You can have the nicest campsites in your market, with the best amenities, the freshest landscaping, and the fastest WiFi. And if your staff is checked out, guests will feel it.

The inverse is also true: a modest, well-run campground with a warm, engaged team will consistently outperform a fancier park where nobody seems to care. It shows up in reviews, repeat bookings, and the referrals that fill your calendar.

In a recent Campspot webinar, both Matt Whitermore of Unhitched and Climb Capital and Grethel Kauss from TRG Living kept coming back to staff as the linchpin of everything else. Here’s what they shared, and what it looks like in practice.

Culture Is Felt by Guests Whether You Realize It or Not

“Culture is felt by guests, whether management realizes it or not.”

Take it from Grethel. The energy your team brings to work—whether they’re engaged or disengaged, proud or indifferent, helpful or just going through the motions—transmits itself to every guest interaction. 

It’s in the tone of voice at check-in, or whether the person answering the phone sounds like they’re glad you called. Guests pick up on all of it. And increasingly, they write about it.

Grethel noted a shift in the nature of reviews: parks that are getting the culture piece right are no longer just collecting star ratings. They’re getting lengthy written reviews where guests describe specific staff members by name. 

“It’s super cool to actually see all of our team members kind of have that healthy competition, where they’re like, ‘I got a five-star review because they mentioned my name.'”

That kind of recognition, she noted, builds morale in a way that management directives alone never will.

Staff First, Guests Second

Matt framed the whole conversation around a philosophy borrowed from legendary restaurateur Danny Meyer: prioritize your staff, and the guest experience takes care of itself.

The practical application of this philosophy means treating your team like the investment they are. Ask what they need to do their jobs well, creating an environment where they feel valued, and recognizing performance in visible, meaningful ways.

Matt also pointed to creative compensation as one lever. “There are some interesting things you can do in terms of compensation—incentivizing a general manager type to hit net operating income targets, or if it’s a turnaround park, to get operating expenses in line,” he said. “It’s a creative way to motivate people to hit certain targets.”

Consider staff incentives to outcomes that matter (occupancy, guest satisfaction scores, review volume) to align what your team cares about with what the business needs.

Watch the full conversation now: Good Parks vs. Great Parks

Clarity Drives Performance

According to Grethel, high-performing teams are made up of people who know exactly what’s expected of them and are recognized for it.

She said, “One of the fastest ways to improve performance is just making sure that you’re creating clarity throughout your entire team. You’re setting clear expectations, you have that proper training and accountability…but not just that, you also have recognition for those team members that are actually doing very well.”

This is where SOPs (standard operating procedures) come in. These help every team member answer any guest question the same way, ensuring consistency throughout the process. 

Grethel’s team learned this the hard way during a period of rapid growth. When her staff’s responses were becoming inconsistent and guests could feel the confusion, they knew they had to go back and ensure all the SOPs were right and being used. 

The goal is that whether a guest is at one of your parks or another, whether they talk to a front desk associate or a maintenance staff member, the experience feels consistent. That consistency is what builds trust.

Finding Great Work Campers and Camp Hosts

For many campground operators, the staffing model depends heavily on work campers and camp hosts, and finding good ones is its own skill.

Both panelists pointed to WorkCamper News / WorkCamper.com as a reliable resource for sourcing candidates. But the most interesting insight was about where their best long-term hosts actually came from. Grethel says,

“Our biggest success rate has come from customers—guests who were repeat visitors to the property and loved it so much they decided that this is what they wanted to do.”

When a guest loves your park enough to want to live and work there, you already know a few things: they fit your culture, they know the property, and they’re genuinely enthusiastic about the experience you offer. That’s a head start you can’t manufacture through any job posting.

For operators scaling beyond a single property, Matt pointed to the regional manager hire as the real key—and the real challenge. “That is the X factor in my mind,” he said. “It’s quite a tall task to oversee a region of properties, to be an extension of ownership, to be that bridge between what the corporate office wants and translating that all to the on-site folks.” LinkedIn, he noted, is a useful tool for finding people already in the industry to start those conversations.

Empowerment Over Micromanagement

The best campground teams are ones that feel trusted to make decisions in the moment, within a clear framework. When you have clear standards, real empowerment, and genuine appreciation built in, you can turn a group of employees into a team that guests actually notice. That’s the team that shows up in the reviews, drives the repeat bookings, and builds the reputation that no marketing budget can substitute for.

Want to hear Matt and Gretel go deeper on what’s working in campground marketing right now? Watch the full webinar replay.