Too Busy to Switch

Campgrounds have it hard enough as it is. The whole job is making a welcoming outdoor experience that people want to go to and spend their time at, and that’s a lot of work before anybody even touches a computer.

Then you add booking software. And a point of sale system. And guest management. On top of everything they already do, it gets close to impossible. So this one is about that pile, the campground booking software and everything bolted onto it, and why so many campground owners stay on a system that costs them way too much.

Why campgrounds don’t switch software

They’d all rather keep what they know, and that’s a pretty reasonable call. On top of everything else they do, they don’t need the stress of switching to a new system. The one they have takes the reservations. The staff already know where everything is. Moving all of it over in the middle of a season sounds like a great way to lose a weekend of bookings.

And to be fair to the vendors, a lot of them built software that works. It’s been taking reservations for years. That counts for something.

So the campground stays on the system it knows.

The problem is the vendors know it too. They know the campground is already too busy keeping up with the business to deal with making a change, so they can charge ridiculous fees, and plenty of them do. Fees for basic stuff. Fees that, added up over enough seasons, actually kill the campground.

Basically, the price goes up because you’re too busy to change. Campgrounds are getting completely taken to the cleaners by it. It’s almost predatory.

Why we made ours

That’s why we made ours. It’s easy to use, it’s feature rich, and we don’t care about ripping anybody off. We care about making campgrounds successful.

Here’s what’s in it. Online reservations, with a calendar. A guest list where every guest gets a profile with their booking history. A point of sale for whatever you sell in the store. Reports on revenue and occupancy. A waitlist. Promo codes. Your own fees, taxes, cancellation policy and check-in times, set however you want them. The whole thing is laid out on our campground booking platform page if you want to look at it next to what you have now.

Then there’s what it costs. There’s no monthly bill. When a guest books online, our fee gets added on top for the guest, so it never comes out of your rate and the whole site fee goes to the campground. If you ring something up in cash, or on your own card reader, we don’t charge anything at all.

Put that next to vendors charging astronomical fees for just the basic features and it’s kind of ridiculous.

When you’re tired of it

Switching is still a change, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. Nobody wants to do it in July. But whenever you’re tired of it, you can come to us. If you’d rather see it before you decide anything, you can talk to a human first and ask whatever you want.

And if you made it all the way to the end of this, you might not be as busy as your vendor thinks.