A weekend break at Burnham-On-Sea Haven Village

As a family, you can easily spend thousands of pounds taking your children on holidays abroad, or you can take them somewhere relatively cheap and local like Haven Holidays and they say something like: “This is the best holiday I’ve ever had!”. Hearing that come out of my seven year old child’s mouth created a warm feeling in my heart and it really is true to say that this chain of vacation parks is paradise for little ones.

At just a 45-minute drive from Bristol Haven’s Burnham-on-Sea Holiday Village is welcoming as soon as you pull up through the gates; after parking up, we made our way to the reception to collect our keys for our prestige caravan with decking (there are five levels of caravan ranging from standard to platinum) and were met by a very friendly team of employees. They were busy, as lots of people were arriving at once during post-work peak hours, but they kept the queue moving and no task was too much trouble.

Haven offer five different levels of luxury in their caravans, from standard to platinum

After getting our keys and our bundle of activity tokens for sessions as diverse as archery, segway riding, pot painting, rock climbing and bungee trampolining (20 tokens cost £100), we then made our way to our home for the next three nights and were very impressed with what we saw – it felt like a home from home with comfortable, modern and clean décor plus central heating and an electric fireplace that heated us up nicely within minutes.

The inside of one of the prestige caravans, which has a deck

The evening entertainment on offer was perfect for keeping kids up after their usual bedtime with flashy, sparkly shows such as Seaside Squad Adventures, featuring all the Haven characters on stage. For the adults there was bingo, a dance troupe and some great singers who belted out a few old favourites. Whilst there, it’s very handy to download the Haven What’s On app to see what’s happening during the evening – or you can ask one of the many members of staff that are always walking around.

After a lovely, refreshing sleep in our caravan that evening, which had two bedrooms and enough space to comfortably sleep four, we enjoyed a home-cooked breakfast using the modern kitchen facilities before we started our list of Saturday leisure activities. On the agenda for the day was swimming, which is offered free to everyone who is holidaying at Haven, aqua gliding, archery and segway riding. The aquagliding – an inflatable boat that kids can steer – was a firm favourite of my daughter, and she squealed with delight when she whizzed around the spacious swimming pool with adult guidance.

The swimming pool is free to use when you’re staying in the caravans

The following day was filled with even more excitement as the order of the fun was rock climbing, bungee trampoling and pot painting – a real mixture of adrenaline and calm. All of the activity workers were so much fun and approachable throughout our whole stay. They knew that the key to a successful holiday is to make the children love what is happening because happy kids equal contented parents.

If you want to eat out on site in the case of this particular Burnham-on-Sea park, then there are a range of options – including lounge-bar Mash and Barrel , Papa John’s pizzeria and Cook’s fish and chip shop. There is no real need to leave the site for the duration of your stay, with a launderette and supermarket on site too. This makes you feel safely enclosed and able to truly relax and unwind. It’s like being in your own little world for a bit and my daughter never wanted to leave. She was asking when we could go back for another holiday before we even got to the end of the road.

A weekend stay in a prestige caravan with decking at Haven’s Burnham-on-Sea Holiday Village costs from £247. To find out more or book, visit www.haven.com/parks/somerset/burnham-on-sea