SmartStay is a Netherlands-based technology company on a mission to simplify how recreational parks manage energy, facilities, and guest experiences. As the Dutch grid grows more constrained and the push for full electrification accelerates, park operators face a challenge: how to deliver comfort and operational efficiency — without costly infrastructure upgrades or overwhelming manual processes.
From the start, SmartStay set out to do more than just measure energy usage. Their platform covers the full spectrum of park management — monitoring electricity, water, and gas, optimizing HVAC, automating lighting and climate for arrivals, integrating with booking systems for “warm welcomes,” and even providing occupancy alerts and smoke detection for enhanced safety.
“We basically build management systems for recreational parks. The grid is always filled up — people can’t get power, or aren’t allowed to deliver back. That’s where we come in.”
— Jeroen van de Vorst, Founder of SmartStay
With energy as a core challenge, SmartStay helps parks move beyond building-level controls. Their solution provides a unified, park-wide view — measuring, automating, and optimizing energy and resource use across all homes and facilities.
SmartStay’s story began with a personal project: building a smarter interface for an old camper. This effort grew into a robust IoT hardware and software stack as Jeroen realized that holiday parks faced even greater challenges, particularly in managing limited power supply without major upgrades.
The Netherlands faces a unique energy bottleneck: companies and parks can wait years for new grid connections, even as the pressure to eliminate gas rises. Operators are left choosing between expensive batteries and “smarter” management.
Most existing energy solutions only optimize single buildings or devices. SmartStay saw the gap:
How do you manage and optimize energy for an entire park — with hundreds of homes, EV chargers, and heat pumps — without breaking the bank or scaling up manual work?
“If you have a holiday park with 200 chargers, you can’t manage it house by house. You want to manage it by park. We measure on all different levels, and can throttle down specific areas, car chargers, or boilers automatically. It’s all automated.”
— Jeroen
Blynk powers the dashboards, cloud infrastructure, and automation logic, letting SmartStay deliver a sophisticated, branded solution to each client — without investing in massive software development.
SmartStay’s requirements were anything but standard: each project, park, or even building type can require its own dashboard, logic, and integrations. That meant a need for a platform that’s flexible, deeply customizable, and scalable for multi-organization clients.
Jeroen shared key Blynk features for SmartStay:
“We needed provisioning, high-level dashboard customization, and especially multi-organization structure. I can set up a facility manager to see energy use across all parks they run. That’s really valuable.”
— Jeroen
SmartStay’s connected solution transformed what was possible for both the company and its clients. By building on Blynk, SmartStay was able to launch and scale a comprehensive park management service — without the massive development costs and headaches of a custom-built platform.
The impact is significant:
SmartStay can serve more parks, respond to unique client needs, and innovate faster — all while delivering a truly differentiated managed service in the recreational and energy management market.
“Blynk enabled us to launch. If a platform like Blynk didn’t exist, I would have had to spend hundreds of thousands of euros — and even then, I would always need developers to add new things for me in the front end and maintain the software.”
— Jeroen
With energy management at the center, SmartStay is expanding into new sectors — targeting not just holiday parks, but also corporate and workforce housing where efficient, scalable management is critical. The team is onboarding new customers and exploring broader housing solutions, always focusing on solving real problems, adding new features when they are truly needed.
We needed provisioning, high-level dashboard customization, and especially multi-organization structure. I can set up a facility manager to see energy use across all parks they run. That’s really valuable.
Jeroen van de Vorst, Founder of SmartStay
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