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MC Fireside Chats – June 5th, 2024

Episode Summary

In the recent episode of MC Fireside Chats, hosted by Brian Searl, the conversation featured industry experts Scott Bahr, Sandy Ellingson, Mike Harrison, Jeff Hoffman, Casey Cochran, and Mark Koep. The discussion focused on the current challenges facing the outdoor hospitality industry, particularly for new park owners who purchased properties at inflated prices during the COVID-19 boom. Sandy Ellingson highlighted that many new park owners are now struggling due to high debt from purchasing properties at peak prices. These owners are facing declining occupancy rates and financial pressures, which contrast with the previous owners who did not have such high debt burdens. Scott Bahr emphasized the importance of understanding both macro and micro trends in the industry. He advised park owners to leverage data from various sources to make informed decisions and anticipate future trends. Jeff Hoffman echoed this sentiment, stressing the need for forward bookings and the use of modern PMS systems for better financial planning and forecasting. The conversation also delved into revenue management and pricing strategies. Mike Harrison and Casey Cochran discussed the necessity of dynamic pricing and targeted promotions, advising against blanket discounting. Instead, they suggested running specific promotions and leveraging ancillary revenue streams. Jeff Hoffman shared a practical approach to pricing, suggesting a tiered structure based on site quality and demand. Technology and education were identified as critical areas for park owners to focus on. Mike Harrison and Jeff Hoffman underscored the importance of staying updated with technological advancements and industry trends. They recommended that park owners invest in technology to enhance operations and guest experiences. Sandy Ellingson introduced “the Hub,” a new platform aimed at facilitating collaboration and innovation within the industry. Mark Koep advised park owners to utilize their existing guest email lists for targeted marketing, emphasizing the value of engaging past guests through email campaigns to maintain occupancy and drive repeat business. Casey Cochran highlighted the importance of allocating time to work on the business rather than just in it, exploring new marketing strategies, and leveraging technology. The panelists also discussed enhancing the guest experience by offering additional amenities and organizing events. They suggested that park owners look for ways to provide unique experiences that could drive additional revenue, such as rental services and partnerships with local businesses. Scott Bahr recommended that park owners actively listen to their guests to understand their needs and preferences better. Sandy Ellingson suggested revising deposit and cancellation policies to make bookings more attractive to potential guests. The episode concluded with each panelist offering practical advice. Mike Harrison emphasized the need to keep up with technology and industry trends, while Mark Koep advised using email marketing to engage past guests. Sandy Ellingson highlighted the importance of collaboration and innovation, and Scott Bahr recommended asking questions and actively listening to guests. Jeff Hoffman stressed the importance of financial planning and forecasting, and Casey Cochran advised creating space and time to work on the business strategically. Overall, the episode provided valuable insights and practical tips for park owners to adapt and thrive in a challenging economic environment.

Recurring Guests

A man is taking a selfie on top of a mountain during the MC Fireside Chats event on December 7th.
Casey Cochran
Vice President of Business Development
Campspot
A man in a plaid shirt smiling in front of a stone wall during the MC Fireside Chats on March 6th, 2024.
Mike Harrison
Chief Operating Officer
CRR Hospitality
A man in a red shirt smiling for the camera during the December 7th, 2022 MC Fireside Chats event.
Mark Koep
Founder and CEO
Campground Views
A man in glasses standing in the snow during MC Fireside Chats on November 1st, 2023.
Scott Bahr
President
Cairn Consulting Group
An older man smiling in a plaid shirt at the MC Fireside Chats on March 6th, 2024.
Jeff Hoffman
President
Ohio Campground Owners Association
A woman with short blonde hair smiling in front of a tree during the MC Fireside Chats on December 7th, 2022.
Sandy Ellingson
RV Industry Advisor

Special Guests

Episode Transcript

This is MC Fireside Chats. A weekly show featuring conversations with thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and outdoor hospitality experts who share their insights to help your business succeed. Hosted by Brian Searl, the founder and CEO of Insider Perks. Empowered by insights from Modern Campground, the most innovative news source in the industry.

Brian Searl: Welcome everybody [00:01:00] to My name is Brian Searl with Insider Perks. Super excited to be back with you for week one here. I took a couple weeks off. It feels like I’m trying to still get back into this whole rhythm here. But thankfully we’ve got a great panel of recurring guests here that obviously will, as always, pick up my slack.

So super excited to be back here for an open discussion show. We’ve got a couple people who want to talk to us. Run around the room and let everybody introduce themselves. As always, feel free to plug yourselves briefly. Let’s start with Scott, because he’s right above me. 

Scott Bahr: Scott Bahr with Cairn Consulting.

Brian Searl: Is it really Scott Bahr? Have I been saying Scott Bahr the whole time and you haven’t corrected me? I guess I just call you Scott in person. 

Scott Bahr: It doesn’t matter. The world is split on the pronunciation. So it’s okay. It’s okay. 

Brian Searl: What is the, we’re gonna have to do a study and commission this. We’ll talk about that later.

Okay, Sandy. 

Sandy Ellingson: I’m Sandy Ellingson and I’m an RV industry advocate. 

Brian Searl: Welcome, Sandy. Thanks for being here. Mike Harrison. 

Mike Harrison: Mike Harrison with Sierra Hospitality. Good afternoon. Morning. [00:02:00] 

Brian Searl: Good afternoon. Good morning, sir. Jeff Hoffman.

Scott Bahr: My next is muted. 

Brian Searl: Yeah, go ahead, Jeff. 

Scott Bahr: He was talking, but he’s muted.

Jeff Hoffman: I’m talking about founding member of Camp Strategy consulting firm. 

Brian Searl: Hey, Jeff, thanks for being here. And Casey from Camp Spot. 

Casey Cochran: That’s it. Casey from Camp Spot. 

Brian Searl: Alright, I guess I, yeah, sorry I didn’t mean to steal your thunder, sir. 

Casey Cochran: No, it’s alright. 

Sandy Ellingson: You can say that because Casey needs no introduction.

Brian Searl: Alright and then we have Mark Koep, who will join us in a couple minutes. He’s on an important phone call, so he’ll be back with us in, he said, about 15 minutes or so. We’ll see how long he has to wait on hold, but excited to have him join us as well. Guys, what’s on our agenda here? There’s a couple things that I want to talk about that we want to get to and I know, Scott, that you were there, and you maybe don’t want to talk about it, but do want to talk about it, but you’re the only person on the show who was there.

So we’d love to just hear your insights a little bit on the Move America week and [00:03:00] things like that in a few minutes. I want to definitely catch up with Jeff, see what’s been happening in the consulting world, Sandy in the RV world, Casey with CampSpot, you’ve been doing some cool things, some of your feature releases I think we’ve seen, Casey.

But let’s start with Mike. What’s new in Sierra Hospitality world, Mike? 

Mike Harrison: Hot off the presses, we just opened our newest resort, Savannah Lakes RV Resort, right off the I 95. It’s fantastic, cut right out of the forest, we share a border with the Savannah Wildlife Refuge. It’s five lakes, 95 acres or so just a beautiful property that’s very convenient but really serenity and just just a gorgeous property.

So businesses are doing well, we continue to focus on looking for third party development and feasibility studies and, Third party management. So that’s what we’re really doing a hard push for right now. And that’s something exciting that we continue to look at. 

Brian Searl: I’m interested, Mike. I think I know the answer to this question, right?

And we’ve had you as [00:04:00] a recurring guest on the show for some time, but I don’t remember if I’ve ever asked this question. We hear a lot about CRR Hospitality. You’re very active on LinkedIn. We, website announcements, all that kind of stuff. As people from the industry look at a company like CRR Hospitality.

Where would you say you want to take the company? Do you want to continue to go what we’re here, like just opening new resorts, third party management? Is there a larger vision you have for it that you could share with the industry? 

Mike Harrison: Sure. I think that’s a great question. Our company’s vision is evolving the industry for the modern world.

So when we created the company a few years ago we said, what do we want to be in seven years? What do we want people to say about us? And, we didn’t say we wanted to be the biggest, right? That wasn’t our vision. We don’t have a goal of. 20 properties a year, anything like that.

We said, we want to be able to leave an indelible mark on the industry that, we have helped push the industry forward. Whatever that is, whether it’s from an experiential hospitality standpoint, or it’s a technology standpoint, or a branding standpoint, we thought there was a place for us [00:05:00] to be able to put the industry in that position.

Part of that is obviously through our own growth. There’s whether it’s our own ground up developments or by, absorbing third party agreements from other owners. But part of it is also contributing to the industry, whether, I’m the speaker or I’m a university instructor for the American Glamping Association or the various different things that, that I’m a part of it’s operating, but also contributing to the industry as a whole.

Brian Searl: So how do you think you fit in with, and I’m just using our guests on this show as an example, right? Because we’ve got some different facets of different people from, that I think are fairly representative of the industry, right? We’ve got Sandy who’s in the RV industry. We’ve got Scott who’s big in data with KOA.

We’ve got Casey from reservation systems and Mark from the 10, 000 things he does, virtual tours and Facebook groups and whatever else. We’ve got Jeff Baughman, financial guru, campground owner, extraordinaire guy who unretired 73 times. How do you think and I think this is something that We often, and the reason I’m framing this question this way, is we often hear about here’s the software providers, [00:06:00] here’s the virtual tour providers, here’s the data people, here’s the management people, but really it’s everybody working together to create a piece that is CRR, right?

As your example, just taking your example. 

Mike Harrison: Yeah, many times I call it a symphony, right? And you need to have the different instruments to make up the orchestra that creates the symphony. And so I agree, I look at everyone on this call as an example, as a partner. We cannot do our business without, an amazing PMS provider like CampSpot, right?

While Jeff is, aligned in what he does, we’ve had so many conversations that helps move the industry forward. Obviously, we know you’re a partner on many different ways from marketing and AI standpoint and branding and digital. And, Mark, obviously, we do business with as well.

So I think, in order to be successful, And, Casey and I have had many conversations as well from CampSpot’s side. I know they have a similar mission, which is to, build the industry together. I don’t know how many folks saw CampSpot or participated in that yesterday, but I think that’s a great example of how CampSpot’s trying to move the industry [00:07:00] forward.

Or the reporting that Scott and you do, together. I think we are at a very important inflection point for the industry. Where I’ll be speaking on this at OHCE a little bit, just about how the industry is evolving. And, the announcement continues to come about Hilton and AutoCamp and where the industry continues to move towards.

It’s going at a rapid pace and things are going to be rolling out and we’re going to try stuff and break stuff and try stuff and break stuff. And it’s going to be exciting, and so I think using your partners and collaborating with your partners is imperative in that because, sometimes we need to push our partners to help grow at the pace we want to grow and deliver what we need to deliver, and we also need to rely on our partners to say, hey, have you guys seen this?

Have you tried this? Do you know we’ve got this coming out? Or, hey, we want to pilot something. We all work together and align to bring the industry forward and up to where, it’s going to be going at breakneck speed. 

Brian Searl: I think that I would love to have a [00:08:00] brief, and certainly all of you can redirect where this show goes, but I’d love to have just a brief conversation about education overall, and that will lead I’d love for you, Casey, to tell us about Camp Spot, which, by the way, is very difficult for me to say, and I don’t know why.

If it’s the camp, like it’s not really anyway, whatever. But the, just the education that is necessary as our industry goes through the changes that have come recently in the last few years, the ones that at least I believe are coming more rapidly in the next few years. And I think that this is, Because everybody on this call, in some form or fashion, is doing their educating.

If that’s Jeff through consulting and strategy and finances, if that’s Mark through new ways to showcase your park, if that’s Casey through Camp Spot and reservation systems and, ways to make up insular revenue, if that’s Scott through the reports that we do for MC Reports and the work he does with KOA and everything else he consults on, if that’s Sandy through the RV industry, if that’s Mike through CRR, right?

Like I think education is a big piece of where we are going [00:09:00] to need to go as an industry, and maybe we should take a few minutes and talk about it. 

Mike Harrison: Let’s get comfortable while Sandy is most likely going to be the first to respond here. 

Brian Searl: No. I gave it to Casey. I did. I promised it to Casey because CampBot.

For one, how did you come up with a name, but only spend about 10 seconds on that? I won’t. 

Casey Cochran: Yeah, no. I think the idea here is, Erin our fearless marketing leader, she puts a unique fun twist on just almost everything she does. It’s just a phenomenal job doing it. So I’m always I’m always pleasantly surprised with the detail that she’ll bring out to, to every little kind of big or large campaign.

But I think that you’re touching on something that’s, I think, is extremely relevant in the idea of education. And at the end of the day what are we educating for, right? There’s education that’s pushing a product or pushing a vision or it’s pushing your services. But to some extent, I think the right people in this space that you continually see.

Kind of. Representing it, which I think this group here, maybe outside of myself, does a phenomenal job of that. No, I’m just kidding. But they, [00:10:00] it’s, we want the industry to keep moving forward, right? We want the industry to keep growing and we are, we’re facing something unique right now, over the last, it’s different than the last few years.

There’s, there is some headwinds right now. Overall camping searches. are down and so it’s okay now it’s not just if you build it they will come now there’s like Mike put it very eloquently like it is it’s a symphony right there’s so many moving pieces there’s so many things that can come together to bring things like again to that make this space successful and to make each individual’s park or their group of parks successful and I think that the education piece of it because there’s so much going on a day to day basis of running the park.

You always use the analogy, you’re working in your business, you’re working on your business. And I, we think the more that we can continue to educate on sometimes broad strokes of, hey, here’s some simple things you can do to make up revenue if you’re, if your occupancy is down, right?

Those are some simple things. But then there’s other things as far as [00:11:00] overall industry trends. that are absolutely necessary to pay attention to, right? You need to be aware of what’s going on. You and I, Brian, have had this conversation for years now where, you know, for a lot of parks for a long time, they didn’t feel they needed any marketing, right?

They’re just like, no, we’re good. We’re where we are. We don’t need to do it. And we’re, they’re recognizing now, okay now that my, my occupancy isn’t like it was last year what do I do now? I’m scrambling now. I need to do marketing. And I’d probably push this back to Mike here in a bit, but for, the, for a lot of operators, they’ve known for three or four or five or six months or eight months that occupancy was down, right?

And, but for a lot of operators, they’re recognizing it right now. They’re reaching out to us right now saying, Hey, June numbers are down. In, in May, May was down. And so for us, education comes through multiple different versions, but to me, what’s absolutely relevant is what’s going on overall in the space.

What are ways that you can make up revenue? If occupancy is down, what are ways you can [00:12:00] increase occupancy? And then overall, how do you use data? How do you use your own park data and overall data to help your business succeed? And if those revolving topics for us, we’ll continue to press and push that out.

Not necessarily this is the flashy new feature, you have to be using this or your business isn’t going to succeed. I think that’s. run its course, and I think we’ve heard enough of that. Now it’s what are all the pieces that are necessary to put you in the best position to be successful? And so the, the Camp Spot thing is starting to pull on those things.

What is something we can bring out four times a year that we feel is relevant in the space right now at this time of the year? What are things you can do that are practical right now in the timeframe that we’re in that we’re seeing that hopefully helps, breed success? Because, we have a unique business model, right?

We only charge when a park takes a reservation, right? So we succeed as parks succeed. If their reservations are down, guess what? Our revenue is down, right? So we’re in it together. We don’t have the model [00:13:00] where, hey, you pay us regardless, and I hope that things are going well. If they’re not, we feel the same pain.

So it’s in our best interest. Being a partner in this space to see what can we do to drive additional awareness? What can we do to drive additional occupancy? What can we do to drive additional conversions? What can we do to drive overall the industry and getting more people camping and more camping nights?

And that’s where this series is starting and where we hope to take it. 

Brian Searl: I don’t want to fear, I don’t want to veer too far away from education, but I want to have one thing that you brought up, I think is important to communicate to owners on the show. And that’s that. A lot of parks are down right now, right?

Like we’re hearing a lot from some of the more vocal voices to be as vague as possible that the industry is great and we’re going to have another great year and it’s going to be amazing, but like this is not what park owners are seeing at their parks, right? Yeah, 

Casey Cochran: it’s, yeah, no, I think, I’ll put it to Mike here, I think this is a really good segue in general, right?

There’s parks that have done a good job using data to [00:14:00] understand that the demand isn’t as high as it was in the past, and so they’ve made adjustments ahead of time to help offset that with ancillary revenue, with unique, with promo codes, with discount codes, with, potentially doing, accepting a few more long term reservations as opposed to transient.

The people that are utilizing data and reporting to their advantage, or at least were aware of it well in advance of, recognizing, hey, it’s June, and I’m not full this June. That’s different than the last four years. That’s pretty relevant to know that three or four years in, or three or four months in advance, or even six months in advance.

Yeah, it needs to be longer than that. So maybe a good segue to this would be handing this off to Mike and saying, okay, Mike, how have you’ve seen the trends. You probably look into our analytics platform, maybe than anyone else in the space. What have you seen and what are, because again, this is, I don’t want to give away your, Your your secret sauce because obviously the management and the tools that you bring are the reason why you run such successful parks.

But [00:15:00] what are some practical things that you’ve done by looking at data that’s available to you to help get in front of some of these things? What, what would be a couple practical things that you’ve done? 

Mike Harrison: We just had this discussion with ownership yesterday. So a couple things. One is I remember when I first, started in the outdoor hospital industry coming from the hotel industry, forecasting is a regular cadence, a regular pattern of doing business.

And in this industry it wasn’t. So I was pushing and pushing for reporting and forecasting to understand what are we doing 6, 12, 18 months from now. And I remember we looked at the Camp Spot Advanced Booking Report and I’m like, eh, oh we got forecasting. I’m like, eh, not really.

And we pushed and pushed and, you guys obviously developed and evolved to CampSpot Analytics. So I think there’s a couple things. One is, I think the industry as a whole needs to understand and be better prepared by looking out 6, 12, 18 months. And they hadn’t been, right? And especially in the last 4 or 5 years where it was hot.

Oh, I’m full. I’ll be full all the time. Secondly, and Brian, you and I have had this discussion probably going back to [00:16:00] last January, where I was, I know how many times I said I want to be doom and gloom, but I don’t see this year being as amazing as everybody thought it was going to be.

And then last year, of course, was down from 2022. And as we finished last year, You always stop me from talking about the economy and pace and, here we are in 2024. But this is what I do for a living to make sure that, our assets are successful. And, our properties are very heavy in the snowbird area.

I always say we usually get an indication of what’s going to happen for the year well before everybody else does because it’s coming to us first. When we see Q1 is going to be off. We know that over the summer of the previous year, we have a good indication of what we feel or what we think might happen in the upcoming year.

For example, a more specific example, Casey, as you mentioned, we had back in January taken a look at the summer of this year and kind of said, okay, we’re looking at year over year trends and we’re down in booking pace. And we had thought we might be, but we were down a little bit more than we had expected to, so we did a hard push for the summer, ran some [00:17:00] promos boosted our Google Ads, and so we were quite overspent in Q1 for marketing and it didn’t necessarily reflect it.

The performance of Q1 but we knew it was for future business. Fast forward, we beat budget and beat last year for May in a couple of our properties and we are well ahead 10 or 15 percent of pace versus last year for the summer. It doesn’t mean it’s solved. This year is still tough. However, we aggressively saw a hole well in advance because a lot of times people are looking 30 or 60 days.

And by the time you get there, It’s too late, right? Now you’re being reactive and, oh, please come stay with me. And so we are looking far out to make sure, like right now, of course, we’re looking at, Q4, of next year and, making plans. You’re probably going to see a promotion come out in the next week about, summer heat, buy two months, get one free kind of thing to build some occupancy, build some base.

If you will, far out. And so using the tools, I [00:18:00] think, and everything at your disposal, it’s not just use, it’s also, the, what we have from Google analytics and the stuff that, that Brian provides us, it’s the reporting that Scott does, it’s not an easy answer. It’s an amalgamation of all the information to make best decisions.

But if you don’t use foresight or you’re not forecasting, it doesn’t matter. Yeah. A long answer to a short question. 

Brian Searl: But that’s a very important thing, right? And you can talk to almost everybody on this call about this forecasting or planning in advance, because, and I’ve had so many of these calls in the last two, three, four weeks with clients who have said Oh I’m down for Memorial Day or I’m down for June.

What do I do? There’s very few things we can do tomorrow to try to fix that. That’s like a Google ads play. That’s an. Mass email campaign. But if you look at the other people that are on this call, right? If you don’t forecast those things in advance, like you look at mark service for campground views.

If somebody calls up Mark and Mark’s my park is down. What can you do to help me, Mark? I can create a virtual tour for you, but I can’t create it, have it online tomorrow, and [00:19:00] then market it tomorrow, and make everybody aware of it tomorrow, like that’s just, I need a window. So you need to prep for this in advance.

And so if we look at all those things, like I can’t switch software, I can’t, maybe I could turn on lock fees tomorrow, that might be a thing. So that’s one thing, right? But there are very few things that you can do without that planning in advance. Would, whoever wants to take that, would somebody agree?

Casey Cochran: I 100 percent agree and we did everything we could and that first camp, camp spot thing that we did, we tried to break it down in terms of, okay, what are some just subtle things you can do? It’s amazing still how many parks, Mark’s gone well beyond this and for good reason, but just still basic imagery, right?

And have you updated even like your listings in terms of like how you’re describing your park and the sites? And so there’s subtle things that, there’s baby steps that still can be done right now that I think parks. Many parks in this space should continue to take serious, making sure you’ve up to date images.

What is, Mike’s done a ton of stuff on branding and what’s your identity and what’s the consistency within that? But there is simple things like, hey, if you’ve never turned on a [00:20:00] simple lock site feed, you’ve never offered add ons at the time of booking like it makes sense to do those things, right?

Those are some subtle things that you can do right now, but you’re right. Overall, if you’re not looking at the stuff at a little bit larger window, You are missing out on adjustments and tweaks that you can make that sometimes require longer than a week or two to do 

Mark Koep: let me add on to that, Brian, real fast. 

Brian Searl: Go ahead, Mark, and then I’ll work with Jeff. 

Mark Koep: So part of that is we were just talking about this the other day, a lot of the private park operators in our industry It’s been a family business. They’ve run this for 25 years. They know what’s going on. They don’t need anything else until they do.

And now they don’t know what to do. And I’ll share an example with you from one of the trade shows. Gentleman walks up to me and I asked him part of the conversation when we’re providing our services, do you have online booking? And he says, no, he’s and you’re not going to convince me to get online booking no matter what you say.

And I said, great. I won’t talk you into it. I said, is your park for sale? It’s I’m always interested for the right price. And I said I’ve got multiple [00:21:00] investors who will buy your park today. And the only thing they’re going to do is install online booking on your website, your same website.

And they’re going to grow the revenue 30 percent in the first year. That’s all I said to him. He said, maybe I should get online booking. I’m like, yeah, I think you should start probably started thinking about that. So the hardest part for a lot of operators is getting out of them, their own way and allowing systems to come into place that can serve them.

And then that brings up the biggest challenge. Where do you find the right systems that work for you? And that’s a hard question to ask because it depends on their tech savviness, who they’re connecting with and so forth. That’s where I think the underlying. The problem lies is that if you don’t know what you don’t know, you’re going to continue doing what you’re doing.

So raising your hand and just being honest and saying, Hey, we’re down this year and I really have no idea. Then start reaching out to people and just having conversations because that’ll guide you down the right path. So Casey, kudos to you guys on that, that Camp Spot report. There was two data points in that presentation that just blew my mind.

The lock site fees. [00:22:00] And then the dynamic pricing too. Just the numbers. If you haven’t had a chance to view that report, I’m sure they can download a recording of it. Casey? But the data they have on lock site fees and dynamic pricing will nullify anybody’s argument about being able to move people around their sites.

When they look at the raw numbers of how much money is made by parks that are using that service, Your argument is moot. You’ll go ahead and use those services and use them appropriately. Kudos to you guys for doing that presentation. 

Brian Searl: So for me, all this is important, right? And I don’t want to, I’m not, I don’t want to minimize all what you just said, Mark, because it’s very important, all the things that we can turn on right now.

But I’m more interested in the discussion of yes, now is now, and now we have to pivot and do certain things, but how do we then work toward 18 months from now? And so I want to ask Jeff this question, just Jeff, from a financial standpoint, if I’m Like a financial guru, as far as I’m concerned, right? I don’t even like to look at my numbers at all, which is probably a terrible thing, but, and don’t coach me on that.

But [00:23:00] so if you literally are an operator and you’re looking very lightly at your finances and maybe you’re working with a Jeff or a camp strategy or a CRR hospitality, that’s paying more attention, but if you’re just lightly paying attention to this stuff, what can you do to help yourself notice and forecast this stuff far enough in advance for you to do more with it?

Jeff Hoffman: What a lot of people don’t look at is, as Mike brought up, their forward bookings. Although the window for booking has decreased, where during COVID and that, I would say we were almost four to six weeks out on reservations. Now that window has dropped back down to the more normal pre COVID booking window.

Which is about two to three weeks out, except for major holidays. If you’re looking at that, and go back and look at maybe your 2019 take [00:24:00] up reports, you can tell if you’re staying even with the percentage of take up on 2019 versus 24. 24 right now seems like it’s going to be flat. When I’ve talked to a lot of people, some of the campgrounds that I have consulted with were up quite a bit, but that’s because we did some changes and they may have added some pads, which is boosting revenue.

But overall, how we educate people to take a look at marketing for the future, how we, how to look at their financials for the future. It goes back to your point and to Casey’s point of educating them. What tools do they need to get that done? How do they look at a financial statement?

I don’t [00:25:00] specialize in marketing, but I know enough in marketing that what you’re marketing today hopefully is for two to three months out, if not more. And if you’re reading that you’ve got a downturn, you’ve got to hit it harder than softer. You can’t, the only way to drive revenue is to out, to market more and not cut that expense.

Cut your expense someplace else if you’re going to have a downturn, but don’t cut your marketing expense. That’s the only way you’re going to draw additional business in. And those are all things that we have to take a look at, both from the financial side. And you brought it up, revenue management there’s dynamic pricing, there’s revenue management, there’s looking at your expenses, how can they be adjusted if you’re going into a a down period.

But the main thing is looking at the [00:26:00] trends and they, as they go to the new systems like CampSpot, it’s a lot easier for a person like myself to come into your campground cold than and pull out data that tells me a lot of information that the campground owner actually doesn’t know at this point. If they’ve, if they’re still doing their stuff on books, it’ll take me weeks to figure out what’s going on.

And lots of going back to old reports where If I get on any kind of new PMS system, I’ve got everything at my fingertips, and I can forecast out, I can budget everything from that. 

Casey Cochran: You touched on something there, Jeff, with everyone’s, dynamic pricing has been this buzzword for what feels like four or five years now.

Some parks use it, vast majority of them don’t, but this year I think looking at dynamic pricing in a different [00:27:00] light could maybe never be more relevant in my opinion. I’ll push this back to Sandy and Mike for their I guess for further take on this, but I think more than ever right now, dynamic pricing, the opposite way that most people look at dynamic pricing is going to be extremely relevant in terms of saying, until my occupancy is this high, I’m going to lower my pricing a certain amount because I need to get people into my spots.

That’s when hospitality and that’s when the experience that I provide them has to be on it’s on a different level. It needs to be on it’s the highest level possible. Because again, I need to speak to this audience. I need to get them in. Then I need to wow them with what we’re able to do. And so this year, I think more than ever, if you’re seeing occupancy lower, what can you do?

Yeah, there’s marketing, there’s lots, there’s all these different things you can do, but at some point, and this is what I’d like to push back maybe to Sandy and Mike, like at what point do you just lower pricing, right? At what point does it say we need to lower our pricing from what it’s been in the past?

to get people in. And then [00:28:00] I think it’s finding that balance of what’s, you don’t want to lower your pricing too much to potentially bring in an audience that you don’t necessarily want there. And then what is that balance? And again, not just pitching everything technology wise, but doing that using technology to say until these site types that are at the lowest occupancy over the next 30 days or 45 days are at a certain percentage occupancy, I’m okay taking my prices down.

15 or 20 percent to see if that actually converts. It’s the same mindset as saying on my holiday weekends when I get to 70 percent occupancy, I’m going to raise my prices 10 percent because we have that much demand this early. At what point do you just simply say pricing is going to come into play? So be curious, like Sandy, like what?

And then Mike, obviously would love to hear your comments too. Are you recommending right now, Sandy, to Parks to say, hey, look, you’re just, You might just need to lower your pricing right now and see if that gets, gets bodies in the park. What’s your take there?

Brian Searl: Before you answer that one thing [00:29:00] I want to throw out that’s super controversial just to play devil’s advocate related to this price topic, right? So I had a conversation with a larger group this morning who owns multiple parks and they were talking about the same thing where like we’re looking at discounting and adjusting rates and do we go, mostly down was the conversation, right?

But looking out at September and seeing those numbers and things like that, And my thing is I’m not sure that discounting is the right way to go. And I know this is going to be controversial and I know I’m not the smartest person in the room about this subject. So I want to toss it out to the group and have you guys give your thoughts on it.

But I think if you’re looking at a consumer who is squeezed because of inflation, And who is naturally going to cut back on some things that they’re doing, whether that’s all camping or no camping or some camping or longer stays or longer distances or whatever it is, right? If you’ve decided in your head that you’re not going to go camping because you’re going to cut that from your budget, I don’t think a 10 or 20 percent discount changes your mind and brings you back to the table.

So there’s certainly people in the middle who’s, who will change their mind. And I’m not saying there [00:30:00] isn’t. But then on the other side, there’s the people who are saying this inflation and this economy really stinks, but I’ve got to get away. I’ve got to get out. I’ve got to relax and de stress.

And so like camping is going to be my one indulgence this year, instead of maybe a big ticket new car or something like that. And I also think those people are going to look at a price of 50 and say, I’ll go camping for that, and they’re not waiting for that 40 or they’re not saying I’m only going to go stay there if it’s 40, because they’ve decided that camping is going to be.

and their discussionary spending. So through that lens, Sandy, please. 

Sandy Ellingson: I was gonna say that was a really interesting point you brought up. I just got back from a large rally. There were about a thousand people and about 500 rigs and there were a lot of Just like breakout sessions, conversations. About 75 percent of the people there had never been to a rally.

And that group was split half and half between like brand new to the RV industry and seasoned RVers. And the conversations were [00:31:00] interesting because a lot of the newer people in the industry were saying, Before they make a trip, they were checking Airbnb prices, hotel prices. So the competitive landscape is now bigger than just looking at RV parks.

And I think that’s confirmed by the fact that we see the big players like Hilton and some of the others and Marriott wanting to get into the RV space. Because what they’re saying over and over again is that we’re getting a higher daily rate than they are, but when you consider that they have to clean all these rooms.

I’ve realized that competitive landscape is bigger. I’m encouraging all of my parks to look at what the whole competitive landscape is around them based on who they’re trying to target. And then the second thing that’s interesting, and we found this to really work, is before you discount your rates, look at your cancellation policy and your deposit policy.

Because the biggest thing we’re hearing [00:32:00] from campers is that during COVID, we raised our deposit policies and they went from 50 percent to 100 percent up front. It’s harder to put that money up front now. If you do go back to the one night, like we used to all do, that makes it easier.

The second thing is, instead of making your cancellation policy where you have to do it two weeks out make it shorter and maybe instead of a refund or a penalization because you need to cancel, tell them you’ll keep that money, and they can change that reservation two or three times during the year if they need to, because a lot of times they’re not booking because they’re worried about the weather, or they’re not booking because they don’t know what’s going to happen with something, and so we’re seeing a lot more last minute reservations.

But I want my parks to get those reservations in advance so they can plan. So those are a couple of things that we’re doing to try and improve that situation. 

Mark Koep: Yeah, and I’ll jump in also, because Brian, [00:33:00] I completely agree with everything you just said there, because that’s the same advice I’m giving my client parks.

I would never discount, or I would never lower my prices. I would do promotions though, so to the point that somebody’s not going to go camping, there are some parks you can think, just you want to think high level. Mike’s Parks, Jellystone Parks, Destination Organizations that are more resort oriented, can obviously put on events and draw people in because they give them an excuse.

But when you go down to the Mom Pop, what can they do if all they are is a place to park and you don’t have any traffic coming in? So there’s a few things you can do. Number one, you can market. Number two, you can answer the phone. That’s probably the biggest thing. You answer the phone, you’re going to get business.

It’s magical. It’s a big problem in our industry. A lot of park owners do not answer their phones. And so they’re not gonna get the business. So the biggest trend that we see going on is two things this year over years past. One, there’s less campers than there was in the previous years.

There’s people who did it, they’re off the road, so we don’t have this huge audience. We still have a massive audience of campers. I’m not saying everybody quit, but it’s not that huge bubble that we had before. One. Two, we’ve [00:34:00] got macro factors going on. It’s an election cycle in the United States. I think in the last three months that we were supposed to die of a solar storm, a nuclear war, and a pandemic.

In the last month alone The amount of news being blasted at people right now about the end of the world, vote for me, it doesn’t matter what side you’re on, it’s scaring people. And so they’re shortening, they’re not going to plan three months out because I might be dead from a nuclear war then, right?

They’re planning in a tighter realm, I’m going to go camping. 

Brian Searl: Super chill up here in Canada, just throwing that out. 

Mark Koep: Yeah we should all go to Canada. And to that point, Brian, and the next, the side point I was going to make is I live in a rural area in Wyoming. Our town is busting at the seams.

There are RVs everywhere. And to the point Sandy just made, there’s actually RVs in the hotel parking lot where they’re staying in the hotel versus the RV park that’s full in our town, right? So people are going to rural areas and their travel has changed. So the industry has changed overall. So the simple thing of just saying, lower your price to bring people in.

No, that’s not it. There’s a whole bunch of other factors. 

Casey Cochran: Yeah. And just to be clear, [00:35:00] I wasn’t suggesting that I was throwing it over to you guys to say cause we’ve had that a lot with people asking us like, Hey, should we just, do we need to go back through and lower the pricing?

And again, that’s why I proposed the question is I don’t think that’s the answer either. I think if you’re going to lower, if you’re going to lower prices, I think it should be promotional or discount based. So people know. that hey, I’m offering you this discount for this period of time. It’s not just generally lowering my prices in general.

You’re giving people the idea of a deal and you’re giving them a discount. You’re giving them a reason to book now or take advantage of a special versus just saying, okay, my prices need to go down because people think it’s too expensive. I would be in that camp. That’s why, again, I would. I was throwing it over to you guys to get your answer there, so I want to make sure that It needs to be 

targeted too, right?

Brian Searl: This is the, it’s very easy because you’re busy and you’re panicking and you’re unsure why you’re down because you didn’t forecast it, didn’t look at the numbers that Jeff said and all those kinds of things to say I’m just going to throw a 20 percent off coupon out there, when instead you should be doing like what the airlines do, for example, is they’ll send you a [00:36:00] discount that says 30 percent off base fares and it’s 10 flights that aren’t full from the airports you don’t want to fly out to because Delta’s trying to fill those seats But that’s a targeted approach.

They know exactly what they’re doing. And so discounting, yes, I’m fine with discounting, but I think it should be carefully thought out and not a blanket discount giving away revenue that you could have gotten later in the year. 

Jeff Hoffman: Hey Brian one of the things that I’ve always taken a look at and we’ve ins instituted in some of the parks is we classify the sites even like the pull through sites.

There’s A, B, C, and D sites. And the back ends and all of that. And what we do is we price structure those so that we have a blend of rates throughout the market. And what I’m finding this year is my crappiest pull throughs that are the lowest price are full. So that tells me that there is [00:37:00] price break this year.

They’re looking for bargains. Where last year it was I should say it’s strange because my high dollar deluxe pull throughs with patios are full and my cheapest sites on pull throughs are full, what we’re missing is the middle of the economy. The high end people are still here and the other ones are still looking for bargains.

I haven’t lowered prices yet. We were just I’ve told them be patient and to market. And the way that we do dynamic pricing is somewhat, we start out with a low price until we get to 25 percent occupancy and then we bump it. At 50 percent occupancy, we’re looking at, that would have been our base rate.

Mark Koep: Hey Jeff, what’s the gap in price between your three site types? It’s about [00:38:00] 30. 

Mike Harrison: I think there’s a couple different factors here too. I think generally speaking, we’re talking about transient. The people are coming from a night, the people are coming, but I think, and these are important discussions to have.

There’s more than just one segment, which is just transient, right? There’s also weeklies, there’s monthlies, and there’s long term. And how you price and factor and consider all of those need to be taken into account differently because, the construction workers traveling there, they’re still traveling, right?

The full timers, they’re still around. And You need to be careful when you apply pricing factors and schematics along those lines to, what market you’re talking about. And then go back to what everybody says, and we used to say this in the hotel business, and I hate to always say, it’s the most annoying when some person says, Oh, when I used to be in blah, blah, blah.

So I’m being very annoying when I say that. I know I am. I’m sorry. But there’s so many tenants that you can pull. And, in the revenue management world, we used to say, are you priced to sell or are you [00:39:00] priced to discount, right? And so if your price is always your discount price, then that’s not a discount, that’s your new price, right?

And so you have to be careful that you just can’t always be discounting or running a promo every single weekend because otherwise that becomes your new price, right? And so that’s the important thing to understand is what your goal is, are you lowering pricing? Or are you running promotions to spur and generate some additional revenue, right?

And one of the things that, I’ve heard for years is you cannot create demand, right? Just because your price is, this doesn’t mean that all of a sudden, all these people are coming. They’re the customers that may be around that are in the market. The lowering price didn’t, it didn’t create the demand.

It may have helped drive more people to you. So there’s some pricing things, that, And all of this, I actually have this whole topic at OHDE about revenue management and, how you apply philosophy and analytics, but it’s right now when it’s tough [00:40:00] is, the most important thing to take a look at what your holistic strategy is and be true and have integrity to your intention, because otherwise you create disharmony with your guests.

Because they don’t understand, what you’re doing. Last week I saw this week you ran that. And I think the other thing is, for a lot of the folks that are new to the industry or some that have been through the cycle, we are in that part of, we come off two record years all time. All time.

And so we’re down, right? But what is that down relative to, right? If you look at the healthy industry, it’s still very healthy. And if you look at it comparatively to what it was four or five years ago, the numbers are great. And having gone through all these different cycles in the hotel world, they’re cycles, and you still look at applying your strategy to what that looks like.

And in CampSpot, they have a market share report, a competitive analysis report, that shows you how you’re competing against your quote unquote comp set. And I love to say, and people laugh at me for saying, but, maybe we’re sucking, but we don’t suck as bad. So you understand [00:41:00] how you’re performing against the other folks in your comp set and you may be down 3%, but you can see your comp set’s down 15, right?

Are the strategies you’re doing, are they working? Are you applying your principles in there? So you’re still gonna be down, right? If that’s a general economic trend or that’s what’s going on. But are you beating out your competition? That’s the measuring stick. Are you performing better than others?

Are you not sucking as bad, in a downturn, so to speak. 

Brian Searl: So I agree with that. I, and I just want to add one small thing to it and say that I’m worried that cause I hear this refrain a lot, not necessarily from you, Mike, and I know you didn’t mean to have a huge structure behind me while I was talking but.

The one thing that we’re, the one thing that I pick out of there is the, that maybe this is a crutch for people if we’re pushing too hard on this notion that, yes, you’re having a good year, and I agree with everything you’re saying, but you’re down from 21, 22, but you’re still having a good year, comparatively speaking to 19.

Does that give people an excuse to then say, oh, then, don’t have to do as much planning as everybody’s talking about the show. 

Mike Harrison: It’s a condition, it’s an [00:42:00] explanation or an understanding. It doesn’t give any. And if somebody I know that’s what you mean. I’m just saying I want to be careful.

If somebody uses that as an excuse, then good luck running your business. Because none of us are ever going to take our foot off the gas and say we’re happy with where we are. Go ahead, Sandy. 

Sandy Ellingson: I just think that another big consideration that has to be brought into this conversation is all of the people who bought parks during COVID and they paid the highest price for those parks And now the occupancy is down.

The prior owner probably could be doing great, because they didn’t have the debt structure that the new owner does. And I’m seeing that a lot with small investors who thought they wanted to get into the RV industry and started buying up parts. Didn’t really know what they were doing and now they’ve got debt higher than what they should have and they cannot get the nightly rates that they really need to make the profit margins that they promised.[00:43:00] 

Brian Searl: Scott Bahr, who’s been ever so quiet and soaking up all the wisdom from everybody except me on this call because I never have any wisdom. Scott, tell us how they can forecast and use data points with the studies that you’re doing for KOA, for MC, on your own, just some of those, how can they use that as a.

Harbinger of what’s to come, both good and bad. 

Scott Bahr: I think first and foremost look who, most of this stuff is macro. And I think to build on what everybody has been talking about here what we do typically is we look at the macro level and now you can take the data that everyone has, whether it’s from CampSpot or, and use that at your micro level.

So first and foremost, there’s two parts to the equation. And one is, what’s happening up here. And that’s what we measure. Look at the demographics. Look at the attitudes. Remember, attitudes are lagging. If someone says, this is my intention now, you’re not going to see that for months. Even if they say, I’m going to do it next month, it’s going to happen [00:44:00] down the road.

It’s much further. All the attitude and stuff, it’s lagging. That’s one thing I would tell people. It’s it Attitudes are always, when they convert to behavior, it’s down the road. Use the information. See who’s going out. Who’s camping, who’s glamping, who’s traveling, who’s road tripping, all those things.

We have that. All that information exists. All you have to do is ask. The other part is what kind of experiences do they want? That’s how you build on it. I think maybe you Brian mentioned this earlier and Mike talked about it too. What are you selling? You’re selling an experience.

What are those experiences that people want? That’s what you’re selling. They’re willing to, and typically if you’re, people will pay for an experience that they want to have, and they’re going to budget for it this year. Talk about the experiences, look at what’s trending out there. There’s a lot of information that we’re putting out that addresses all this the on the ground experiences, how they want to eat, what they want to do, what they want to who they want to be with, all those things.

[00:45:00] And how you use that is, that’s been the most important thing anyone can get. It’s active listening. Listen, ask, listen and ask. It’s there’s a lot that can be learned from this. And again, by combining the information that’s available, that’s where you get the picture. And I, from Camp Spot, co presented down in Florida, and I thought it worked, I really enjoyed it because what we did was he talked about the information that, that the objective information that.

It’s being gathered. And I talked about the trends. I talked about what you’re not, and here’s what we’re seeing. You bring those together, you get the full picture of what’s going on. And it allows you, I think, to make better decisions because now you really know what’s going on because the behavior and intentions, but you also know the attitudes is an important part of a lot of people forget about.

Casey Cochran: Yeah that’s a really good point. It makes me think of something else too, in terms of what you can do right now and Mike’s Perks have done a really good job with this. It really [00:46:00] came full circle. I did a quick trip to Jamaica to visit a friend. And there’s this big fear thing going on in Jamaica right now.

I’ll try to bring this all together, but of like people, being scared to go there and things of that sort. Don’t go off the resorts or don’t go out of the, into the local places. And it’s this fear that got created internally at the resorts to try to keep everyone there. So they spent all their money there and they didn’t venture out anywhere else.

To spend any money anywhere else. And it’s worked. It’s worked phenomenally. They take this fear aspect of things to try to keep everyone there and blame, violence that might be, 300 miles away or something like that. That happens in every city. And use that to have reasons to say no, you shouldn’t really, you shouldn’t leave the resort at all.

It’s too scary out there. We did the exact opposite. Everything was perfectly fine. Let’s bring that up because, Mike’s done a good job of this at his parks, but controlling what you can control, if your occupancy is down 20%, let’s say, so very, simply, if you have 100 and this year it’s going to be 80 because the occupancy is there, what [00:47:00] can you do at your park to get that 80 to 100 again, and it might not be from an extra body it might be from other things that you can offer at the park, whether it’s running off pickleball paddles or if it’s You know if it is firewood and ice or it’s just what does your park have to offer locally there that you can Draw up the ticket of that per person what you’re making from that person you know at the park and so I think being creative there or what’s at your disposal is it linking up with?

Other tours that are in the area and say, Hey, I’ll send business your way. What’s, what’s something we can work out. There’s other ways at saying, instead of saying, I got to get 20 more bodies in my park if you have 80, are you getting the most out of those 80 people by offering whatever it is, ancillary things that you can offer them.

And I, like I said, Mike’s done a phenomenal job at this. I was at his parks and it was great. I felt like I didn’t need to buy anything anywhere else besides maybe going to dinner a couple of times. And I’m sure that was by design which is a good thing, but I think exploring those things for every park at a very practical level is like, what are some things here that I absolutely [00:48:00] could make some additional revenue off of the people that are there, not just with my price, not just charging them more for the pad or for the cabin, but what are some things that are going to be benefits or add ons that I can add ons.

Sell to them or offer to them while they’re there and that’s going to help offset, maybe a lower occupancy So that’s an area worth exploring if parks have it 

Mike Harrison: That’s an intentional strategy Basically that we have talked about the last year is precisely what you just said and that wasn’t by accident which is Driving ancillary revenue, right?

And we’re looking for pennies anything that we can make money off of we’re trying to You know, whether it’s, tie dye, running extra activities, doing extra golf carts. We just installed a sluice, which is one of those, gem mining, amenities. The, we have a revenue share with a yoga instructor.

We just signed up a new food truck. We, there’s probably 30 different things that we are doing to drive other revenue, that can help offset, if you’re down in some of the site revenue [00:49:00] imperative strategy. 

Brian Searl: Absolutely. You can go the other way too though, right? You can make sure that your margins are intact while saving money in other places that perhaps you would have spent in other years?

Scott Bahr: Yeah, I would hear it. So Scott, what were you going to say? Oh, I was going to say just to look at a different hospitality situation in the work I, I’ve done like with Paris Casinos in the past is they increase their revenue for events by a concert for the VIPs or whomever. They would increase their revenue for the event by.

15 to 20 percent just by having a social hour prior to the event where they served food and drinks. It was a huge revenue generator for them for those types of events. So it’s one of those things that, yeah, the food and drink, by the way is a really good market by them and people love it.

It’s a big draw. That’s all I wanted to say. 

Brian Searl: That’s actually fascinating. So do we have any data, Scott or anybody else on this call about how many people, if your check in time is at four, how many people would [00:50:00] come at three versus would come at eight, nine, 10 at night if they could, is there any data that exists on that?

Scott Bahr: Not that I have. 

Brian Searl: It’s a super simple like idea and it’s not a huge revenue generator, but like I used to go to the Kempton hotels and they used to have that happy wine hour or whatever at seven o’clock. Why not offer like an early check in social? where you sell things and people can show up. I don’t know.

Scott Bahr: Those things are great ideas. That’s that. I think that’s all part of the mix. Find out ways. I like what you’re talking about, finding alternatives to generate revenue. I think you were just talking about that. It’s there’s some great opportunities. It might be talking about those events, all of them.

People love that kind of stuff. And they’re willing, again, they have their budgets, but they’re willing to put out a few dollars for that kind of stuff. Convenience factor is huge as well. 

Brian Searl: Alright, so let’s spend the last few minutes or just do a round robin around the room for people. If you had to pick one or two things that people should pay attention to educate themselves, forecast, [00:51:00] Adjust whatever, help prepare for what is now and may happen in the future.

What would those one or two things be? Start with Mike Harrison.

Mike Harrison: What they should keep an eye on, is what you’re asking? 

Brian Searl: Yeah, like things that they should either start to educate themselves on, numbers or data they should pay attention to, just ways that they can help whether what may or may not be coming or what is happening now. 

Mike Harrison: Okay, so I’ll be prepared in the future if that’s what you want to say.

If I’m a business owner or a business manager, How do I make sure I’m successful in the future? What do I have to keep an eye on? I would say two things. One is technology. And you can encompass AI into that and you can encompass the evolution of, Mark’s product and Casey’s product or Joe Dumig or, different platforms.

You have to leverage, what the professional and really upscale property is doing because it will become commonplace and you’ll be left behind if you don’t. And there’s some things that can really You know, maximize your park by doing those things. So I would say [00:52:00] technology is number one and number two is, they have to keep up on trends.

There’s not one source, but whether it’s the KOA report or whether it’s the Modern Campground and current consulting report, or whether it’s Lamping Report or Woodall’s or, whatever it is, you gotta find four or five or six sources of information and read it religiously. So you understand what’s coming, what are the trends, what’s national, what’s economic data, what’s coming down the pike so that you can make the best decisions for your business.

We use those all the time just to, help shape decisions for amenities, or what we’re going to offer, what the demographic changes are going to be, et cetera, et cetera. So those would be the two things I would say. 

Brian Searl: All right, Mark, have you been quiet further than usual?

Mark Koep: Yeah, I this was a great presentation by everybody, so I just shut up. Everybody’s I don’t need to talk when everybody’s killing it. So my advice right now, and I think the easiest thing for park owners to grasp and do to control the flow of their guests [00:53:00] is you want to reach guests that have stayed at your park, right?

You have their email address. If you want to do something tangible that can increase your business, start doing some online webinars, go to YouTube, learn how to use an email handler and start emailing your guests. There’s segmentation, there’s all sorts of stuff. I’m not gonna overwhelm you. If I give you one task.

Get your email list out of your reservation system and get those emails on to an email handler and start communicating with the people who know who you are. All right, Sandy. 

Sandy Ellingson: My dream that I’ve been working on for several years actually goes live on June the 15th. So my my tip would be to watch out for the hub because it is exactly what I think parks have been needing.

It’s what I’ve been doing for four years on my own and now will facilitate. Everybody in the industry, whether it’s campgrounds or RV industry, manufacturers or suppliers, you’ll be able to connect, [00:54:00] communicate, collaborate, and then innovate. And I think in doing all of that, we will change this industry.

Brian Searl: All right, Scott Bahr. 

Scott Bahr: I would say in terms of, in, in order to help plan ahead is I would encourage people to read all the stuff Mike was talking about first. Do that. Be a good consumer. And again, I will reiterate the idea of asking questions. If, find the people who do this research, ask them questions.

Find people in the industry that you know and respect, ask questions. If you’re using CampSpot, call CampSpot to ask questions. Sorry, Casey. But no, but it’s if you’re working with Mark, call Mark. If you’re, call and ask questions. Be a good consumer. And the last piece of advice I would say is talk to your guests.

Talk to your campers. Ask them what they’re doing. Ask them why they picked you. Ask them what their plans are for the future. That on the ground information, again, it may be [00:55:00] lagging because they’re there now, but it will give you some insights into what’s going to happen in the future and what’s coming along.

Cause there’s things like the shortened booking window. I’ve been talking about this for months because we saw it. I go, I think it’s going to happen. And it is, it’s happening. Spontaneous travels returning. And so it’s something to be aware of, be prepared for, and it’s just done by asking people, that’s all.

Brian Searl: All right. Jeff Hoffman, then we’ll finish up with Casey. 

Jeff Hoffman: A lot of what Mike said, I think our industry is becoming more Technologically advanced than it ever has been, and the people that aren’t keeping pace are going to get left behind. And I do think that education is their key. The more you can read about the industry, the more you can research the industry, look at new products that are coming out that are going to help you get organized and change how you’re [00:56:00] operating the campground.

Those are all things that are going to help you in the end. But, also, if you know that we’re going to be down, you’ve got to be, figuring out how are you going to increase occupancy in August, September, and October, and hopefully catch some of that revenue back. You can’t just sit on your hands.

Brian Searl: All right. Best for last. No pressure. I don’t know. We’ll see a lot of good stuff there. 

Casey Cochran: I was thinking through this. Everyone said a lot of good things. I would say to me, if I’m speaking to a practical your standard mom and pop or, you own a park or a few parks, my advice would be that you have to carve out time to work on your business as opposed to, even right now in the heart of the busy season, you can choose to go out and fix this water thing or whatnot.

I think you have to allocate a certain amount of time to work. On the business versus being in the business all the time. And the difference of what that’s going to do is allow you to look at things like technology or look at different [00:57:00] products or things of that sort. And if that’s not you as a business owner, if that’s not your Skillset, or if that’s just not something you see yourself doing, then incentivize a manager or incentivize someone else that works for you, works with you and let them go out and create space.

To, again to look at these different, look at marketing, to look at, are we in all the local things here? Have we sent an email to our guests recently or past guests? Like everything that everyone’s just suggested, you have to be intentional about creating space and time to do, to pursue some of those things.

Cause otherwise. You’ll just all of us, you’ll find yourself working doing the things that are coming at you, which right now for most campground owners is going to be relentless. It’s going to be, this is the busy time. Even if you’re 20 percent down from last year, there’s still a hell of a lot of work to be done.

So if you’re not creating that space it, it sometimes can get pushed off too far and there’s still a lot of season left. There’s lots of camping ahead of us. There’s still a ton of time for a lot of things to turn around, but give yourself some space and time to, to work on some of these [00:58:00] things. So you can make necessary pivots, even, even now, or even in the middle of the season.

Brian Searl: Awesome. Guys. I appreciate it. We’re a couple minutes over. We’re going to wrap up the show. Great discussion as always. Thank Jeff Hoffman, Scott Bahr. Casey Cochran, Mike Harrison, Mark Kapp, Sandy who had I believe to drop off the call but super appreciative of you guys all being here We’ll see you next month For another episode of all of us together.

We’ll see you next week for an episode focused on glamping and take care guys. Have a great day. I really appreciate you being here. 

Scott Bahr: All right. Take care. 

This episode of MC Fireside Chats with your host, Brian Searl, have a suggestion for a show idea. Want your campground or company in a future episode?

Email us at hello at modern campground. com. Get your daily dose of news from modern campground. com. And be sure to join us next week for more insights into the fascinating world of outdoor [00:59:00] hospitality.

This is MC Fireside Chats. A weekly show featuring conversations with thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and outdoor hospitality experts who share their insights to help your business succeed. Hosted by Brian Searl, the founder and CEO of Insider Perks. Empowered by insights from Modern Campground, the most innovative news source in the industry.

Brian Searl: Welcome everybody [00:01:00] to My name is Brian Searl with Insider Perks. Super excited to be back with you for week one here. I took a couple weeks off. It feels like I’m trying to still get back into this whole rhythm here. But thankfully we’ve got a great panel of recurring guests here that obviously will, as always, pick up my slack.

So super excited to be back here for an open discussion show. We’ve got a couple people who want to talk to us. Run around the room and let everybody introduce themselves. As always, feel free to plug yourselves briefly. Let’s start with Scott, because he’s right above me. 

Scott Bahr: Scott Bahr with Cairn Consulting.

Brian Searl: Is it really Scott Bahr? Have I been saying Scott Bahr the whole time and you haven’t corrected me? I guess I just call you Scott in person. 

Scott Bahr: It doesn’t matter. The world is split on the pronunciation. So it’s okay. It’s okay. 

Brian Searl: What is the, we’re gonna have to do a study and commission this. We’ll talk about that later.

Okay, Sandy. 

Sandy Ellingson: I’m Sandy Ellingson and I’m an RV industry advocate. 

Brian Searl: Welcome, Sandy. Thanks for being here. Mike Harrison. 

Mike Harrison: Mike Harrison with Sierra Hospitality. Good afternoon. Morning. [00:02:00] 

Brian Searl: Good afternoon. Good morning, sir. Jeff Hoffman.

Scott Bahr: My next is muted. 

Brian Searl: Yeah, go ahead, Jeff. 

Scott Bahr: He was talking, but he’s muted.

Jeff Hoffman: I’m talking about founding member of Camp Strategy consulting firm. 

Brian Searl: Hey, Jeff, thanks for being here. And Casey from Camp Spot. 

Casey Cochran: That’s it. Casey from Camp Spot. 

Brian Searl: Alright, I guess I, yeah, sorry I didn’t mean to steal your thunder, sir. 

Casey Cochran: No, it’s alright. 

Sandy Ellingson: You can say that because Casey needs no introduction.

Brian Searl: Alright and then we have Mark Koep, who will join us in a couple minutes. He’s on an important phone call, so he’ll be back with us in, he said, about 15 minutes or so. We’ll see how long he has to wait on hold, but excited to have him join us as well. Guys, what’s on our agenda here? There’s a couple things that I want to talk about that we want to get to and I know, Scott, that you were there, and you maybe don’t want to talk about it, but do want to talk about it, but you’re the only person on the show who was there.

So we’d love to just hear your insights a little bit on the Move America week and [00:03:00] things like that in a few minutes. I want to definitely catch up with Jeff, see what’s been happening in the consulting world, Sandy in the RV world, Casey with CampSpot, you’ve been doing some cool things, some of your feature releases I think we’ve seen, Casey.

But let’s start with Mike. What’s new in Sierra Hospitality world, Mike? 

Mike Harrison: Hot off the presses, we just opened our newest resort, Savannah Lakes RV Resort, right off the I 95. It’s fantastic, cut right out of the forest, we share a border with the Savannah Wildlife Refuge. It’s five lakes, 95 acres or so just a beautiful property that’s very convenient but really serenity and just just a gorgeous property.

So businesses are doing well, we continue to focus on looking for third party development and feasibility studies and, Third party management. So that’s what we’re really doing a hard push for right now. And that’s something exciting that we continue to look at. 

Brian Searl: I’m interested, Mike. I think I know the answer to this question, right?

And we’ve had you as [00:04:00] a recurring guest on the show for some time, but I don’t remember if I’ve ever asked this question. We hear a lot about CRR Hospitality. You’re very active on LinkedIn. We, website announcements, all that kind of stuff. As people from the industry look at a company like CRR Hospitality.

Where would you say you want to take the company? Do you want to continue to go what we’re here, like just opening new resorts, third party management? Is there a larger vision you have for it that you could share with the industry? 

Mike Harrison: Sure. I think that’s a great question. Our company’s vision is evolving the industry for the modern world.

So when we created the company a few years ago we said, what do we want to be in seven years? What do we want people to say about us? And, we didn’t say we wanted to be the biggest, right? That wasn’t our vision. We don’t have a goal of. 20 properties a year, anything like that.

We said, we want to be able to leave an indelible mark on the industry that, we have helped push the industry forward. Whatever that is, whether it’s from an experiential hospitality standpoint, or it’s a technology standpoint, or a branding standpoint, we thought there was a place for us [00:05:00] to be able to put the industry in that position.

Part of that is obviously through our own growth. There’s whether it’s our own ground up developments or by, absorbing third party agreements from other owners. But part of it is also contributing to the industry, whether, I’m the speaker or I’m a university instructor for the American Glamping Association or the various different things that, that I’m a part of it’s operating, but also contributing to the industry as a whole.

Brian Searl: So how do you think you fit in with, and I’m just using our guests on this show as an example, right? Because we’ve got some different facets of different people from, that I think are fairly representative of the industry, right? We’ve got Sandy who’s in the RV industry. We’ve got Scott who’s big in data with KOA.

We’ve got Casey from reservation systems and Mark from the 10, 000 things he does, virtual tours and Facebook groups and whatever else. We’ve got Jeff Baughman, financial guru, campground owner, extraordinaire guy who unretired 73 times. How do you think and I think this is something that We often, and the reason I’m framing this question this way, is we often hear about here’s the software providers, [00:06:00] here’s the virtual tour providers, here’s the data people, here’s the management people, but really it’s everybody working together to create a piece that is CRR, right?

As your example, just taking your example. 

Mike Harrison: Yeah, many times I call it a symphony, right? And you need to have the different instruments to make up the orchestra that creates the symphony. And so I agree, I look at everyone on this call as an example, as a partner. We cannot do our business without, an amazing PMS provider like CampSpot, right?

While Jeff is, aligned in what he does, we’ve had so many conversations that helps move the industry forward. Obviously, we know you’re a partner on many different ways from marketing and AI standpoint and branding and digital. And, Mark, obviously, we do business with as well.

So I think, in order to be successful, And, Casey and I have had many conversations as well from CampSpot’s side. I know they have a similar mission, which is to, build the industry together. I don’t know how many folks saw CampSpot or participated in that yesterday, but I think that’s a great example of how CampSpot’s trying to move the industry [00:07:00] forward.

Or the reporting that Scott and you do, together. I think we are at a very important inflection point for the industry. Where I’ll be speaking on this at OHCE a little bit, just about how the industry is evolving. And, the announcement continues to come about Hilton and AutoCamp and where the industry continues to move towards.

It’s going at a rapid pace and things are going to be rolling out and we’re going to try stuff and break stuff and try stuff and break stuff. And it’s going to be exciting, and so I think using your partners and collaborating with your partners is imperative in that because, sometimes we need to push our partners to help grow at the pace we want to grow and deliver what we need to deliver, and we also need to rely on our partners to say, hey, have you guys seen this?

Have you tried this? Do you know we’ve got this coming out? Or, hey, we want to pilot something. We all work together and align to bring the industry forward and up to where, it’s going to be going at breakneck speed. 

Brian Searl: I think that I would love to have a [00:08:00] brief, and certainly all of you can redirect where this show goes, but I’d love to have just a brief conversation about education overall, and that will lead I’d love for you, Casey, to tell us about Camp Spot, which, by the way, is very difficult for me to say, and I don’t know why.

If it’s the camp, like it’s not really anyway, whatever. But the, just the education that is necessary as our industry goes through the changes that have come recently in the last few years, the ones that at least I believe are coming more rapidly in the next few years. And I think that this is, Because everybody on this call, in some form or fashion, is doing their educating.

If that’s Jeff through consulting and strategy and finances, if that’s Mark through new ways to showcase your park, if that’s Casey through Camp Spot and reservation systems and, ways to make up insular revenue, if that’s Scott through the reports that we do for MC Reports and the work he does with KOA and everything else he consults on, if that’s Sandy through the RV industry, if that’s Mike through CRR, right?

Like I think education is a big piece of where we are going [00:09:00] to need to go as an industry, and maybe we should take a few minutes and talk about it. 

Mike Harrison: Let’s get comfortable while Sandy is most likely going to be the first to respond here. 

Brian Searl: No. I gave it to Casey. I did. I promised it to Casey because CampBot.

For one, how did you come up with a name, but only spend about 10 seconds on that? I won’t. 

Casey Cochran: Yeah, no. I think the idea here is, Erin our fearless marketing leader, she puts a unique fun twist on just almost everything she does. It’s just a phenomenal job doing it. So I’m always I’m always pleasantly surprised with the detail that she’ll bring out to, to every little kind of big or large campaign.

But I think that you’re touching on something that’s, I think, is extremely relevant in the idea of education. And at the end of the day what are we educating for, right? There’s education that’s pushing a product or pushing a vision or it’s pushing your services. But to some extent, I think the right people in this space that you continually see.

Kind of. Representing it, which I think this group here, maybe outside of myself, does a phenomenal job of that. No, I’m just kidding. But they, [00:10:00] it’s, we want the industry to keep moving forward, right? We want the industry to keep growing and we are, we’re facing something unique right now, over the last, it’s different than the last few years.

There’s, there is some headwinds right now. Overall camping searches. are down and so it’s okay now it’s not just if you build it they will come now there’s like Mike put it very eloquently like it is it’s a symphony right there’s so many moving pieces there’s so many things that can come together to bring things like again to that make this space successful and to make each individual’s park or their group of parks successful and I think that the education piece of it because there’s so much going on a day to day basis of running the park.

You always use the analogy, you’re working in your business, you’re working on your business. And I, we think the more that we can continue to educate on sometimes broad strokes of, hey, here’s some simple things you can do to make up revenue if you’re, if your occupancy is down, right?

Those are some simple things. But then there’s other things as far as [00:11:00] overall industry trends. that are absolutely necessary to pay attention to, right? You need to be aware of what’s going on. You and I, Brian, have had this conversation for years now where, you know, for a lot of parks for a long time, they didn’t feel they needed any marketing, right?

They’re just like, no, we’re good. We’re where we are. We don’t need to do it. And we’re, they’re recognizing now, okay now that my, my occupancy isn’t like it was last year what do I do now? I’m scrambling now. I need to do marketing. And I’d probably push this back to Mike here in a bit, but for, the, for a lot of operators, they’ve known for three or four or five or six months or eight months that occupancy was down, right?

And, but for a lot of operators, they’re recognizing it right now. They’re reaching out to us right now saying, Hey, June numbers are down. In, in May, May was down. And so for us, education comes through multiple different versions, but to me, what’s absolutely relevant is what’s going on overall in the space.

What are ways that you can make up revenue? If occupancy is down, what are ways you can [00:12:00] increase occupancy? And then overall, how do you use data? How do you use your own park data and overall data to help your business succeed? And if those revolving topics for us, we’ll continue to press and push that out.

Not necessarily this is the flashy new feature, you have to be using this or your business isn’t going to succeed. I think that’s. run its course, and I think we’ve heard enough of that. Now it’s what are all the pieces that are necessary to put you in the best position to be successful? And so the, the Camp Spot thing is starting to pull on those things.

What is something we can bring out four times a year that we feel is relevant in the space right now at this time of the year? What are things you can do that are practical right now in the timeframe that we’re in that we’re seeing that hopefully helps, breed success? Because, we have a unique business model, right?

We only charge when a park takes a reservation, right? So we succeed as parks succeed. If their reservations are down, guess what? Our revenue is down, right? So we’re in it together. We don’t have the model [00:13:00] where, hey, you pay us regardless, and I hope that things are going well. If they’re not, we feel the same pain.

So it’s in our best interest. Being a partner in this space to see what can we do to drive additional awareness? What can we do to drive additional occupancy? What can we do to drive additional conversions? What can we do to drive overall the industry and getting more people camping and more camping nights?

And that’s where this series is starting and where we hope to take it. 

Brian Searl: I don’t want to fear, I don’t want to veer too far away from education, but I want to have one thing that you brought up, I think is important to communicate to owners on the show. And that’s that. A lot of parks are down right now, right?

Like we’re hearing a lot from some of the more vocal voices to be as vague as possible that the industry is great and we’re going to have another great year and it’s going to be amazing, but like this is not what park owners are seeing at their parks, right? Yeah, 

Casey Cochran: it’s, yeah, no, I think, I’ll put it to Mike here, I think this is a really good segue in general, right?

There’s parks that have done a good job using data to [00:14:00] understand that the demand isn’t as high as it was in the past, and so they’ve made adjustments ahead of time to help offset that with ancillary revenue, with unique, with promo codes, with discount codes, with, potentially doing, accepting a few more long term reservations as opposed to transient.

The people that are utilizing data and reporting to their advantage, or at least were aware of it well in advance of, recognizing, hey, it’s June, and I’m not full this June. That’s different than the last four years. That’s pretty relevant to know that three or four years in, or three or four months in advance, or even six months in advance.

Yeah, it needs to be longer than that. So maybe a good segue to this would be handing this off to Mike and saying, okay, Mike, how have you’ve seen the trends. You probably look into our analytics platform, maybe than anyone else in the space. What have you seen and what are, because again, this is, I don’t want to give away your, Your your secret sauce because obviously the management and the tools that you bring are the reason why you run such successful parks.

But [00:15:00] what are some practical things that you’ve done by looking at data that’s available to you to help get in front of some of these things? What, what would be a couple practical things that you’ve done? 

Mike Harrison: We just had this discussion with ownership yesterday. So a couple things. One is I remember when I first, started in the outdoor hospital industry coming from the hotel industry, forecasting is a regular cadence, a regular pattern of doing business.

And in this industry it wasn’t. So I was pushing and pushing for reporting and forecasting to understand what are we doing 6, 12, 18 months from now. And I remember we looked at the Camp Spot Advanced Booking Report and I’m like, eh, oh we got forecasting. I’m like, eh, not really.

And we pushed and pushed and, you guys obviously developed and evolved to CampSpot Analytics. So I think there’s a couple things. One is, I think the industry as a whole needs to understand and be better prepared by looking out 6, 12, 18 months. And they hadn’t been, right? And especially in the last 4 or 5 years where it was hot.

Oh, I’m full. I’ll be full all the time. Secondly, and Brian, you and I have had this discussion probably going back to [00:16:00] last January, where I was, I know how many times I said I want to be doom and gloom, but I don’t see this year being as amazing as everybody thought it was going to be.

And then last year, of course, was down from 2022. And as we finished last year, You always stop me from talking about the economy and pace and, here we are in 2024. But this is what I do for a living to make sure that, our assets are successful. And, our properties are very heavy in the snowbird area.

I always say we usually get an indication of what’s going to happen for the year well before everybody else does because it’s coming to us first. When we see Q1 is going to be off. We know that over the summer of the previous year, we have a good indication of what we feel or what we think might happen in the upcoming year.

For example, a more specific example, Casey, as you mentioned, we had back in January taken a look at the summer of this year and kind of said, okay, we’re looking at year over year trends and we’re down in booking pace. And we had thought we might be, but we were down a little bit more than we had expected to, so we did a hard push for the summer, ran some [00:17:00] promos boosted our Google Ads, and so we were quite overspent in Q1 for marketing and it didn’t necessarily reflect it.

The performance of Q1 but we knew it was for future business. Fast forward, we beat budget and beat last year for May in a couple of our properties and we are well ahead 10 or 15 percent of pace versus last year for the summer. It doesn’t mean it’s solved. This year is still tough. However, we aggressively saw a hole well in advance because a lot of times people are looking 30 or 60 days.

And by the time you get there, It’s too late, right? Now you’re being reactive and, oh, please come stay with me. And so we are looking far out to make sure, like right now, of course, we’re looking at, Q4, of next year and, making plans. You’re probably going to see a promotion come out in the next week about, summer heat, buy two months, get one free kind of thing to build some occupancy, build some base.

If you will, far out. And so using the tools, I [00:18:00] think, and everything at your disposal, it’s not just use, it’s also, the, what we have from Google analytics and the stuff that, that Brian provides us, it’s the reporting that Scott does, it’s not an easy answer. It’s an amalgamation of all the information to make best decisions.

But if you don’t use foresight or you’re not forecasting, it doesn’t matter. Yeah. A long answer to a short question. 

Brian Searl: But that’s a very important thing, right? And you can talk to almost everybody on this call about this forecasting or planning in advance, because, and I’ve had so many of these calls in the last two, three, four weeks with clients who have said Oh I’m down for Memorial Day or I’m down for June.

What do I do? There’s very few things we can do tomorrow to try to fix that. That’s like a Google ads play. That’s an. Mass email campaign. But if you look at the other people that are on this call, right? If you don’t forecast those things in advance, like you look at mark service for campground views.

If somebody calls up Mark and Mark’s my park is down. What can you do to help me, Mark? I can create a virtual tour for you, but I can’t create it, have it online tomorrow, and [00:19:00] then market it tomorrow, and make everybody aware of it tomorrow, like that’s just, I need a window. So you need to prep for this in advance.

And so if we look at all those things, like I can’t switch software, I can’t, maybe I could turn on lock fees tomorrow, that might be a thing. So that’s one thing, right? But there are very few things that you can do without that planning in advance. Would, whoever wants to take that, would somebody agree?

Casey Cochran: I 100 percent agree and we did everything we could and that first camp, camp spot thing that we did, we tried to break it down in terms of, okay, what are some just subtle things you can do? It’s amazing still how many parks, Mark’s gone well beyond this and for good reason, but just still basic imagery, right?

And have you updated even like your listings in terms of like how you’re describing your park and the sites? And so there’s subtle things that, there’s baby steps that still can be done right now that I think parks. Many parks in this space should continue to take serious, making sure you’ve up to date images.

What is, Mike’s done a ton of stuff on branding and what’s your identity and what’s the consistency within that? But there is simple things like, hey, if you’ve never turned on a [00:20:00] simple lock site feed, you’ve never offered add ons at the time of booking like it makes sense to do those things, right?

Those are some subtle things that you can do right now, but you’re right. Overall, if you’re not looking at the stuff at a little bit larger window, You are missing out on adjustments and tweaks that you can make that sometimes require longer than a week or two to do 

Mark Koep: let me add on to that, Brian, real fast. 

Brian Searl: Go ahead, Mark, and then I’ll work with Jeff. 

Mark Koep: So part of that is we were just talking about this the other day, a lot of the private park operators in our industry It’s been a family business. They’ve run this for 25 years. They know what’s going on. They don’t need anything else until they do.

And now they don’t know what to do. And I’ll share an example with you from one of the trade shows. Gentleman walks up to me and I asked him part of the conversation when we’re providing our services, do you have online booking? And he says, no, he’s and you’re not going to convince me to get online booking no matter what you say.

And I said, great. I won’t talk you into it. I said, is your park for sale? It’s I’m always interested for the right price. And I said I’ve got multiple [00:21:00] investors who will buy your park today. And the only thing they’re going to do is install online booking on your website, your same website.

And they’re going to grow the revenue 30 percent in the first year. That’s all I said to him. He said, maybe I should get online booking. I’m like, yeah, I think you should start probably started thinking about that. So the hardest part for a lot of operators is getting out of them, their own way and allowing systems to come into place that can serve them.

And then that brings up the biggest challenge. Where do you find the right systems that work for you? And that’s a hard question to ask because it depends on their tech savviness, who they’re connecting with and so forth. That’s where I think the underlying. The problem lies is that if you don’t know what you don’t know, you’re going to continue doing what you’re doing.

So raising your hand and just being honest and saying, Hey, we’re down this year and I really have no idea. Then start reaching out to people and just having conversations because that’ll guide you down the right path. So Casey, kudos to you guys on that, that Camp Spot report. There was two data points in that presentation that just blew my mind.

The lock site fees. [00:22:00] And then the dynamic pricing too. Just the numbers. If you haven’t had a chance to view that report, I’m sure they can download a recording of it. Casey? But the data they have on lock site fees and dynamic pricing will nullify anybody’s argument about being able to move people around their sites.

When they look at the raw numbers of how much money is made by parks that are using that service, Your argument is moot. You’ll go ahead and use those services and use them appropriately. Kudos to you guys for doing that presentation. 

Brian Searl: So for me, all this is important, right? And I don’t want to, I’m not, I don’t want to minimize all what you just said, Mark, because it’s very important, all the things that we can turn on right now.

But I’m more interested in the discussion of yes, now is now, and now we have to pivot and do certain things, but how do we then work toward 18 months from now? And so I want to ask Jeff this question, just Jeff, from a financial standpoint, if I’m Like a financial guru, as far as I’m concerned, right? I don’t even like to look at my numbers at all, which is probably a terrible thing, but, and don’t coach me on that.

But [00:23:00] so if you literally are an operator and you’re looking very lightly at your finances and maybe you’re working with a Jeff or a camp strategy or a CRR hospitality, that’s paying more attention, but if you’re just lightly paying attention to this stuff, what can you do to help yourself notice and forecast this stuff far enough in advance for you to do more with it?

Jeff Hoffman: What a lot of people don’t look at is, as Mike brought up, their forward bookings. Although the window for booking has decreased, where during COVID and that, I would say we were almost four to six weeks out on reservations. Now that window has dropped back down to the more normal pre COVID booking window.

Which is about two to three weeks out, except for major holidays. If you’re looking at that, and go back and look at maybe your 2019 take [00:24:00] up reports, you can tell if you’re staying even with the percentage of take up on 2019 versus 24. 24 right now seems like it’s going to be flat. When I’ve talked to a lot of people, some of the campgrounds that I have consulted with were up quite a bit, but that’s because we did some changes and they may have added some pads, which is boosting revenue.

But overall, how we educate people to take a look at marketing for the future, how we, how to look at their financials for the future. It goes back to your point and to Casey’s point of educating them. What tools do they need to get that done? How do they look at a financial statement?

I don’t [00:25:00] specialize in marketing, but I know enough in marketing that what you’re marketing today hopefully is for two to three months out, if not more. And if you’re reading that you’ve got a downturn, you’ve got to hit it harder than softer. You can’t, the only way to drive revenue is to out, to market more and not cut that expense.

Cut your expense someplace else if you’re going to have a downturn, but don’t cut your marketing expense. That’s the only way you’re going to draw additional business in. And those are all things that we have to take a look at, both from the financial side. And you brought it up, revenue management there’s dynamic pricing, there’s revenue management, there’s looking at your expenses, how can they be adjusted if you’re going into a a down period.

But the main thing is looking at the [00:26:00] trends and they, as they go to the new systems like CampSpot, it’s a lot easier for a person like myself to come into your campground cold than and pull out data that tells me a lot of information that the campground owner actually doesn’t know at this point. If they’ve, if they’re still doing their stuff on books, it’ll take me weeks to figure out what’s going on.

And lots of going back to old reports where If I get on any kind of new PMS system, I’ve got everything at my fingertips, and I can forecast out, I can budget everything from that. 

Casey Cochran: You touched on something there, Jeff, with everyone’s, dynamic pricing has been this buzzword for what feels like four or five years now.

Some parks use it, vast majority of them don’t, but this year I think looking at dynamic pricing in a different [00:27:00] light could maybe never be more relevant in my opinion. I’ll push this back to Sandy and Mike for their I guess for further take on this, but I think more than ever right now, dynamic pricing, the opposite way that most people look at dynamic pricing is going to be extremely relevant in terms of saying, until my occupancy is this high, I’m going to lower my pricing a certain amount because I need to get people into my spots.

That’s when hospitality and that’s when the experience that I provide them has to be on it’s on a different level. It needs to be on it’s the highest level possible. Because again, I need to speak to this audience. I need to get them in. Then I need to wow them with what we’re able to do. And so this year, I think more than ever, if you’re seeing occupancy lower, what can you do?

Yeah, there’s marketing, there’s lots, there’s all these different things you can do, but at some point, and this is what I’d like to push back maybe to Sandy and Mike, like at what point do you just lower pricing, right? At what point does it say we need to lower our pricing from what it’s been in the past?

to get people in. And then [00:28:00] I think it’s finding that balance of what’s, you don’t want to lower your pricing too much to potentially bring in an audience that you don’t necessarily want there. And then what is that balance? And again, not just pitching everything technology wise, but doing that using technology to say until these site types that are at the lowest occupancy over the next 30 days or 45 days are at a certain percentage occupancy, I’m okay taking my prices down.

15 or 20 percent to see if that actually converts. It’s the same mindset as saying on my holiday weekends when I get to 70 percent occupancy, I’m going to raise my prices 10 percent because we have that much demand this early. At what point do you just simply say pricing is going to come into play? So be curious, like Sandy, like what?

And then Mike, obviously would love to hear your comments too. Are you recommending right now, Sandy, to Parks to say, hey, look, you’re just, You might just need to lower your pricing right now and see if that gets, gets bodies in the park. What’s your take there?

Brian Searl: Before you answer that one thing [00:29:00] I want to throw out that’s super controversial just to play devil’s advocate related to this price topic, right? So I had a conversation with a larger group this morning who owns multiple parks and they were talking about the same thing where like we’re looking at discounting and adjusting rates and do we go, mostly down was the conversation, right?

But looking out at September and seeing those numbers and things like that, And my thing is I’m not sure that discounting is the right way to go. And I know this is going to be controversial and I know I’m not the smartest person in the room about this subject. So I want to toss it out to the group and have you guys give your thoughts on it.

But I think if you’re looking at a consumer who is squeezed because of inflation, And who is naturally going to cut back on some things that they’re doing, whether that’s all camping or no camping or some camping or longer stays or longer distances or whatever it is, right? If you’ve decided in your head that you’re not going to go camping because you’re going to cut that from your budget, I don’t think a 10 or 20 percent discount changes your mind and brings you back to the table.

So there’s certainly people in the middle who’s, who will change their mind. And I’m not saying there [00:30:00] isn’t. But then on the other side, there’s the people who are saying this inflation and this economy really stinks, but I’ve got to get away. I’ve got to get out. I’ve got to relax and de stress.

And so like camping is going to be my one indulgence this year, instead of maybe a big ticket new car or something like that. And I also think those people are going to look at a price of 50 and say, I’ll go camping for that, and they’re not waiting for that 40 or they’re not saying I’m only going to go stay there if it’s 40, because they’ve decided that camping is going to be.

and their discussionary spending. So through that lens, Sandy, please. 

Sandy Ellingson: I was gonna say that was a really interesting point you brought up. I just got back from a large rally. There were about a thousand people and about 500 rigs and there were a lot of Just like breakout sessions, conversations. About 75 percent of the people there had never been to a rally.

And that group was split half and half between like brand new to the RV industry and seasoned RVers. And the conversations were [00:31:00] interesting because a lot of the newer people in the industry were saying, Before they make a trip, they were checking Airbnb prices, hotel prices. So the competitive landscape is now bigger than just looking at RV parks.

And I think that’s confirmed by the fact that we see the big players like Hilton and some of the others and Marriott wanting to get into the RV space. Because what they’re saying over and over again is that we’re getting a higher daily rate than they are, but when you consider that they have to clean all these rooms.

I’ve realized that competitive landscape is bigger. I’m encouraging all of my parks to look at what the whole competitive landscape is around them based on who they’re trying to target. And then the second thing that’s interesting, and we found this to really work, is before you discount your rates, look at your cancellation policy and your deposit policy.

Because the biggest thing we’re hearing [00:32:00] from campers is that during COVID, we raised our deposit policies and they went from 50 percent to 100 percent up front. It’s harder to put that money up front now. If you do go back to the one night, like we used to all do, that makes it easier.

The second thing is, instead of making your cancellation policy where you have to do it two weeks out make it shorter and maybe instead of a refund or a penalization because you need to cancel, tell them you’ll keep that money, and they can change that reservation two or three times during the year if they need to, because a lot of times they’re not booking because they’re worried about the weather, or they’re not booking because they don’t know what’s going to happen with something, and so we’re seeing a lot more last minute reservations.

But I want my parks to get those reservations in advance so they can plan. So those are a couple of things that we’re doing to try and improve that situation. 

Mark Koep: Yeah, and I’ll jump in also, because Brian, [00:33:00] I completely agree with everything you just said there, because that’s the same advice I’m giving my client parks.

I would never discount, or I would never lower my prices. I would do promotions though, so to the point that somebody’s not going to go camping, there are some parks you can think, just you want to think high level. Mike’s Parks, Jellystone Parks, Destination Organizations that are more resort oriented, can obviously put on events and draw people in because they give them an excuse.

But when you go down to the Mom Pop, what can they do if all they are is a place to park and you don’t have any traffic coming in? So there’s a few things you can do. Number one, you can market. Number two, you can answer the phone. That’s probably the biggest thing. You answer the phone, you’re going to get business.

It’s magical. It’s a big problem in our industry. A lot of park owners do not answer their phones. And so they’re not gonna get the business. So the biggest trend that we see going on is two things this year over years past. One, there’s less campers than there was in the previous years.

There’s people who did it, they’re off the road, so we don’t have this huge audience. We still have a massive audience of campers. I’m not saying everybody quit, but it’s not that huge bubble that we had before. One. Two, we’ve [00:34:00] got macro factors going on. It’s an election cycle in the United States. I think in the last three months that we were supposed to die of a solar storm, a nuclear war, and a pandemic.

In the last month alone The amount of news being blasted at people right now about the end of the world, vote for me, it doesn’t matter what side you’re on, it’s scaring people. And so they’re shortening, they’re not going to plan three months out because I might be dead from a nuclear war then, right?

They’re planning in a tighter realm, I’m going to go camping. 

Brian Searl: Super chill up here in Canada, just throwing that out. 

Mark Koep: Yeah we should all go to Canada. And to that point, Brian, and the next, the side point I was going to make is I live in a rural area in Wyoming. Our town is busting at the seams.

There are RVs everywhere. And to the point Sandy just made, there’s actually RVs in the hotel parking lot where they’re staying in the hotel versus the RV park that’s full in our town, right? So people are going to rural areas and their travel has changed. So the industry has changed overall. So the simple thing of just saying, lower your price to bring people in.

No, that’s not it. There’s a whole bunch of other factors. 

Casey Cochran: Yeah. And just to be clear, [00:35:00] I wasn’t suggesting that I was throwing it over to you guys to say cause we’ve had that a lot with people asking us like, Hey, should we just, do we need to go back through and lower the pricing?

And again, that’s why I proposed the question is I don’t think that’s the answer either. I think if you’re going to lower, if you’re going to lower prices, I think it should be promotional or discount based. So people know. that hey, I’m offering you this discount for this period of time. It’s not just generally lowering my prices in general.

You’re giving people the idea of a deal and you’re giving them a discount. You’re giving them a reason to book now or take advantage of a special versus just saying, okay, my prices need to go down because people think it’s too expensive. I would be in that camp. That’s why, again, I would. I was throwing it over to you guys to get your answer there, so I want to make sure that It needs to be 

targeted too, right?

Brian Searl: This is the, it’s very easy because you’re busy and you’re panicking and you’re unsure why you’re down because you didn’t forecast it, didn’t look at the numbers that Jeff said and all those kinds of things to say I’m just going to throw a 20 percent off coupon out there, when instead you should be doing like what the airlines do, for example, is they’ll send you a [00:36:00] discount that says 30 percent off base fares and it’s 10 flights that aren’t full from the airports you don’t want to fly out to because Delta’s trying to fill those seats But that’s a targeted approach.

They know exactly what they’re doing. And so discounting, yes, I’m fine with discounting, but I think it should be carefully thought out and not a blanket discount giving away revenue that you could have gotten later in the year. 

Jeff Hoffman: Hey Brian one of the things that I’ve always taken a look at and we’ve ins instituted in some of the parks is we classify the sites even like the pull through sites.

There’s A, B, C, and D sites. And the back ends and all of that. And what we do is we price structure those so that we have a blend of rates throughout the market. And what I’m finding this year is my crappiest pull throughs that are the lowest price are full. So that tells me that there is [00:37:00] price break this year.

They’re looking for bargains. Where last year it was I should say it’s strange because my high dollar deluxe pull throughs with patios are full and my cheapest sites on pull throughs are full, what we’re missing is the middle of the economy. The high end people are still here and the other ones are still looking for bargains.

I haven’t lowered prices yet. We were just I’ve told them be patient and to market. And the way that we do dynamic pricing is somewhat, we start out with a low price until we get to 25 percent occupancy and then we bump it. At 50 percent occupancy, we’re looking at, that would have been our base rate.

Mark Koep: Hey Jeff, what’s the gap in price between your three site types? It’s about [00:38:00] 30. 

Mike Harrison: I think there’s a couple different factors here too. I think generally speaking, we’re talking about transient. The people are coming from a night, the people are coming, but I think, and these are important discussions to have.

There’s more than just one segment, which is just transient, right? There’s also weeklies, there’s monthlies, and there’s long term. And how you price and factor and consider all of those need to be taken into account differently because, the construction workers traveling there, they’re still traveling, right?

The full timers, they’re still around. And You need to be careful when you apply pricing factors and schematics along those lines to, what market you’re talking about. And then go back to what everybody says, and we used to say this in the hotel business, and I hate to always say, it’s the most annoying when some person says, Oh, when I used to be in blah, blah, blah.

So I’m being very annoying when I say that. I know I am. I’m sorry. But there’s so many tenants that you can pull. And, in the revenue management world, we used to say, are you priced to sell or are you [00:39:00] priced to discount, right? And so if your price is always your discount price, then that’s not a discount, that’s your new price, right?

And so you have to be careful that you just can’t always be discounting or running a promo every single weekend because otherwise that becomes your new price, right? And so that’s the important thing to understand is what your goal is, are you lowering pricing? Or are you running promotions to spur and generate some additional revenue, right?

And one of the things that, I’ve heard for years is you cannot create demand, right? Just because your price is, this doesn’t mean that all of a sudden, all these people are coming. They’re the customers that may be around that are in the market. The lowering price didn’t, it didn’t create the demand.

It may have helped drive more people to you. So there’s some pricing things, that, And all of this, I actually have this whole topic at OHDE about revenue management and, how you apply philosophy and analytics, but it’s right now when it’s tough [00:40:00] is, the most important thing to take a look at what your holistic strategy is and be true and have integrity to your intention, because otherwise you create disharmony with your guests.

Because they don’t understand, what you’re doing. Last week I saw this week you ran that. And I think the other thing is, for a lot of the folks that are new to the industry or some that have been through the cycle, we are in that part of, we come off two record years all time. All time.

And so we’re down, right? But what is that down relative to, right? If you look at the healthy industry, it’s still very healthy. And if you look at it comparatively to what it was four or five years ago, the numbers are great. And having gone through all these different cycles in the hotel world, they’re cycles, and you still look at applying your strategy to what that looks like.

And in CampSpot, they have a market share report, a competitive analysis report, that shows you how you’re competing against your quote unquote comp set. And I love to say, and people laugh at me for saying, but, maybe we’re sucking, but we don’t suck as bad. So you understand [00:41:00] how you’re performing against the other folks in your comp set and you may be down 3%, but you can see your comp set’s down 15, right?

Are the strategies you’re doing, are they working? Are you applying your principles in there? So you’re still gonna be down, right? If that’s a general economic trend or that’s what’s going on. But are you beating out your competition? That’s the measuring stick. Are you performing better than others?

Are you not sucking as bad, in a downturn, so to speak. 

Brian Searl: So I agree with that. I, and I just want to add one small thing to it and say that I’m worried that cause I hear this refrain a lot, not necessarily from you, Mike, and I know you didn’t mean to have a huge structure behind me while I was talking but.

The one thing that we’re, the one thing that I pick out of there is the, that maybe this is a crutch for people if we’re pushing too hard on this notion that, yes, you’re having a good year, and I agree with everything you’re saying, but you’re down from 21, 22, but you’re still having a good year, comparatively speaking to 19.

Does that give people an excuse to then say, oh, then, don’t have to do as much planning as everybody’s talking about the show. 

Mike Harrison: It’s a condition, it’s an [00:42:00] explanation or an understanding. It doesn’t give any. And if somebody I know that’s what you mean. I’m just saying I want to be careful.

If somebody uses that as an excuse, then good luck running your business. Because none of us are ever going to take our foot off the gas and say we’re happy with where we are. Go ahead, Sandy. 

Sandy Ellingson: I just think that another big consideration that has to be brought into this conversation is all of the people who bought parks during COVID and they paid the highest price for those parks And now the occupancy is down.

The prior owner probably could be doing great, because they didn’t have the debt structure that the new owner does. And I’m seeing that a lot with small investors who thought they wanted to get into the RV industry and started buying up parts. Didn’t really know what they were doing and now they’ve got debt higher than what they should have and they cannot get the nightly rates that they really need to make the profit margins that they promised.[00:43:00] 

Brian Searl: Scott Bahr, who’s been ever so quiet and soaking up all the wisdom from everybody except me on this call because I never have any wisdom. Scott, tell us how they can forecast and use data points with the studies that you’re doing for KOA, for MC, on your own, just some of those, how can they use that as a.

Harbinger of what’s to come, both good and bad. 

Scott Bahr: I think first and foremost look who, most of this stuff is macro. And I think to build on what everybody has been talking about here what we do typically is we look at the macro level and now you can take the data that everyone has, whether it’s from CampSpot or, and use that at your micro level.

So first and foremost, there’s two parts to the equation. And one is, what’s happening up here. And that’s what we measure. Look at the demographics. Look at the attitudes. Remember, attitudes are lagging. If someone says, this is my intention now, you’re not going to see that for months. Even if they say, I’m going to do it next month, it’s going to happen [00:44:00] down the road.

It’s much further. All the attitude and stuff, it’s lagging. That’s one thing I would tell people. It’s it Attitudes are always, when they convert to behavior, it’s down the road. Use the information. See who’s going out. Who’s camping, who’s glamping, who’s traveling, who’s road tripping, all those things.

We have that. All that information exists. All you have to do is ask. The other part is what kind of experiences do they want? That’s how you build on it. I think maybe you Brian mentioned this earlier and Mike talked about it too. What are you selling? You’re selling an experience.

What are those experiences that people want? That’s what you’re selling. They’re willing to, and typically if you’re, people will pay for an experience that they want to have, and they’re going to budget for it this year. Talk about the experiences, look at what’s trending out there. There’s a lot of information that we’re putting out that addresses all this the on the ground experiences, how they want to eat, what they want to do, what they want to who they want to be with, all those things.

[00:45:00] And how you use that is, that’s been the most important thing anyone can get. It’s active listening. Listen, ask, listen and ask. It’s there’s a lot that can be learned from this. And again, by combining the information that’s available, that’s where you get the picture. And I, from Camp Spot, co presented down in Florida, and I thought it worked, I really enjoyed it because what we did was he talked about the information that, that the objective information that.

It’s being gathered. And I talked about the trends. I talked about what you’re not, and here’s what we’re seeing. You bring those together, you get the full picture of what’s going on. And it allows you, I think, to make better decisions because now you really know what’s going on because the behavior and intentions, but you also know the attitudes is an important part of a lot of people forget about.

Casey Cochran: Yeah that’s a really good point. It makes me think of something else too, in terms of what you can do right now and Mike’s Perks have done a really good job with this. It really [00:46:00] came full circle. I did a quick trip to Jamaica to visit a friend. And there’s this big fear thing going on in Jamaica right now.

I’ll try to bring this all together, but of like people, being scared to go there and things of that sort. Don’t go off the resorts or don’t go out of the, into the local places. And it’s this fear that got created internally at the resorts to try to keep everyone there. So they spent all their money there and they didn’t venture out anywhere else.

To spend any money anywhere else. And it’s worked. It’s worked phenomenally. They take this fear aspect of things to try to keep everyone there and blame, violence that might be, 300 miles away or something like that. That happens in every city. And use that to have reasons to say no, you shouldn’t really, you shouldn’t leave the resort at all.

It’s too scary out there. We did the exact opposite. Everything was perfectly fine. Let’s bring that up because, Mike’s done a good job of this at his parks, but controlling what you can control, if your occupancy is down 20%, let’s say, so very, simply, if you have 100 and this year it’s going to be 80 because the occupancy is there, what [00:47:00] can you do at your park to get that 80 to 100 again, and it might not be from an extra body it might be from other things that you can offer at the park, whether it’s running off pickleball paddles or if it’s You know if it is firewood and ice or it’s just what does your park have to offer locally there that you can Draw up the ticket of that per person what you’re making from that person you know at the park and so I think being creative there or what’s at your disposal is it linking up with?

Other tours that are in the area and say, Hey, I’ll send business your way. What’s, what’s something we can work out. There’s other ways at saying, instead of saying, I got to get 20 more bodies in my park if you have 80, are you getting the most out of those 80 people by offering whatever it is, ancillary things that you can offer them.

And I, like I said, Mike’s done a phenomenal job at this. I was at his parks and it was great. I felt like I didn’t need to buy anything anywhere else besides maybe going to dinner a couple of times. And I’m sure that was by design which is a good thing, but I think exploring those things for every park at a very practical level is like, what are some things here that I absolutely [00:48:00] could make some additional revenue off of the people that are there, not just with my price, not just charging them more for the pad or for the cabin, but what are some things that are going to be benefits or add ons that I can add ons.

Sell to them or offer to them while they’re there and that’s going to help offset, maybe a lower occupancy So that’s an area worth exploring if parks have it 

Mike Harrison: That’s an intentional strategy Basically that we have talked about the last year is precisely what you just said and that wasn’t by accident which is Driving ancillary revenue, right?

And we’re looking for pennies anything that we can make money off of we’re trying to You know, whether it’s, tie dye, running extra activities, doing extra golf carts. We just installed a sluice, which is one of those, gem mining, amenities. The, we have a revenue share with a yoga instructor.

We just signed up a new food truck. We, there’s probably 30 different things that we are doing to drive other revenue, that can help offset, if you’re down in some of the site revenue [00:49:00] imperative strategy. 

Brian Searl: Absolutely. You can go the other way too though, right? You can make sure that your margins are intact while saving money in other places that perhaps you would have spent in other years?

Scott Bahr: Yeah, I would hear it. So Scott, what were you going to say? Oh, I was going to say just to look at a different hospitality situation in the work I, I’ve done like with Paris Casinos in the past is they increase their revenue for events by a concert for the VIPs or whomever. They would increase their revenue for the event by.

15 to 20 percent just by having a social hour prior to the event where they served food and drinks. It was a huge revenue generator for them for those types of events. So it’s one of those things that, yeah, the food and drink, by the way is a really good market by them and people love it.

It’s a big draw. That’s all I wanted to say. 

Brian Searl: That’s actually fascinating. So do we have any data, Scott or anybody else on this call about how many people, if your check in time is at four, how many people would [00:50:00] come at three versus would come at eight, nine, 10 at night if they could, is there any data that exists on that?

Scott Bahr: Not that I have. 

Brian Searl: It’s a super simple like idea and it’s not a huge revenue generator, but like I used to go to the Kempton hotels and they used to have that happy wine hour or whatever at seven o’clock. Why not offer like an early check in social? where you sell things and people can show up. I don’t know.

Scott Bahr: Those things are great ideas. That’s that. I think that’s all part of the mix. Find out ways. I like what you’re talking about, finding alternatives to generate revenue. I think you were just talking about that. It’s there’s some great opportunities. It might be talking about those events, all of them.

People love that kind of stuff. And they’re willing, again, they have their budgets, but they’re willing to put out a few dollars for that kind of stuff. Convenience factor is huge as well. 

Brian Searl: Alright, so let’s spend the last few minutes or just do a round robin around the room for people. If you had to pick one or two things that people should pay attention to educate themselves, forecast, [00:51:00] Adjust whatever, help prepare for what is now and may happen in the future.

What would those one or two things be? Start with Mike Harrison.

Mike Harrison: What they should keep an eye on, is what you’re asking? 

Brian Searl: Yeah, like things that they should either start to educate themselves on, numbers or data they should pay attention to, just ways that they can help whether what may or may not be coming or what is happening now. 

Mike Harrison: Okay, so I’ll be prepared in the future if that’s what you want to say.

If I’m a business owner or a business manager, How do I make sure I’m successful in the future? What do I have to keep an eye on? I would say two things. One is technology. And you can encompass AI into that and you can encompass the evolution of, Mark’s product and Casey’s product or Joe Dumig or, different platforms.

You have to leverage, what the professional and really upscale property is doing because it will become commonplace and you’ll be left behind if you don’t. And there’s some things that can really You know, maximize your park by doing those things. So I would say [00:52:00] technology is number one and number two is, they have to keep up on trends.

There’s not one source, but whether it’s the KOA report or whether it’s the Modern Campground and current consulting report, or whether it’s Lamping Report or Woodall’s or, whatever it is, you gotta find four or five or six sources of information and read it religiously. So you understand what’s coming, what are the trends, what’s national, what’s economic data, what’s coming down the pike so that you can make the best decisions for your business.

We use those all the time just to, help shape decisions for amenities, or what we’re going to offer, what the demographic changes are going to be, et cetera, et cetera. So those would be the two things I would say. 

Brian Searl: All right, Mark, have you been quiet further than usual?

Mark Koep: Yeah, I this was a great presentation by everybody, so I just shut up. Everybody’s I don’t need to talk when everybody’s killing it. So my advice right now, and I think the easiest thing for park owners to grasp and do to control the flow of their guests [00:53:00] is you want to reach guests that have stayed at your park, right?

You have their email address. If you want to do something tangible that can increase your business, start doing some online webinars, go to YouTube, learn how to use an email handler and start emailing your guests. There’s segmentation, there’s all sorts of stuff. I’m not gonna overwhelm you. If I give you one task.

Get your email list out of your reservation system and get those emails on to an email handler and start communicating with the people who know who you are. All right, Sandy. 

Sandy Ellingson: My dream that I’ve been working on for several years actually goes live on June the 15th. So my my tip would be to watch out for the hub because it is exactly what I think parks have been needing.

It’s what I’ve been doing for four years on my own and now will facilitate. Everybody in the industry, whether it’s campgrounds or RV industry, manufacturers or suppliers, you’ll be able to connect, [00:54:00] communicate, collaborate, and then innovate. And I think in doing all of that, we will change this industry.

Brian Searl: All right, Scott Bahr. 

Scott Bahr: I would say in terms of, in, in order to help plan ahead is I would encourage people to read all the stuff Mike was talking about first. Do that. Be a good consumer. And again, I will reiterate the idea of asking questions. If, find the people who do this research, ask them questions.

Find people in the industry that you know and respect, ask questions. If you’re using CampSpot, call CampSpot to ask questions. Sorry, Casey. But no, but it’s if you’re working with Mark, call Mark. If you’re, call and ask questions. Be a good consumer. And the last piece of advice I would say is talk to your guests.

Talk to your campers. Ask them what they’re doing. Ask them why they picked you. Ask them what their plans are for the future. That on the ground information, again, it may be [00:55:00] lagging because they’re there now, but it will give you some insights into what’s going to happen in the future and what’s coming along.

Cause there’s things like the shortened booking window. I’ve been talking about this for months because we saw it. I go, I think it’s going to happen. And it is, it’s happening. Spontaneous travels returning. And so it’s something to be aware of, be prepared for, and it’s just done by asking people, that’s all.

Brian Searl: All right. Jeff Hoffman, then we’ll finish up with Casey. 

Jeff Hoffman: A lot of what Mike said, I think our industry is becoming more Technologically advanced than it ever has been, and the people that aren’t keeping pace are going to get left behind. And I do think that education is their key. The more you can read about the industry, the more you can research the industry, look at new products that are coming out that are going to help you get organized and change how you’re [00:56:00] operating the campground.

Those are all things that are going to help you in the end. But, also, if you know that we’re going to be down, you’ve got to be, figuring out how are you going to increase occupancy in August, September, and October, and hopefully catch some of that revenue back. You can’t just sit on your hands.

Brian Searl: All right. Best for last. No pressure. I don’t know. We’ll see a lot of good stuff there. 

Casey Cochran: I was thinking through this. Everyone said a lot of good things. I would say to me, if I’m speaking to a practical your standard mom and pop or, you own a park or a few parks, my advice would be that you have to carve out time to work on your business as opposed to, even right now in the heart of the busy season, you can choose to go out and fix this water thing or whatnot.

I think you have to allocate a certain amount of time to work. On the business versus being in the business all the time. And the difference of what that’s going to do is allow you to look at things like technology or look at different [00:57:00] products or things of that sort. And if that’s not you as a business owner, if that’s not your Skillset, or if that’s just not something you see yourself doing, then incentivize a manager or incentivize someone else that works for you, works with you and let them go out and create space.

To, again to look at these different, look at marketing, to look at, are we in all the local things here? Have we sent an email to our guests recently or past guests? Like everything that everyone’s just suggested, you have to be intentional about creating space and time to do, to pursue some of those things.

Cause otherwise. You’ll just all of us, you’ll find yourself working doing the things that are coming at you, which right now for most campground owners is going to be relentless. It’s going to be, this is the busy time. Even if you’re 20 percent down from last year, there’s still a hell of a lot of work to be done.

So if you’re not creating that space it, it sometimes can get pushed off too far and there’s still a lot of season left. There’s lots of camping ahead of us. There’s still a ton of time for a lot of things to turn around, but give yourself some space and time to, to work on some of these [00:58:00] things. So you can make necessary pivots, even, even now, or even in the middle of the season.

Brian Searl: Awesome. Guys. I appreciate it. We’re a couple minutes over. We’re going to wrap up the show. Great discussion as always. Thank Jeff Hoffman, Scott Bahr. Casey Cochran, Mike Harrison, Mark Kapp, Sandy who had I believe to drop off the call but super appreciative of you guys all being here We’ll see you next month For another episode of all of us together.

We’ll see you next week for an episode focused on glamping and take care guys. Have a great day. I really appreciate you being here. 

Scott Bahr: All right. Take care. 

This episode of MC Fireside Chats with your host, Brian Searl, have a suggestion for a show idea. Want your campground or company in a future episode?

Email us at hello at modern campground. com. Get your daily dose of news from modern campground. com. And be sure to join us next week for more insights into the fascinating world of outdoor [00:59:00] hospitality.