather it's a price the market supports.
The debt shouldn't make a difference to pricing unless debt free owners were reducing pricing below what they could charge (with the trade off being that you won't be able to book except with quick fingers on days of release).
> As an example, watch the price of a family-sized lodge miraculously double from one week to the next, thanks to school holidays.
This is just market mechanics. School holidays is when families with school aged kids are looking to get a place so the demand is higher. This happens to everything. It’s not some dark conspiracy to gouge out people. If some folks are willing to pay TWICE what you want to pay, just to get the same place then they are allowed to do so and you can’t complain that you don’t get it for half the cost, you could just book your stay outside the school holidays if you want it cheaper.
It's just one measure of profitability. Is it a con to report a business's gross revenue? Hardly.
It has a useful meaning in its context. If you're going to value a business based on a single number, your problems can't be fixed by blaming the number.
Author of the article here -- kind of, but the idea here was just to write a piece about a capital-intensive business compared to the couple of capital-light businesses I'd covered in the prior articles I wrote, and how that difference in capital requirements plays through the P&L, balance sheet and cash flow statement. One effect of capital intensity is that EBITDA becomes a less useful measure, sure. Another effect is that the cashflow statement becomes incredibly important to running the business, as does understanding the difference between maintenance capex and growth capex.
It's known colloquially as "Earnings before bad stuff" because you can use it to hide all the stuff in your accounts that doesn't make you look good. It's not a con, more like obfuscation.
The author wrongly implies that if Center Parcs was just owned by a public company or an individual, that those controlling entities would simply not care about making a profit and wouldn’t charge the prices they do. Author also ignores inconvenient facts such as how the private equity firms actually spent a lot of money upgrading parks in order to make them the desirable locations they are today. I suppose author would’ve preferred they be kept in disarray but cheap?? I could go on but no point. This kind of left wing economic ignorance (redundant?) is tiring but sadly expected. Private equity isn’t perfect but it’s been made out to be some sort of bogeyman it’s demonstrably not.
Hello! Author of the article here. Thanks for the comments, and appreciate the discusssion. I'll start off by pointing out that I'm not left wing, and I have an economics degree so my old lecturers would be disappointed if I was still described as 'economically ignorant.' And I completely agree that PE isn't perfect and I completely agree that PE isn't a bogeyman of any sort. Like any kind of business, I'm sure there are good PE firms and not-so-good PE firms, and firms at every point along that spectrum.
I don't intend to at all imply that Center Parcs would be better off as a public company, or in the hands of a private individual. I'm pointing out that the surface level commentary of "bloody hell Center Parcs is expensive" is misleading, and the reality is much more nuanced than that, hence the need for a deep dive into the financials. Points I make in the article:
1) Center Parcs makes great gross margins on accommodation and food & drink, and EBITDA looks great, but that's a misleading way to look at the business precisely because it's capital-intensive, and the owners -- whether PE, public, or a private individual -- have to continue to reinvest maintenance or growth capex to keep it that way. And that requires either cash or debt, there's no way around that.
2) I contrasted it with a couple of capital-light businesses to show the difference in P&L and balance sheet dynamics, precisely because people often misunderstand capital intensity and the impacts on the business model.
3) I gave a restated measure of profitability (EBDAT), and show the normalised free cash flow which show that Center Parcs is a fairly normal performing business with decent but unspectactular returns. It's definitely not the case that the PE owners are simply pricing things high and raking in the cash.
4) I showed that the expected valuation of £4.5-5bn might be difficult to achieve at a time of rising interest rates, because both capital intense businesses and large PE deals require lots of debt. I make no value judgment on the use of debt -- debt is a tool to use in any business, and just like a surgeon's scalpel, it can be used for good or for harm.
Again, this is much more nuanced than 'PE bad, high prices bad' which is the surface-level analysis that I'm poking fun at in the title and in the piece.
Parents are fined and (in a minority of cases) imprisoned for taking children out of school in term-time. Usually it's the ones who are honest that end up getting in trouble, and the others that can pass it off as sickness get away with it.
During Covid and recent NASUWT/NAHT/NEU strikes though, it's seemingly not been seen as a problem for kids to miss out significantly on face-to-face learning!
I think most teachers would agree that, for pupils without a significant attendance problem, a week away (particularly if it's towards the end of a term) is not going to make a realistic difference when it comes to attainment for most students.
> I think most teachers would agree that, for pupils without a significant attendance problem, a week away (particularly if it's towards the end of a term) is not going to make a realistic difference when it comes to attainment for most students.
I generally agree with this, but discretion doesn't scale. If you allow teachers to use discretion to approve absences, it will create the opportunity unfair system, where people who the teacher likes more may get preferential treatment. And even if the system isn't actually unfair, it'll create the perception of unfairness (Joe was allowed to go early, why can't my son?).
It's also way easier for a school to say "no early absences, that's the national policy", and not have to get into constant arguments with parents.
> It's also way easier for a school to say "no early absences, that's the national policy", and not have to get into constant arguments with parents.
Also, if the teachers/school approved the holiday for someone who then underperformed in some exam or other assessment, and it could be seen that missing something in that week off, you can bet your last penny that many parents will blame the school for approving the request instead of telling them there might be a problem, and if the school deny a request because there might be a problem many parents will blame the school for there being a problem in the first place.
In some cases the problem would be with the school, but it wouldn't be just those cases that get the full-on compo-face-in-the-national-press treatment. Teachers jobs are hard enough as it is, especially given the level of remuneration and other conditions, without asking them to take on this responsibility.
Skipping school can have a significantly detrimental effect on a child, it doesn't always, maybe it doesn't most of the time, but it does often enough that it is a significant concern. If people don't like how the school system works, perhaps they should try homeschooling?
To be blunt: I don't pay my taxes to fund an education system¹ so someone's offspring can wag off…
----
[1] I don't begrudge funding the education system generally, despite not having (and not planning to have) kids myself² because I'm well aware that good education for all is a huge benefit for society as a whole
[2] Before anyone says “you don't have kids, you don't know how hard it can be”: I know full well how hard it can be and that is one of the reasons for my intention to never breed, I can't speak for anyone else's but my decision on the matter is not the one taken from a position of inadequate awareness
We took our children out of school for three months about twenty years ago because I had the opportunity to work for that period in the US. We asked the school to provide the targets for the period for each child and my wife ensured that the children did a few hours work every day, not a whole day by any means. When we got back to Norway all three of the children were ahead of their classes.
In Norway there seems to be no requirement to attend school, only a requirement that the children be educated. The headmistress tried to pressure my wife to not take the children out but the only penalty she could apply was a vague threat that there might not be places available when they got back.
One idea that might reduce the problem that the UK has would be to adopt the Polish system of dividing the country into four school regions with staggered holidays.
There are staggered holidays, but it's uncoordinated, based around local council areas - i.e. areas with a population of a hundred-thousand to around a million people. One council may run mid-July to end-of-August, another council a week earlier, and a third a week later.
The UK summer vacation (summer holiday in British English) is significantly shorter than in other countries - only six weeks, where I understand eight or nine is common in other European countries. This probably significantly adds to the holiday congestion and higher surge pricing.
> The UK summer vacation (summer holiday in British English) is significantly shorter than in other countries
This is compensated by "half-term" weeks, where schools close in the middle of a semester, so in total there is no difference. Predictably, those weeks also see massive spikes in prices for holidays, airfare, etc.
The UK education system is built from the ground up to ensure class lines remain intact. This is just another facet of it: the wealthy will go on holiday no matter what; others will either not go or be price-gouged, hence ensuring they cannot accumulate enough to ever challenge the ruling class.
> One idea that might reduce the problem that the UK has would be to adopt the Polish system of dividing the country into four school regions with staggered holidays.
Predators will be predators, and the prices will be jacked-up to cover the holiday span of the four regions..
The choice we have is to not given them money by not going there..
> One idea that might reduce the problem that the UK has would be to adopt the Polish system of dividing the country into four school regions with staggered holidays.
We're some of the way there - Scottish school terms run differently to England/Wales/NI (Scottish schools stopped and went back ~2 weeks earlier).
Is there? We didn't make any formal application, we just said they wouldn't be there for that three month period and could we please have the lesson plans.
But remember my children went to school in Norway where there is considerably less hostility and friction between the state and the people.
It's the same reason I would never go on a cruise ship. You're locked into a floating hotel for a few weeks and they can charge whatever they want while you're aboard. But plenty of people seem to like them, and there is loads of competition (other holidays available), so it's not a problem that cruise ships are like this.
That they did, but they're servicing massive amounts of debt to be in the position to do so (i.e. to own the company).
It's obviously a thing you may do, and it's what PE does do. Just as the article said, it's fundamentally the same idea as renting out a mortgaged house.
But it also means that what's actually going on is that the business is really just the catalyst for the actual transaction of interest: moving money from the consumers to whoever lent the money to the PE firm in the first place. The PE firm business is to get paid to be the middlemen.
More is spent paying for the debt then is spent on the capital expenditures. New things and maintenance of existing things combined are well under the approximate £100m debt bill. The thing is, Center Parcs has existed for decades, so the debt is sort of artificial: if it had never been bought on finance by PE, there could be, say, £100m per year more to spend (capex, opex, whatever) without changing prices to the consumer at all.
It's a bit like being in that rented house, but the house was sold by an outright owner who could afford a install a new boiler to someone on a 80% LTV mortgage and now the landlord needs to put the prices up to cover the interest because their rates went up. Yes, the new owner couldn't have afforded the house without loading up on debt, so it's nice for them that someone will front the cash to get then into the landlord business. If no one can afford to build outright, it's also good that there are ways to pay for the capex at all, or no one could build any houses in the first place(1). But it's cold comfort to the tenant in question who is now personally paying for all the "value added" for less ability to get a new boiler then they had before.
(1) I'm unsure how much debt enabled the original Sherwood Forest site to be built at all, but £32m in 1987 isn't chump change. Then again the base rate was over 8%, so debt was pretty expensive. It was double that at around 15% in 1989 when they opened the second site. So, considering they didn't sink, either they had good profitability straight away or a small debt load.
We stayed for the first time this year with our two small kids. We went "off season" in Jan when prices were reasonable.
I can see the attraction but centre parks does not feel like a great place for small kids. There is no laundry facilities in the lodges, and not even anywhere on site! The heating kept resetting to 14c overnight in January. There are gas ovens (gas! In 2024!) with zero effort at child proofing (I await the inevitable news story about a family getting blown-up when their 18 month old accidentally turned on the gas oven...). You are made to feel very unwelcome if you have the temerity to try to leave the place not at the scheduled time - getting back in by car was like trying to pass through a Berlin Wall checkpoint or something equally unpleasant. Many activities were only for 3 years+. Despite not being allowed to drive your own car, there were a lot of service vehicles and the like driving around the place so it wasn't even safe to cycle around or let the kids run free. There were outdoors playgrounds, but no indoor playgrounds/soft play apart from tiny ones attached to restaurants (perfect combo that: recently fed kid and jumping about....), and the outdoor playgrounds were mostly unsuitable for kids under 5 ... This is the UK - it rains all the time so you need indoor options! You have to wear an electronic wristband everywhere you go to e.g. use a locker or unlock your door, but you can't use it to pay for things.
Could you be more concrete please? What did you do? What did you experience?
Basically I'm asking this because I'm trying to understand. I see two options:
option 1: the oven is lacking several expected safety features and it is actually dangerous.
option 2: the oven has the usual safety features, you (and your toddler) were perfectly safe, you just didn't know this because you don't understand how gas ovens functions, and what safety features they have.
On any modern oven if you turn the gas on and the flame goes out (or does not light at all) the gas flow stops. You have to keep the knob pressed in to start the flow just turning the knob does not on itself enables the gas to flow. At the same time the action of pushing in the knob starts sparks which light the gas flowing out.
For a toddler (or you) to blew up the oven they need to turn the knob, push it in, and the ignitors need to fail to ignite, and you or your toddler need to keep pushing the knob. Are you saying that the ignitors failed? or that the thermistor failed to shut off the glass flow?
Honestly, I can’t remember the details. I turned the nob to preheat the oven not realising it was gas. Later came back to check, opened the door to a strong smell of gas. Maybe it had cut out by then, not sure.
Was I dumb? Yes, but I’d just driven for hours and was trying to unpack, handle the rest of the family and cook dinner all at once and was still in the mindset of the electric oven I had at home.
Doesn't sounds like it. I mean in general it is bad form to blame users for safety problems. Even more so in an unfamiliar environment.
If the oven had a safety thermocouple and it was working correctly there should have been 0 gas smell after what you say you did. If you did that and smelled gas then the oven was either faulty or very old.
The UK doesn't have much forest.
So, they can make themselves appear more valuable by pushing up the price of forest land.
Forest land used to be priced based on the lumber value - which is almost nil. There was also the pricing element of the possible agricultural value if it were to be cut down (which is also almost nul, because the land is usually unsuitable for agriculture). There is also the very high value if you were somehow able to build houses on it, but the very low probability of being able to secure permits to do so.
However, I have noticed odd real estate transactions in the last ~decade for forest land. Specifically, a few companies have been buying up lots of forest land, dividing it into tiny parcels, often just a few hundred yards in each direction, and selling it for 10x the price.
Most don't sell, but a few do - and thats all you need to make the basis of a new market price.
Now when you value all of center parcs land, it looks way better!!!
And there is a 2nd factor... Center parcs usually get permission to build lodges on their land as temporary forest huts, and since they aren't made for anyone to be resident in, this is normally seen as an okay use of otherwise protected forest. Gradually over many years they can slowly turn it into a brownfield site by trimming out trees. 20 yrs down the line they might get permission to build actual houses on the land. Suddenly it's worth 100x as much.
I would 100% not be surprised if center parcs end up making more money by this conversion of forest land to residential (skirting laws designed to protect forests) than they make from decades of running the parks.
reply