Never ever stay at Gin Gin caravan park!

by Sarah
(Perth, WA, Australia)

My family have been to this caravan park for the last 8 years for Easter. This was once beautiful and grassy, a short drive from Perth and a lovely camp site. This year our experience was very different. Firstly, the staff had so much difficulty taking a simple booking that we had to call them three times.

Our holiday was lovely until the Sunday when we came home to a note under our tent advising us that we were not allowed to have a light on an unpowered site. For the last 7 years we have rented a powered caravan site and an unpowered tent site next to each other- we have run a single extension cord to the tent and powered a lamp for around 5-10 minutes each evening whilst getting ready for bed. Previously this has not been a problem.

The note requested that we go to the office and pay an extra $12 per night for use of electricity. As we did not know we were doing anything wrong, we immediately removed the extension cord and light.

A member of staff (Terri) converged upon our caravan and tent later that evening. She immediately started shouting at us about stealing their electricity (apparently we had deliberately parked our caravan crooked in order to enable this theft of electricity).

She then advised us that if we did not pay for the electricity she would call the police and have us removed. When we advised that we have done this for the past 7 years she advised us that we had clearly been ripping them off for this period of time and that she did not care that we were return customers.

She told us that she was going to call police and left. My father and partner went over to the petrol station to discuss the issue with the manager. Unfortunately he was so drunk that she was slurring words badly and smelt strongly of beer. He too was offensive and refused to let us off on the charge for electricity.

My partner and I went to pay the $24 we owed them for 2 nights electricity only to be informed that we actually only owed them $14. The manager then made a comment about 'all this fuss for $14'- well exactly. We will not be returning and I certainly don't recommend this to other campers.

To cap it all off, the police arrived at the caravan park some 15 minutes later and did multiple laps around our area- the owners quite clearly have called police over $14!