About us
Who are we?
Kleine Ruwinkel began life as a farm and agricultural business. In 1969 Willem van den Heuvel bought the farm and lived here with his wife Hennie Kuipers, and their 4-year-old son. However during these times there was an oversupply of milk and butter, which made turning a profit more and more difficult. So Willem quickly decided and made plans to take the farm in a different direction. During the 1970's camping was becoming hugely popular and Willem set about turning the farm into a camping and caravanning park. The land was quickly transformed from a working farm into a campsite. Rows of trees appeared where vegetables and grass once grew. The old cowsheds became the canteen and a camp shop was set up where the Hans & Grietje now stands. In summer 1970 the young family welcomed their first guests to the Camping Klein Ruwinkel.
In the years that followed the business went from strength to strength; another son was born; and in 1974 the campsite was fully booked out! Year after year Willem used the profits provided by the summer business to make improvements to the site including, rebuilding the canteen; hire of static caravans; and building an all weather tennis court. In 1987 the most ambitious project yet was starting to take form: an indoor swimming pool. This project was finished in 1988 and this also marked the beginning of the bungalows that stand on the complex today. We then worked collaboratively with Creatief Vakantieparken from Gronigen to ensure that the bungalows and the customer journey were exactly what our customers wanted. Creatief Vakantieparken handled all the bookings and advertising while that left Klein Ruwinkel free to improve our product and service.
Around the late 90's early 00's Creatief Vakantie Parkers became Landal Greenparks, and through this acquisition became the largest bungalow parks in the Netherlands. In the 00's we experienced the Internet revolution. This meant some changes to the way we conducted our business. For example national marketing campaigns became less important as people paid more and more attention to the internet. More and more bookings were being made using the internet. Landal Greenparks was then acquired by the American company Wyndham vacation rentals. On the 31 December 2014 the contract between Landal Greenparks and Kleim Ruwinkel came to an end. It was then that the family van den Heuvel decided to take the business back into their own hands so they could concentrate on creating and moulding a first class product and customer service.
