June 4, 2026
Elizabeth Pun
Most parks compete on amenities, but the best ones win on experience. Here's what that looks like, and how to audit your own guest journey.
Sure, amenities get campground guests in the door. But the guest experience brings them back. It’s a simple idea that a surprising number of parks haven’t fully acted on.
That distinction between good parks and great ones was the jumping-off point for a recent Campspot webinar featuring Matt Whitermore of Unhitched and Climb Capital, and Grethel Kauss from TRG Living.
“The best parks create that emotional connection and that consistency,” Grethel said. “People may book for the amenities, but they’ll come back every single time for that experience.”
Below, we break down what that actually looks like, and walk through a simple audit you can use to find the gaps in your own guest journey.
Watch the full conversation now: Good Parks vs. Great Parks
As Matt frames it, amenities are largely binary. A guest either needs a pool or they don’t. They’re looking for a water park, a dog run, or easy pull-through sites, and they’ll filter their search accordingly.
Amenities determine whether you show up on the list. Experience determines whether they remember you, review you, and come back.
The problem is that most parks in any given market have largely the same amenities. Having just returned from an industry conference in Florida, Matt posed, “You’re shopping as an RVer to go to a park in Florida. You might have a couple dozen campgrounds to choose from. And so you’re looking for those differentiators in terms of experience. What’s the service? What’s the hospitality?”
Grethel reinforced it from her own portfolio experience. “Most of the parks, whenever we go ahead and look at nearby properties, have the exact same amenities. So you have to be able to stay in line and see what’s actually going to drive guests to you.”
The conclusion isn’t that amenities don’t matter; they do. It’s that they’re the floor, not the ceiling. The parks that are winning on loyalty, reviews, and word-of-mouth are winning on something harder to copy: a consistent, memorable experience that starts before arrival and extends well after checkout.
One of the most useful frameworks from the conversation was Matt’s point about identity. Parks get into trouble, he argued, when they try to occupy the middle of the spectrum. They’re not quite a high-end resort, not quite a rustic escape, not quite anything in particular.
The alternative is committing to a lane. If you’re a no-frills stopover park, own it. Nail the infrastructure, make check-in effortless, keep the bathhouses spotless. If you’re a rustic campground on a beautiful river, lean into that. Build your marketing, your programming, and your staff culture around what makes you distinctly you.
That commitment is what makes the experience feel coherent rather than cobbled together. And coherent experiences are what guests can actually describe to their friends.
Experience is the sum of every touchpoint a guest has with your park, from the first time they find you online to the email they get a week after checkout.
Grethel put it this way when asked what operators should focus on:
“I would look at every single touch point: from your website to your booking process, to your check-in communication, to the cleanliness of your campground and maintenance, and then following up with all your guests after their stay.”
Using that as an audit framework, here’s what to look at across each stage:
What does a guest find when they Google your park? Are your photos current? Does your listing reflect what’s actually great about your park, or does it read like a spec sheet?
Is your booking process easy on mobile? Grethel flagged this specifically: “Don’t just take a look at your desktop version of your website. Please make sure you look at your mobile view, because nowadays guests are actually using their phone to book their entire experience.” A clunky mobile checkout is killing bookings you never even knew you lost.
Are you communicating before guests arrive? A simple pre-arrival email with directions, check-in instructions, amenity highlights, and a warm welcome sets the tone before they even pull in.
Are your staff equipped and empowered to create personal moments, or are they just managing logistics? Grethel noted that staff culture is felt by guests “whether management realizes it or not.”
Are you following up? A well-timed post-stay email (thanking guests, inviting a review, maybe offering an incentive to come back) is one of the highest-ROI things you can do. Campspot’s automated post-stay messaging makes this easy to set up and forget. The guests who leave happy and never hear from you again are a missed opportunity.
READ NEXT: How Campground Automation Saves Thousands of Hours and Boosts Revenue
According to Grethel, the nature of reviews has changed.
“It’s no longer the regular four- or five-star review. It’s actually this lengthy experience of their entire experience when they visited.”
When guests are writing paragraphs instead of sentences, when they’re describing specific staff members by name, when they’re talking about how a stay made them feel…that’s the proof that guest experience is what sticks. This is the kind of social proof that no ad budget can manufacture.
The parks getting those reviews aren’t necessarily the ones with the most amenities, but rather the ones where every stage of the journey felt intentional.
Want to hear Matt and Grethel go deeper on what separates great parks from good ones? Watch the full webinar replay.
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