Picture this scenario:
You’re a campground owner and currently in the front office at your campground. At the desk, you’re shuffling through stacks of paperwork, trying to keep the different pieces of information organized as you try to find the information you’re actually looking for. As you do this, two guests walk in looking for a campsite. You pull up the spreadsheet that you use to keep track of available sites and place a worn-out paper map in front of them of your property. The guest selects a site, and you have to scroll through your spreadsheet to see if it’s available. Turns out the one they want is already booked, so they have to take a look at the map and select something else.
Meanwhile, a lineup has formed behind them of guests who also want to book, ones who want to pay, add another couple of days to their stay, and a few who just want to ask a simple question. The situation has quickly changed to be too much for a single person to handle.
The above scenario is frustrating for many campground owners and staff members, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Camp management software can help give you and your staff back valuable time, while in the same thread give more flexibility and options to guests. For example, with camp management software, the first guest who wanted to book could have done so online, so when they arrived, all they would have had to do was check in through the website, eliminating the need for them to interact with a staff member at all. The guests that wanted to add another couple of days to their vacation? They could also do that through the camp management software’s integrated booking system.
In this article, we explore more about the importance of a camp management system, including features, benefits, and tips for how to choose the best software for your business.
Brief History of Camp Management Software
While camp management software isn’t exactly a new thing, it’s a market that has been growing exponentially in recent years. There are some logical reasons why this may be happening:
- There’s a growing need for campsites in the United States and beyond. With more people camping because it’s a less expensive option for a vacation or they just need somewhere to stay overnight, the demand for campsites across the country and throughout North America is growing. However, managing all of these spaces manually is a logistical chore with regard to staffing costs and ongoing maintenance. Camp management software helps alleviate some of that burden by allowing many management tasks to be done remotely.
- The COVID-19 Pandemic highlighted the need for businesses to embrace technology, including campgrounds. Once the pandemic hit, many people looked to camping as a social-distancing-friendly vacation option that would help them get out of the house. With the increased demand, campground owners needed to quickly find a way to maintain their staff’s safety but still meet their guests’ needs. Enter camp management software.
- Using a camp management system supports a more sustainable business model. Campground owners are embracing more environmentally-friendly ways of doing business, including initiatives like tree planting and using more sustainable and efficient materials in facilities construction that reduce the campground’s carbon footprint. Camp management software supports this by helping campgrounds go paperless.
There’s also been the introduction of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning that continue to contribute to making camp management software more effective and efficient over time. For example, artificial intelligence makes determining effective pricing (dynamic pricing) easier by quickly identifying pricing patterns and trends within current and historical data, helping you set the right price at the right time for your campsites. This is much faster than a manual revenue management strategy, as the technology can glean insights from a vast array of data (current and historical market rates, customer behavior, purchasing trends and patterns, etc.) and as a result suggest rates that are based on extensive data analysis.
Automation has also been an essential technology offered in the best camp management software solutions, taking over tedious and repetitive tasks to free up time from administrative workload, including automatically scheduling tasks and sending notifications, for instance, reminding guests of payment or check-in and check-out times, and much more.
Common Features of a Camp Management System
Campground management systems offer a range of features tailored to streamline operations and enhance the ability to manage a campground efficiently and effectively. Common features that you can find in camp management software are outlined in the table below:
| Feature | What it Does |
| Online booking | Allows campers to reserve sites or accommodations through a user-friendly online platform. With Newbook, you can integrate robust online booking on your website for a seamless reservation experience. |
| Channel management | Allows you to manage various OTAs in a centralized location without having to visit each website and rely on their native tools. Plus automations for pricing and information updates make managing a ton of OTAs at once a breeze. |
| Real-time pricing and availability management | Ensures that accurate pricing and site availability are always reflected on your direct online booking engine and your OTAs at all times. |
| Scheduling and notifications | Allows manual and automated notifications to be sent and tasks to be scheduled based on triggers or manual actions. |
| Online payments and invoicing | Allows you to accept online payments and provide guests with an automatically generated invoice with information about the transaction. |
| Staff management | Centralizes the management of staff schedules, roles, and responsibilities. |
| Marketing tools | Email and SMS campaign functionality helps keep your business front-of-mind for your existing and potential customers. |
| Data security and compliance | Sensitive business and customer data should be protected with SSL and TLS encryption |
| Mobile-friendliness | Ensures that guests can have a great direct booking experience on their smartphone or tablet. |
| Guest portal | Allows guests to make adjustments to their bookings, such as increasing or decreasing their stay length, adding amenities and services to their stay, and more. |
| Customer support and service | Offers customer support channels for administrators for assistance and issue resolution related to software functionality. |
Key Benefits of Camp Management Software
Camp management software offers numerous benefits for campground owners and administrators, facilitating streamlined operations, enhanced guest experiences, and improved efficiency. Some key advantages include:
1. A Simplified Reservation and Booking Process
These days, the majority of people want to be able to book a campground online rather than having to call a campground directly. Making it easy for potential guests to simply visit your website and book a campsite is important to capture these bookings. Plus, integrated guest portals often found with the best camp management software, such as Newbook, offer a mutually beneficial solution for guests and campground owners. They empower guests to independently adjust bookings, add extras, check in/out, and handle payments without the need for direct interaction with a staff member. This autonomy not only grants guests control over their stay but also alleviates administrative burdens for both you and your staff.
2. Helps Enable Better Revenue Management
Several factors come into play when determining optimal and competitive prices for your campground. Considerations such as the proximity to outdoor amenities like hiking trails, swim-friendly lakes, boat launches, and fishing spots significantly influence pricing. Additionally, the specific location of individual campsites can impact their rates. Sites closer to conveniences such as washrooms, laundry facilities, and showers may command higher prices due to their desirability for tenting. Moreover, sites offering scenic vistas or access to public areas like beaches often carry premium pricing compared to those without such views.
Furthermore, variables like weather patterns, seasonal shifts, and market competition play a pivotal role in shaping your pricing strategies. To gather comprehensive data and establish more competitive rates for each lot, implementing revenue management solutions is vital for campgrounds and RV parks. The intricacies involved in considering these factors make manual pricing a time-consuming endeavor, underscoring the necessity for automated solutions.
Newbook’s revenue management system incorporates dynamic pricing, utilizing extensive data analysis to discern patterns and trends. This automated tool then sets optimal pricing for all your sites and properties based on the insights gleaned from the data.
3. Helps You Make Data-Driven Business Decisions
Camp management software offers valuable insights presented visually through charts and graphs, eliminating the need for extensive data mining. Accessing critical data instantly and comprehending it at a glance enables informed and improved business decision-making across all facets of your campground’s operations.
Newbook stands out by offering comprehensive reporting features, providing both overarching reports encompassing multiple properties and detailed, property-specific breakdowns. These robust reporting options empower users with a panoramic view of their business or dive deep into individual property analytics.
4. Better Upselling During the Booking Process
With camp registration software, you can more easily promote upsell opportunities during your booking process without making it seem too salesy. Guests often appreciate being offered additional amenities during the booking process because it eliminates them having to reach out to a staff member afterwards to ask whether certain amenities are available.
With Newbook, you can easily give the guest the ability to add things like a picnic table, bicycle, canoe rental, life jackets, and more during the booking process so that guests can pay for everything all at once and focus on enjoying their vacation.
5. Better Manage Long-Term Guest Payments
Some campgrounds offer long-term stay options, where guests can either lease a site annually or pay for stays on a monthly basis. Managing these long-term stays often involves manually handling billing processes at customized rates distinct from those for regular guests. This usually requires ongoing manual oversight when necessary.
Camp management software such as Newbook streamlines this process by providing automated recurring billing for long-term guests. Rather than creating invoices manually, Newbook automates the process of generating and sending accurate invoices directly to the guests. Coupled with its online payment features, this capability substantially minimizes administrative workload.
How to Choose the Best Camp Management Software
Choosing the best camp management software involves several considerations to ensure it aligns with your specific camp’s needs. Specific considerations that you should keep in mind include:
1. Your Campground’s Needs
The first step is to determine which functions that the software provides are crucial for your business. This will typically be things like online camp registration, staff task scheduling, payment and billing, general customer and staff management, and revenue management. Features like centralized reservation management and a channel manager are also important for ensuring that all your bookings are coming in to one place for ease of management.
2. Scalability
As your business grows, it’s important that the camp management software that you choose is able to support that growth. Software that can handle an increasing number of tasks, bookings, payments, and more is important so you don’t find yourself having to switch software after a short time.
3. User Experience
Investing in easy-to-use and intuitive software is important for yourself and your staff. When software is easy to use, it increases productivity and helps with employee buy-in. If the software requires an unreasonable amount of onboarding for simple tasks and proves to add more time to a process rather than reduce it, chances are that you’ll just go back to using the old way, negating the purpose of the software in the first place.
4. Real-Time Updates
The ability of camp management software to facilitate real-time updates is essential, especially with regard to pricing and availability. Most campground owners list their property (or properties) on online travel agency (OTA) websites to increase reach. However, managing the pricing, descriptions, and images for multiple OTAs can quickly become too much when you rely on native platforms. Camp management software eliminates that burden by allowing you to update this information once and then update that information automatically on all channels that you list with. If you use a dynamic pricing strategy, the pricing information is updated everywhere automatically.
5. Customization and Flexibility
It’s important that the software you choose can be customized to suit your business’s unique needs. Sure, most campgrounds operate mostly the same, but there are often still differences in management style and processes that the software needs to be able to support. Ensuring that the camp management software will integrate with other software in your business’s tech stack is important so that if you use a specific type of revenue management software, for instance, the camp management software can facilitate data transfer between the two programs.
Newbook offers a wide range of plug-and-play integrations with popular hospitality software that can be activated out of the box. This ensures that data isn’t siloed in one program and that all your pieces of software work well with each other.
Why You Should Stay Away From Camp Management Software Free Options
As you’re searching around the internet for camp management software options, it might seem tempting to go with a free version. After all, it costs nothing, so what’s the worst that could happen? You use it for a while, and then move on to more robust paid software? It might not seem that bad when you think about it that way, so why do we recommend not going for camp management software free versions?
First, it’s important to break down the general differences between free software and paid in terms of pros and cons:
| Free Software | Paid Software | |
|---|---|---|
| Pros | – Doesn’t cost anything to download and use – Usually open source (which means that you can make any changes to it that you like) – Acts as a foundation for custom software if you’re looking for one – No commitment (such as a subscription) to simply try it | – Software updates, bug fixes, and hosting is managed by a company and not the user – Doesn’t require the user to invest in hosting technology like server space – Provides customer support for the user – More reliable than free software – Often can be accessed on any device through a web browser – Offers built-in user security and data protection features |
| Cons | – Has hidden costs (e.g., server space, bandwidth management, software updates, and maintenance) – Is usually not as fully featured as paid software – Software updates, bug fixes, and technical issues are the responsibility of the user – Often isn’t as user-friendly as paid options – Often requires a high level of technical knowledge to use properly – Training and onboarding are usually online documentation created by a community – Security of the software is the responsibility of the user | – Costs money (usually a monthly subscription) – There’s a chance that the company won’t provide timely updates – Paid software is often proprietary, which means that more intense software customization is limited (but user-level customization options are still often available) |
Typically, the choice between free and paid software is often a no-brainer for most campground owners. Most owners prefer the advanced features, professional support options, robust security, and ease of management that paid camp management software offers over free versions.
If you simply want to try a piece of software before purchasing it, most camp management software offerings provide a free trial that you can take advantage of to try the core features of the software before you hand over your cash.
Why Newbook Offers the Best Camp Management System
When selecting the camp management system, the options can seem overwhelming. Newbook stands apart, purpose-built to cater to accommodations of varying sizes with a user-friendly yet feature-rich platform.
As a comprehensive property management solution, Newbook serves as a singular hub for hotels and resorts, offering indispensable tools to optimize operations. Emphasizing seamless integration, we support numerous platform integrations like:
- Park Aid
- BookOutdoors
- Zip
- Vrbo
- Airbnb
And much more, and even provide tailored solutions through our Open AI integration.
Our commitment to data security and uptime remains unwavering. With a robust 99.99% uptime guarantee and cutting-edge cybersecurity measures, clients can trust uninterrupted revenue generation, free from worries about downtime or data breaches.
What does a 99.99% uptime guarantee mean when most software offers a 99% uptime guarantee? The difference may seem negligible, but it translates into a significant difference:
- 99% uptime translates to a potential downtime of 3 days, 15 hours, and 39 minutes.
- 99.99% translates to a max of 52 minutes and 35 seconds annual downtime.
At Newbook, our approach to customer service is deeply personalized. From initial onboarding to ongoing support, we aim for a white-glove experience, forging partnerships with our clients to be seen not just as technology providers but as steadfast allies in their operational success.
Conclusion
Camp management software software revolutionizes campground management, offering a streamlined reservation process and empowering guests to self-manage bookings. It alleviates administrative burdens, allowing for online check-ins and extended stays without staff intervention.
The growth of camp management software aligns with the surge in camping demands post-pandemic and a focus on sustainable practices. Advancements in technology, such as AI and automation, have enriched these systems, facilitating dynamic pricing and freeing staff from repetitive tasks.
Such software equips campgrounds with essential tools, including:
- Online booking
- Real-time updates
- Comprehensive reporting
And much more, optimizing operations and enhancing guest experiences. Newbook, a standout among camp management systems, emphasizes user-friendly features, robust integrations, and top-notch data security.
Choosing the right software involves considering scalability, user experience, real-time updates, customization, and compatibility with existing tech stacks. While free options may seem tempting, paid software often offers advanced features, professional support, and enhanced security.
Newbook emerges as an ideal choice, delivering a comprehensive solution for accommodations of all sizes. It ensures seamless integration, data security, and exceptional customer service, aligning with campground owners’ operational success.
Learn more about Newbook and how our software can help your accommodation business by reaching out to us today.
