Feb 3

Feb 3 New reservations system promises modern campground bookings

Having owned a resort I can say that one of the best ways to increase sales easily is to make sure that whatever reservations system you’re using that it works well with travel booking aggregators like TripAdvisor, booking.com and those kinds of things. The RV campground business doesn’t seem to have anything like that nor do many campgrounds even seem to care.

Spot2Nite

If Terry Broussard and the team at Spot2Nite have anything to say about it, that will all change with their new app launched just this week.

Spot2Nite promises to take information from campground’s reservations system and aggregate that into one free app that lets you see what’s available within a specific geography. With that app you can specify amenities or features that are important to you as well, such as pull-through sites, sites with 30 or 50 amp service and much, much more.

Spot2Nite screen shots showing how the app can be used to book campgrounds.

Not just tonight

While the name of the app implies looking for a spot simply for the night, it’s actually designed as a booking system for any length of time and any reservations period that is enabled by a campground’s booking system. For example, if you want a place to camp that’s near fishing during the height of the season you can use Spot2Nite to book that.

But the obvious thing is being able to book a site tonight and that’s the seed that germinated into the app. Terry was looking for a campground and gave his phone to Sam Bruner to find something for the evening.

As anybody who has tried to book a last-minute reservation knows, the process is tremendously frustrating. Campgrounds often have no web-based reservations system, you leave a message and maybe they call you back days later. Booking a campground is a genuinely horrible experience often times, especially if you are in a time-critical situation.

Not reinventing the wheel

Spot2Nite uses a campground’s existing system to check for availability and works with reservation system providers RMS, Newbook and Checkfront. It’s really easy, you choose an area where you’d like to go and then see live availability of campsites at the various parks. There’s an interactive map so you can even choose the campsite that best suits you.

Rather than reinvent the wheel Spot2Nite simply is an aggregator and uses the campground’s existing system to provide the information.

Challenges

The challenge here is how many campgrounds live in the dark ages and don’t embrace web-based booking systems and I really hope this changes. When I bought the resort in 2008 they, too, were using handwritten reservations systems and by implementing a modern system we saw a huge increase in booking.

What we found was that lots of folks were booking reservations after hours at the guests’ convenience. Having a web-based reservations system also allowed our front desk staff to work with guests to make their experience better rather than having to deal with phone calls and voice messages. It was better service in every conceivable way and the payoff was more bookings and happier guests.

One more thing, while the app itself is free there is a “convenience fee” when booking a campground of between $3-5. If this app works as well as it seems to, that’ll be the best $5 I spent on RVing.