The poor cleanliness of Brean’s Pontins holiday park, near Burnham-On-Sea, has been featured this week on BBC1’s Watchdog TV programme.
The show secretly filmed a visit to the park last week when its team found ‘blood stained sheets’, ‘grubby and rundown public toilets’, ‘disused chairs by the play area’, ‘litter by the crazy golf’, ‘grime on the floors’, ‘filth’ and ‘holes in walls’.
The programme mocked new owner Britannia Hotels’ claims about turning the park into a Disney-themed resort by bringing its own dwarfs onto the park to clean up the worst-affected chalets before the Pontins security team asked them to leave.
The Watchdog programme said it had received 100 complaints from holidaymakers and named the Brean Sands park as the worst Pontins park in Britain.
Customers interviewed on the show claimed: “The only way I can describe Pontins Brean Sands is hell on earth.”
In a fiery interview with Watchdog host Anne Robinson, Britannia Hotel Group’s Eileen Downey explained that the firm has only recently taken over the park and is in the process of starting a major refurbishment programme.
She said: “We have only owned the park for 26 weeks, so this programme is rather premature.”
“These parks are townships – they have 3,500 apartments – and we bought them out of receivership. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
“We have had 1.5 million people visit the parks and you have only received 100 complaints. 99.9% of people had good value British holidays.”
She continued: “I am happy that the refurbishments are going as planned… some parks will be closed in mid-November for work. When our refurb is complete, everyone will have good value.”
Administrator KPMG announced last January that Pontin’s five parks, which were put into administration last November, had been saved by Britannia.
The Pontins holiday firm was launched in 1946 when Fred Pontin opened his first holiday park in Brean.
