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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

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.

[1] https://archive.ph/bTwcD

[2] https://www.lincolninternational.com/perspectives/articles/i...

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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.

School holidays are already annoyingly staggered +/- a week for different schools.

What's so annoying about it?

Half-term for one kid is not the same as the other etc

they do that in france with the "white" week. It's staggered and different per region.

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.

> People want to have summer vacation in summer

Well that's just kind of truism. It is forced by policies and not some innate behavior of people in all places or of all classes.

It isn't a truism. Summer is when the weather is good.

That would help for a lot of things that are priced around schools.

Flights can be 1/3rd the price with less than a week before/after summer break.

> 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.

Rationing would be using a lottery system. Raising prices just makes it goddamn pay to play.

Who do you see as competitors to Center Parcs? Butlins and Pontins spring to mind initially, but are actually pretty different.

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