Special Field Report — No. 01: The German Camping Market - A €821 Million Market Nobody Has Properly Disrupted Yet

The German camping market has been growing double-digit for years. International investors, private equity firms, and foreign chains are now moving in. France, Scandinavia, Switzerland — everyone wants a piece of the German camping pie. And anyone who understands real estate recognises the pattern immediately: this is the exact starting position that triggers consolidation waves.
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43 million overnight stays in 2024. €821 million in revenue — and that was 2022, before the most recent rounds of price increases. A new record in 2025 with 44.7 million stays, growing 4.2% year-on-year. The hotel sector declined in the same period. Camping grew. And now something is happening that will fundamentally change this industry.
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The question is whether this is a genuine opportunity for real estate professionals and hospitality operators — or the next hype topic where only the biggest players ultimately win. To answer that, we need to look at who is buying, why, and where the risks and returns actually lie.
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The Numbers That Explain the Interest
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The starting point is a market that has doubled in twenty years. In 2005, German campgrounds recorded 21.7 million overnight stays. In 2025 that number reached 44.7 million — a 105.5% increase within a single generation. Frank Schaal, Managing Director of the German Federal Association of Camping (BVCD), expected 2025 to at least match the 2024 record. The result exceeded expectations.
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The structural driver is not new, but it has accelerated. Over the past five years, Germans have acquired motorhomes and caravans in mass numbers. Vehicle registrations in the category have grown by over 30% since 2019. With 74,718 new motorhome registrations in 2024 alone — a 9.1% increase year-on-year — and a record 187,219 secondhand units changing hands, the installed base of camping-capable households is at an all-time high and still growing. These people need pitches. Regularly. Repeatedly. Year after year.
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This is not a one-time wave. This is recurring demand. And that is precisely what makes the market attractive to investors: predictable seasonal cashflows, low churn, and a product that is almost completely immune to the threats of remote work, online commerce, or digitalisation. You cannot digitalise a tent.
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The numbers that matter for investment analysis sit alongside the overnight stay data:
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→  Overnight stays 2025: 44.7 million — 4th consecutive record year (Destatis)

→  Market revenue: €821M (2022 baseline) → €530M+ campground sector 2025 (Statista) — pre-price-increase revenues are the floor, not the ceiling

→  Vehicle stock growth since 2019: +30%+ registered motorhomes and caravans

→  Growth vs pre-pandemic: +24.9% above 2019 levels

→  Hotel sector in same period: -0.4% — camping outperformed by nearly 5 percentage points

→  Average overnight cost: €40/night Germany — still the cheapest in Western Europe (Italy: €66, Croatia: €68)

→  Campgrounds: 3,202 sites — vast majority in family or municipal ownership

→  Guest profile: ~50% from the upper income third · 37% aged 30–40

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That last figure — half of all German camping guests in the top income third — is the number that most surprises people who still associate camping with budget travel. The German camping market has completed a quality migration. The guest arriving at the campground is no longer the backpacker with a two-person tent. They are a professional in their thirties, with a €80,000 motorhome, a booking made six months in advance, and a willingness to pay materially more for a site that meets their standard.
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The Real Estate Logic: Why This Market Pattern Is Familiar
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For anyone with a background in real estate investment, the structural description of the German camping market triggers an immediate recognition. Over 3,200 sites. The overwhelming majority in family ownership or operated by municipalities. Small-scale, fragmented, barely professionalised. Minimal digital infrastructure. No yield management. No brand platform. No consolidated acquisition market.
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This is the exact configuration that has historically preceded consolidation waves in every comparable real estate-adjacent sector. Student housing looked like this in the early 2000s. Serviced apartments in the 2010s. Self-storage. Logistics. Healthcare real estate. All were initially dismissed as niche categories, belittled by institutional investors, then within a few years absorbed the kind of institutional attention that compressed returns and rewarded early movers with outsized exits.
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When private equity money starts flowing into a market, it is usually a signal of two things simultaneously: the returns are there — and the window for buying cheaply will not stay open forever.

The consolidation thesis in German camping is structurally identical to those earlier waves. The fragmentation is the opportunity. The professionalisation upside is the return driver. The question is not whether consolidation will happen — the international operators already arriving make that question moot. The question is who moves early enough to benefit from the pre-consolidation pricing.
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The Buyers: Who Is Moving and What They Know
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The list of active acquirers in the German camping market in 2024–2025 is instructive in its diversity. It includes a French entertainment chain, a Scandinavian rollup vehicle, a Swiss-listed holding company, a Berlin-then-Hamburg startup, and an expanding cohort of private equity firms with no prior camping experience. They are arriving from different directions and with different playbooks — but they share a common read of the structural opportunity.

CapFun: France Knows the Playbook
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The first significant cross-border move came from France. CapFun — part of the PHA Group, with over 200 holiday parks across France — acquired its first German campground in Tecklenburg in the Teutoburg Forest. The seller was Regenbogen AG, one of the few small chains that existed in Germany.
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The reason this matters is not the transaction itself. It is what CapFun represents: a company that has already executed in France exactly what is now beginning in Germany. France has been through the transition from family-operated campground to professionalised chain. CapFun knows the playbook — the acquisition criteria, the integration methodology, the amenity investments that drive yield, the guest experience changes that justify price increases. They are not arriving to learn the market. They are arriving to apply a proven model to a market that has not yet been through the same process.
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First Camp: The Nordic Consolidation Model
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Parallel to CapFun's entry, Scandinavian chain First Camp has Germany explicitly in its sights. CEO Johan Söör has been publicly clear: he is convinced that the consolidation experience from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway is directly transferable to the German market.
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The evidence base for this conviction is First Camp's own history. Since 2019, the company has acquired nearly 50 sites in Scandinavia, bringing its total to over 70 locations. The methodology is consistent: identify fragmented, family-owned markets with strong underlying demand; acquire sites below institutionally priced levels; apply digital infrastructure, branded management, and operational efficiency; generate materially higher revenue per pitch than the pre-acquisition operator.
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Germany is the logical next step — and First Camp has already moved. In July 2025, the group entered Germany with the acquisition of Via Claudia Camping in Lechbruck am See, Bavaria, generating €3.6M revenue in 2024. In November 2025, it followed with the acquisition of nine additional sites in Germany and Switzerland from lodgyslife AG — the brands AZUR and Camping Lodge — bringing its combined DACH and Nordic portfolio to approximately 91 sites. The combined entity positions itself as the market leader in leisure camping 'from the Alps to the Arctic Circle.' The window that Victor Fink described as not staying open forever is already beginning to close.
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Überland Camping: Domestic Speed
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Überland Camping was founded in Berlin in 2024 — since relocated to Hamburg — and has within a single year grown to eight sites spanning the Black Forest, Sauerland, Teutoburg Forest, Weser Uplands, Harz mountains, and North Sea coast. This is growth velocity that in any other real estate sector would be described as a roll-up execution.
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Camp Feuerland in the Weser Uplands — the company's first acquisition — operates approximately 1,000 pitches on 40 hectares directly on the Weser river, with its own harbour and a 9-hectare lake. Hegi Familien Camping in Tengen (Black Forest) has already received planning approval to expand from 200 to 450 pitches under the new ownership. These are not passive acquisitions. They are active repositioning plays: acquire sites with structural quality, invest in adventure playgrounds, aqua parks, digital booking, and ecological improvements, then benefit from the value created by professionalisation.
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The Überland model is oriented toward families — 'camping like it always was: close, free, connected to nature — but relaxed, active, and sustainable.' The brand identity is clear enough. The execution pace is more interesting: eight sites in under two years is the kind of tempo that suggests institutional backing and a defined investment thesis, not opportunistic deal-making.
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lodgyslife AG: The DACH Institutional Pioneer
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Before its merger with First Camp, lodgyslife AG — publicly traded on the Frankfurt stock exchange, co-founded by Jan Vyskocil and René Müller — was making the case that DACH camping is a legitimate institutional asset class. Founded five years ago, the company built to 12 sites across Germany and Switzerland through acquisitions from succession situations, municipal contract changes, and strategic realignments. Overnight stays at the Camping Lodge brand grew 27% — 14 percentage points above market average — demonstrating that the professionalisation hypothesis is not theoretical. Applying digital infrastructure, quality management, and brand positioning to previously underperforming sites generates measurable outperformance.
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lodgyslife described itself as the first institutional operator of tourist campgrounds in the DACH region. That description was accurate at the time. Now, as part of First Camp's European platform, the infrastructure it built — the acquisition pipeline, the municipal relationships, the operational systems — forms the DACH backbone of a pan-European operator.
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Wildwood Camping: The Brand-Led Operator
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Wildwood Camping takes a structurally different approach from the consolidators. Founded in 2023 by Benjamin Ruth — previously publisher of Vice Magazine Germany — the company is building a consumer brand rather than a real estate platform. 'Camping like it used to be — with a little more comfort' is the positioning. The first site, in the Lüneburger Heide, opened in July 2023 with 150 pitches, a clubhouse designed like a living room, and hotel-grade sanitation infrastructure.
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By April 2025, Wildwood had opened simultaneously in the Harz (former Waldweben site in Clausthal-Zellerfeld — 210 pitches, fully booked for Easter within days of opening) and on Rügen (coastal site with Baltic Sea access via Glewitz ferry). A fourth site in the Uckermark is planned for 2026. One in three Wildwood guests returns or actively recommends the brand — an NPS metric that, at a three-site company, demonstrates that brand-led campground operations generate loyalty assets as well as real estate returns.
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What Drives the Return — And What Threatens It
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The investment case for German campgrounds rests on four structural mechanisms. Understanding each one — and the risk that accompanies it — is the prerequisite for any serious engagement with this market.
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1. Entry Barriers Are High

A campground requires land, permits, infrastructure, and a location that actually works. You cannot open a campground in a commercial zone on the edge of an industrial estate. The supply constraint is structural and durable: prime locations near coastlines, lakes, national parks, and mountain landscapes are finite. New planning consents for camping in Germany are difficult to obtain in the most desirable regions. This scarcity protects the invested asset.
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2. Operating Costs Are Comparatively Low

A campground has no stairwell, no elevator, no heating system serving fifty residential units. The infrastructure is fundamentally simpler than a conventional hotel or residential property: sanitary facilities, power connections, paths, and drainage. The majority of the pitched area is green space with minimal maintenance requirements. The complexity — and cost — of institutional hotel operations simply does not apply.
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3. The Professionalisation Uplift

This is the primary return driver, and it is real. Many German family-operated sites are, in investment terms, significantly underperforming their location. No online booking system. No dynamic pricing. No yield management. Introducing digital reservation infrastructure alone — before investing a single euro in physical improvements — can materially increase revenue per pitch. Adding breakfast pre-order services, a camp shop with contactless payment, licence plate recognition for self-check-in, and a structured programme of activities creates measurable guest satisfaction improvements that support higher rates and earlier booking windows.
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lodgyslife demonstrated this with a 27% overnight stay increase at the Camping Lodge brand — 14 percentage points above market average — purely through operational repositioning. The professionalisation upside in the German camping market is not hypothetical. It is documented.
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4. Glamping: The New Price Category

The fourth return driver is the one with the widest margin expansion potential. Landal, the Dutch holiday park operator, has publicly confirmed it is evaluating the glamping segment for Germany. And the numbers explain why: a conventionally pitched campground generates an average of €40 per night. A well-designed glamping unit in the same location commands €150 to €200 per night — a 3.75x to 5x uplift on the same land, with higher guest satisfaction, longer average stays, and a more affluent target audience.
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Germany has almost no scaled glamping offer. This is not a niche observation — it is the most significant product gap in Central European outdoor hospitality. The guest who wants a premium outdoor retreat in the German Alps, the Austrian lake district, or the Swiss mountain landscape has no branded, quality-guaranteed domestic option. They drive to Austria or book in Iberia. The operator who fills this gap on German soil will capture pricing that the conventional campground market cannot currently generate.
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The Risks Are Real: Seasonality, Regulation, and Community
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The investment case is structurally compelling. The risks are equally real and should not be minimised.
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Seasonality is the primary operational challenge. In most German regions, four to six months generate the meaningful revenue flow. The winter months — with rare exceptions for sites investing in winterised infrastructure and year-round programming — are thin. Campground businesses that planned for perpetual growth and failed to manage their fixed cost base against seasonal revenue patterns have suffered in the 2024–2025 cycle: a wave of insolvencies among motorhome rental companies and campground-adjacent businesses demonstrates that the structural demand is real but the operating model requires sophistication.
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The regulatory environment is fragmented across sixteen German states and across the municipal layer below them. Planning law, conservation requirements, protected area restrictions, and neighbourhood regulations vary substantially by location. An investor who understands the planning framework in Bavaria may not be equipped to navigate the same process in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
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And then there is the community dimension — perhaps the most underestimated risk in the entire investment thesis. When a French chain acquires a family campground that has been running for three generations and announces plans to build a waterpark complex, the local community does not applaud. The Regenbogen AG case makes this concrete: the dispute over a campground on the Darß peninsula in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern generated months of negative headlines, political opposition, and reputational damage. Investing in campgrounds means investing in local politics, in community relationships, and in the social contract that a campground holds with the landscape and the people who have relied on it.
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The Regenbogen AG case showed it plainly: whoever buys campgrounds also buys into municipal politics. Ignoring the community dimension is not a real estate risk — it is an existential one.

Asset Class or Niche Topic? The Honest Answer Is Both.
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For institutional investors managing large capital pools — pension funds, sovereign wealth, large private equity — the German camping market is, right now, still too fragmented and too small to deploy capital at scale. Over 3,200 sites, the overwhelming majority in family or municipal hands, cannot be consolidated in one or two quarters. The institutional underwriting process, the portfolio construction logic, and the minimum ticket sizes of large funds do not map cleanly onto a market still defined by individual family businesses.
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But that is precisely the opportunity for the fast movers. Überland Camping, Wildwood, and lodgyslife (pre-First Camp) were all able to pick the best sites at pre-institutional pricing — because the big funds had not yet arrived. That window is closing, not closed. But the pace of external entry is accelerating.
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The parallels to other asset classes that followed this trajectory are instructive. Student housing. Senior care. Self-storage. Logistics parks. All were initially viewed as niche sectors, too fragmented, too operational, too complex for institutional investors accustomed to simpler product types. All subsequently experienced rapid consolidation, margin expansion by professional operators, and price compression as capital competed for the best assets. Camping, viewed with this lens, is not in a unique position. It is in a familiar position — approximately five years behind the consolidation curve of those other sectors.
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In Germany's camping market, the early movers are still picking the best sites at pre-institutional pricing. That window will not stay open forever. In France, the consolidation already happened: the five largest chains now operate a significant share of all sites, at margins materially above the fragmented baseline. The direction of travel is not in question.

There is, however, one dimension of the camping market that distinguishes it from most real estate asset classes: its counter-cyclicality. In recessions, people camp more — not less. Because it is cheaper than hotels. Because the vehicle is already paid for. Because a domestic holiday in a motorhome has lower marginal cost than a flight and a resort booking. This means that campground cashflows are less correlated with economic cycles than most property types. In a period of macro uncertainty, that is a structurally attractive characteristic.

The Deal That Changed the Conversation: First Camp and lodgyslife
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The most consequential single transaction in the German camping market's recent history closed in two stages in 2025. First, First Camp's acquisition of Via Claudia Camping in Bavaria in July — its market entry, the first time Europe's largest camping chain had a German address. Then, in November, the acquisition of nine additional sites from lodgyslife AG — the AZUR and Camping Lodge brands across Germany and Switzerland — bringing the combined First Camp / DACH portfolio to approximately 91 sites across six countries.
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Round Shield, the European credit fund managed by Harrison Street Asset Management, which had provided senior secured financing of more than €50 million to lodgyslife, exited its position after the First Camp acquisition closed. That exit — a sophisticated credit investor recovering its position following a strategic merger — is the clearest single signal that the German camping market has crossed into institutional territory.
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The combined entity's positioning statement captures the strategic ambition: 'the market leader in leisure camping from the Alps to the Arctic Circle.' It is the first claim of pan-European camping market leadership that is not made by ECG or CapFun from a French base, but by a Scandinavian operator using a German and Swiss platform as its southern anchor. The consolidation playbook that worked in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland is now being applied, site by site, to the largest camping market in Europe.

The Gap Nobody Is Filling: Premium Outdoor Hospitality
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Every operator entering the German camping market — First Camp, CapFun, Überland, Wildwood, lodgyslife — is targeting the pitched campground segment. This is the logical starting point: volume, recurring demand, manageable professionalisation investment, and a clear path to operational improvement. It is the right first move.
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But none of them are addressing the product category where the true pricing power lives. The premium outdoor retreat — the designed cabin, the glamping lodge, the forest sanctuary — is the product type commanding €150 to €200 per night in comparable European markets. It is the product type that Landal is evaluating for Germany. And it is the product type that does not yet exist at scale in the German market, under a coherent brand, with a quality guarantee that sophisticated guests can rely on.
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The investors now entering Germany are building a foundation for outdoor hospitality. The product that sits on top of that foundation — the premium layer, the design-forward outdoor retreat, the experience that the upper-income German camping guest would pay hotel rates for if the right product existed — that product is still unbuilt. That is the gap AWAYO® is positioned to fill.

Summary: What the Market Tells Us
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The German camping market booms — and has been doing so not for months but for years. 44.7 million overnight stays in 2025. Rising prices. Growing demand. A fourth consecutive record year while the hotel sector declines.
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Simultaneously, the market — with over 3,000 sites in family and municipal hands — is as fragmented as almost any other sector in German real estate. International chains from France and Scandinavia are at the door. Young German companies like Überland Camping are growing at record pace. Private equity capital is flowing. And the experience from every comparable market shows: when consolidation starts, it moves faster than most expect.
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For real estate professionals, this means: attention now. Campgrounds are not conventional real estate — but they have predictable cashflows, a professionalisation upside that is well-documented, and a market that is unmistakably in motion. Those who engage now have an information advantage. Those who wait for the large funds to arrive will pay the premium those funds create.
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And for outdoor hospitality operators — for the brands that understand not just the real estate but the guest experience, the design language, and the product architecture of premium outdoor stays — the opportunity is even more specific. The investors entering Germany are building the infrastructure layer. Nobody is building the experience layer above it. That is where the market is waiting.

KEY MARKET DATA

Overnight stays 2025: 44.7M — new record (Destatis, March 2026)

Revenue baseline: €821M (2022, pre-price-increase) — structurally higher today

Vehicle stock growth: +30%+ registered motorhomes since 2019 (CIVD)

Campgrounds: 3,202 sites — >2/3 family or municipal owned

Guest profile: ~50% upper income third · 37% aged 30–40 (Statista)

Professionalisation premium: lodgyslife: +27% stays — 14pp above market avg.

Glamping pricing uplift: €40/night (standard) vs €150–200/night (glamping)

First Camp/lodgyslife deal: ~91 sites, 6 countries, Nov 2025

Überland Camping: 8 sites, founded 2024, Germany-wide

Wildwood Camping: 3 sites + Uckermark 2026, brand-led, 1:3 return rate

Sources: Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis) · BVCD (Frank Schaal) · CIVD · ADAC/PiNCAMP · Statista · Promobil · CampingImpulse · First Camp Group AB press releases · lodgyslife AG · Offmarket 24 Immobilien Deepdive.

This article is part of the AWAYO® Special Series — Field Notes on Hospitality. We read, watch, and listen to the conversations shaping the future of the industry, and apply what we find to the outdoor hospitality context we know best.