4 Things We Learned From the Biggest Booking Week in Campspot History

Each year, Campspot observes substantial booking activity across our platform in March. It’s an exciting time of year as campers look ahead to the summer and fall and make campground reservations for their upcoming excursions. This year, to help campground owners generate even more revenue during this popular booking period, Campspot organized its first ever Biggest Booking Week campaign. This campaign asked campground owners to opt-in by creating a promotion that would run March 14 to March 19 using the code “BIGGEST23.” The results? Better than we could have hoped for! Read on for the results of the campaign and our top four takeaways.

Biggest Booking Week Results and Key Learnings

Nearly 300 Campspot campgrounds participated in Biggest Booking Week. That’s a heck of a lot of awesome camping deals!

Across the Campspot platform, the Biggest Booking Week campaign helped spur over 60,000 campground reservations. That’s equivalent to campers spending 2.3 million hours in the great outdoors!

1. Deals Attract New Customers

Ever been nervous to try something or waited to purchase in case it went on sale? It’s no secret that discounts drive spending behavior, but what’s most interesting for us was the amount of NEW customers that were driven to book trips because of the promotion period. During Biggest Booking Week, parks that participated in the promo code saw nearly a 50% jump in week-over-week bookings on the marketplace and 94% of these bookings were from new customers.

2. Having a Promo Also Drives Non-Promo Bookings

Of course, we were excited to see campers taking advantage of the BIGGEST23 promo code when checking out, but we also saw that non-promo code bookings increased 95% year-over-year for this particular week. A practice referred to as “breakage,” essentially this speaks to customers who are drawn in by the promotion but then end up booking a reservation for a non-promo trip. The lesson here? While you might be “taking a hit” when you promote a discount, you not only stand to gain a higher volume of reservations, but also possibly a boost to non-promo reservations as well.

3. Promos Drive Average Booking Value

Ironically, when campers save, it seems they tend to spend MORE to get the most bang for their buck! During the campaign, we observed the average booking value of a reservation made with BIGGEST23 to be 33% higher than those made without a code from the previous week.

Of course, the type of promotion a campground is offering can influence this behavior as well. Many parks offered a certain percentage off when campers booked a set number of nights. This is an example of a thoughtfully designed promotion that could lead to larger average booking value.

4. Campgrounds Experienced Week-Over-Week Growth Regardless of Participation—But Those Involved Grew More

Of all the bookings that took place on Campspot Marketplace over the campaign’s time period, 25% used the BIGGEST23 promo code. We also saw that participating campgrounds experienced a nearly 50% week-over-week growth in reservations from the week prior, and non-participating campgrounds still grew, too—23% week over week.

Rising tides lift all ships, right? Certainly, but in order to really ride the wave—it pays to play! While this campaign was the first of its kind, we hope to work with our partner campgrounds to create future opportunities just like this one that not only drive more revenue for campgrounds, but help campers discover new destinations, save money, and take more trips.

Thank you to all of our participating partner campgrounds involved in Biggest Booking Week. We’re so proud of what we could accomplish and learn together and we can’t wait to see what we can create together next. For more information on Campspot’s Biggest Booking Week, be sure to check out these reads: