Kurow Holiday Park owner Diane Curtis said the park had been ''flat stick'' since Christmas, when it filled to capacity.
While it was her and her husband's first year as owners, regular campers had told them it was the busiest the Kurow campsite had been in 10 years.
Otematata Holiday Park & Lodge owner Brent Cowles said he had witnessed the growth over the past five years.
''Every year since we've been out it's just got busier and busier,'' he said. ''Over there [at the park] is just a bumper season. There's more people in this area than we've ever seen.''
Omarama Top 10 Holiday Park owner Tony Chapman said his park was ''always full'' with about 450 campers on site.
Waitaki District Council lakes camping supervisors Simon and Teresa Fox said the six council campsites - Parsons Rock, Boat Harbour, Wild Life Reserve, Loch Laird, Sailors Cutting and Falstone Creek - had for the past two years been as busy as they had ever been.
''They have been very, very, very busy,'' Mr Fox said. ''Lots of families. That's what we want.''
Over the peak week after Boxing Day, up to 5000 people would have stayed at council campgrounds.
Sailors Cutting, in its 50th year, was always busy at the holidays. But Boat Harbour, at Otematata, was traditionally quiet and this year ''it was packed - busier than we've ever seen it before, times two''.
Janet Maguire, of Geraldine, at Boat Harbour yesterday, said she had camped in the valley since she was a young girl growing up in Waimate in the late 1960s.
Her father, Gordon Munro, took her out fishing on the Waitaki River when she was 8, and it stuck. This year, she was camping with family that had congregated from Christchurch, Amberley and Kelowna, in Canada. Three generations were fishing.
And last night, the family would eat freshly caught fish just like her mother made: ''Sprinkle sugar on it and then salt and pepper and leave it for a few hours, and then cook it in butter.''
