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Families with younger children often lean coastal, since a beach gives you a ready-made activity that needs very little planning: buckets, spades and a few hours, and everyone's entertained. Couples or those wanting a slower pace, or a base for cycling and walking rather than swimming, often prefer the countryside or Broads setting, where the pace of the holiday matches the pace of the surroundings.

The short version: book peak weeks as soon as you know your dates, and treat everything else as considerably more flexible.

Take these four in order, location, size, facilities, pet policy, and most first-time bookings come together quickly. Our own parks sit across a mix of coastal and quieter countryside settings, so whichever mood you're after for your break, there's usually a fit somewhere in the range.

Noise and privacy tend to worry first-timers more than they need to. Units are generally spaced with a reasonable gap between them, and most parks are quieter in the evenings than people expect, particularly outside peak school holiday weeks.

With a bit of flexibility on dates and location, a short break is often bookable within a few days rather than weeks, which makes a UK holiday park a genuinely practical option when the diary suddenly clears.

Footwear deserves more thought than it usually gets. Bring proper walking shoes or trainers for dunes, coastal paths and pebble beaches, sandals for round the static caravan holiday lets and the pool if your park has one, and something you don't mind getting wet for rockpooling or a paddle. Flip-flops alone rarely survive a full week of coastal walking.