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March 24, 2025
Team Campspot
A well-tailored revenue management strategy for campgrounds isn't a copy-paste of the hotel playbook. Discover the nuances in this post and our free guide.
Running a campground in today’s fast-evolving outdoor hospitality market is no small feat. Rising operational costs, growing competition, and shifting camper expectations following the pandemic mean staying profitable requires expert strategy. Now more than ever, campgrounds are expected to meet modern consumer demands and offer a flexible, seamless, and transparent booking experience. That’s where smart revenue management comes in. But what is revenue management, exactly?
At its core, revenue management is about optimizing your pricing and occupancy to maximize profits. It’s not just about charging the right rate; it’s about understanding what drives guest decisions and crafting strategies that align your offerings with their needs, preferences, and willingness to pay.However, revenue management for campgrounds isn’t a copy-paste of the hotel playbook. Unlike hotels, campgrounds deal with unique variables—seasonal demand, a wide variety of site types, and the deeply personal experiences campers expect, just to name a few. Failing to tailor your revenue management strategy to your unique business will lead to missed opportunities or alienated guests.
The information in this post is an excerpt from our free guide, Revenue Management 101: Boosting Profits Without the Hotel Playbook. Inside, we explore practical, campground-specific revenue management strategies designed to boost your bottom line. You can use these actionable insights to address the distinct challenges and opportunities of your campground operations and maximize revenue. Below, we cover the basics and a summary of why campgrounds are different from hotels.
Be sure to download the full guide to learn:
Download The Full Guide Now: Revenue Management 101: Boosting Profits Without the Hotel Playbook.
Revenue management is the art and science of selling the right product, to the right customer, at the right time, and for the right price. For campgrounds, it’s the strategic approach to optimizing campground profitability by adjusting pricing, controlling inventory, and forecasting demand. It involves using data to anticipate booking trends, implement dynamic pricing, and balance occupancy to maximize revenue while maintaining a great guest experience. Another way to think about it? Revenue management helps you focus on your best 100 reservations—not just your first 100 reservations.
Consider these key principles:
Predicting when demand will peak or dip helps campgrounds adjust pricing and availability to optimize revenue. This involves analyzing historical trends, market conditions, and even weather patterns to anticipate customer behavior.
Static rates are revenue management’s worst enemy. Dynamic pricing adjusts your rates based on factors like demand, occupancy, and seasonality, allowing you to capture more value during high-demand periods while remaining competitive during slower times.
Campgrounds serve a diverse range of guests, and understanding their behaviors is key to optimizing pricing and inventory. Guest segmentation helps campgrounds optimize pricing and offerings by analyzing factors such as booking behavior (early planners vs. last-minute bookers), length of stay (overnighters vs. extended-stay guests), and preferred booking channel (direct vs. OTA). Understanding these patterns allows operators to tailor promotions and pricing to different guest needs.
Revenue management principles may have roots in the hotel industry, but campgrounds face unique qualities and challenges that require a much more tailored approach.
Hotels, which standardize room categories and whose accommodation options are not particularly complex, have a relatively simple inventory system. Number of beds is the one defining qualifier, which means hotel revenue managers can book guests into general room categories and wait to assign specific room numbers right up until check-in. If they overbook some room categories, it’s relatively easy to move a guest into a commensurate room category. There is also often a base price from which other room rates are derived.
Campgrounds, on the other hand, offer a diverse array of accommodations with many other attribute requirements. There are different site types (tent sites, RV sites, cabins, glamping yurts), each with their distinct pricing and demand patterns. Other hard requirements include accommodatable rig sizes, hook-up availability and wattage, geographic location, and more. The demand for cabins won’t necessarily impact the demand for tents, and guests needing a 50-amp site can’t be easily overflowed into a 30-amp site.
The fact is that inventory management and optimization is much more complicated for campgrounds than for hotels.
With campground reservation software like Campspot, however, you have access to a grid optimization feature designed to maximize site availability by arranging reservations in a way that reduces unbookable gaps. This happens in real-time as guests search for availability, ensuring that sites are filled as efficiently as possible while maintaining the integrity of existing reservations. The system respects business rules set by the operator, ensuring that optimizations work within predefined constraints rather than overriding them.
Campspot’s business rules engine allows you to unlock otherwise unbookable inventory by intelligently optimizing your reservation grid while respecting the rules you’ve set for your campground. By dynamically adjusting availability, it helps minimize gaps in occupancy while maintaining adherence to your operational constraints. This allows you to maximize revenue opportunities without compromising guest experience or site requirements.
Unlike many hotels, which operate year-round with relatively consistent availability, campgrounds often experience distinct seasonal peaks and off-seasons. Some campgrounds even fully close during lower-demand months, requiring a revenue strategy that accounts for these fluctuations.
Guests staying at hotels often fall into a few categories: they’re traveling for leisure, business, or with a group (which can also be subdivided into leisure or business). This also affects their length of stay; business travelers might book for one to two nights, while families might seek to unwind over several days.
In the camping industry, most guests are traveling for leisure, which means it’s more important for campgrounds to appeal to individual travelers. Campers often book longer stays, even up to a couple months during peak seasons.
Understanding these types of behaviors is crucial for setting rates and availability that cater to the needs of your different customer segments while optimizing revenue.
Header Image Credit: Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park™ Camp-Resort: Golden Valley
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