Should my RV park take online bookings?

Take online bookings if

• You lose guests after hours. A traveler deciding at 9 pm books the park that lets them. If your office closes at 5 and the phone goes to voicemail, the booking goes to the park down the road.
• You have a season and more than about 25 sites. Below that, a reservation book works. Above it, in season, the phone becomes a second job.
• You want deposits and no-show fees. A platform collects the card, applies the policy, and sends the confirmation. Nobody argues with a receipt.
• You want to be in the platform marketplaces. Campspot's marketplace and similar directories send some guests to listed parks.
• You want the numbers. Occupancy, revenue per site, booking lead time, cancellation rates. Platforms report them; a book does not.

Stay phone-first if

• Your sites turn over once a year. A long-term park with a waiting list does not need an availability calendar. It needs an application form and a phone number.
• Arrival needs a conversation. A steep road, a tight turn, a low bridge, a gate code, rules a guest should hear before they commit. Some parks are better with every guest talked to first.
• Your guests want to call. Mostly repeat, mostly older, and they like the person who answers. Forcing them online loses goodwill for no gain.
• Volume does not justify the fees. A ten-site park doing forty bookings a year may pay more in platform fees than the convenience is worth.

A phone-first park still needs a website. It just needs a large phone number, current rates, honest photos, and a request form for the people who found you at eleven at night.

How the platforms charge

Terms change and vary by park size, so treat this as the shape rather than the numbers. Campspot charges the park a monthly subscription and, in most plans, a per-booking fee, and adds a guest-paid service fee at checkout. RoverPass has offered a guest-paid service fee model with low or no monthly cost to the park. Firefly Reservations is subscription-based with card processing on top. Newbook and Bonfire are subscription-based, usually priced by site count. Card processing, typically around three percent, applies on all of them.

The question to ask each one: what does a $50 one-night booking cost me and cost the guest, all in. Get the answer in dollars, not percentages, and compare.

What to look for in a platform

• Site-level rules. Rig length limits, pull-through versus back-in, amperage, pets, minimum stays by season. If the platform cannot enforce them, the office will be on the phone fixing bookings.
• A book button or widget you can put on your own site. Every major platform has one. This is how your website and the platform work together.
• Deposit and cancellation policies you control. Yours, not theirs.
• Reports you will actually read. Occupancy and revenue by month, at least.
• What happens if you leave. Can you export your guest list and history. Some platforms make leaving expensive by making the data hard to take.

What the website does either way

The platform books. The website gets found. A search for your town and your kind of guest returns parks with their own sites, on their own domains, with plain facts on the page. That site ends every page at a button. For a platform park, the button opens the platform. For a phone park, the button is the phone number and a short request form. Nothing about how you take reservations changes; what changes is how many people reach that step.

We build for both. We connect to Campspot, RoverPass, Firefly, Newbook, and Bonfire, we keep the connection working when the platform changes its embed, and we will not talk a phone-first park into a platform it does not want. What a site includes.

A middle path some parks use

Online booking for overnight and short stays, phone only for monthly and seasonal sites. The platform handles the volume; the office keeps the conversation for the guests who are moving in. The website has a page for each, with a book button on one and a phone number and form on the other. This is the setup at a good share of the parks we build for.