MC Fireside Chats – June 7th, 2023

Brian: Welcome everybody to another episode of MC Fireside Chats. My name’s Brian Searl with Insider Perks. Here as always, with our recurring guests for week one, who are just Sandy and [00:01:00] just Mark today because everybody else apparently is busy. I don’t know why I’m never busy. I feel like that’s a me problem and maybe I should refocus on other priority areas to make sure that I do have other things to do besides this show once in a while.

But here we are. So super excited to have Sandy Ellingson in here. Gonna talk a little bit about the RV industry and some of our we’re gonna debate all kinds of stuff. We’ll figure out what to debate. And obviously Mark Koep from Campground Views, like seven, how many Facebook forums you have now, like 22, 23.

So anyway. And all kinds of helping the industry, working with local associations we were talking about before the show. So I dunno what we wanna talk about today, but we’re gonna continue this discussion we were having backstage. Real quick, Sandy, for those of you who those of you don’t know, I am very opinionated.

And I often will say things that I have absolutely no data to back up what I did today and what came outta my mouth. And so maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong, but I literally can’t prove it to you. And [00:02:00] so Sandy was calling me out on it beforehand and she also like basically pointed out the fact that like when I go camping, I look at, and we’ll talk about that in a second.

And then I realize in the back of my head I’m thinking like cool, but I don’t go camping. I don’t have time. So that further distances myself from the argument I was trying to make. But anyway do we have anything that’s pressing on our agenda before we briefly touch on that conversation?

And Sandy holds me accountable. 

Mark: I’ll let you guys just dig in. Go ahead and dig in on this. 

Brian: I don’t know. It’s an interesting conversation I feel like, right? 

Mark: No, it’s a good conversation. 

Brian: But anyway, so like before Sandy holds me accountable, we should say that. Speaking of accountable, let’s talk about our sponsor for this show, Fireside Accounting.

Who is owned by Lindsay Foos. Great woman. Years of experience. Her husband runs a Campground management company as well. But just, if you’re looking for somebody to keep you accountable for all your numbers and your finances, as well as somebody who really knows the industry and can dive into all the things about RV parks and campgrounds and sites and numbers and unique [00:03:00] tax exemptions you might qualify for, and just keeping you on your toes and accountable, definitely reach out to Lindsay and give her team a call.

We’re really grateful for her for sponsoring this episode of Fireside Chat. So here’s what we were talking about. Okay. And we only had what, a 32nd, two minute conversation on it, something like that. We’re talking about Campground maps. That was where we went, right? We were talking about how people waste money on advertising, right?

In some instances, based on my opinion. But that I feel like I have some data to back me on. So I think we wanna touch on, let’s start with the Campground map, right? Sandy make your argument. 

Sandy: So I was just saying that I am a digital girl. I fully believe in digital marketing. However, I think it’s very interesting that the one piece of traditional marketing that I still love and I hear, still hear from campers of all ages that they really appreciate is the Campground map with all of the ads around the border.

Brian: All right, so we’re gonna have some fun with this. I just wanna listen when you say you’ve heard, cuz we’re talking about data, right? When you say you’ve heard from campers of all ages, [00:04:00] have you surveyed the one-year-olds? 

Sandy: No, I have not surveyed them. They refuse to comply. 

Mark: They actually enjoy the camp maps cuz they think they taste good.

Brian: Fair. But are they actually consuming the advertising then? 

Actually no. Literally they’re consuming the advertising.

 That is the best attention that a business owner can get right there. Like it would, it’ll literally be with ’em for a couple days probably.

Mark: Yeah. And then who knows what comes out the other end. 

Brian: And then they pass it on to someone else. 

 I dunno if you can call that word of mouth. This is probably going into territory when stop before we get too far. But so anyway, continue your argument. I’m sorry. 

Sandy: My argument for that is that, you don’t always go into a place where you’ve got good cell connection or good internet and what, and there’s a pretty consistent pattern of what kind of people will advertise around the edge of the Campground map.

Brian: Yes. The people [00:05:00] who wanna waste money are the consistent people who will advertise around the map. 

Sandy: Not true, I don’t look at the map cause my husband navigates and gets us on the site and I don’t really look at the hours because I’m not a rule follower or the rules, I’m not a rule follower.

But what I do look at is those ads around the edge for a couple of reasons. One is personal because I love to see who’s supporting our industry and I wanna support them. And then two, I always wanna know, I travel with a pet. I wanna know if there’s an advertiser on there that’s an emergency pet vet in case an emergency happens.

I don’t have to stop to Google or look, I know it’s right there. I wanna know if there’s good local pizza, not just Dominoes or Little Caesars. 

Brian: How do you know that they’re, how do you know they’re good though? This guy just paid to be on the ad. Like he could have just he could be the worst vet in the entire city or state, and he just had 500 bucks to spend and you’re gonna take your dog there and put his precious little puppy life into this guy’s hands without reading any Google reviews, seeing [00:06:00] if he posts on social media.

Sandy: Listen, if he’s supporting my campgrounds, he is a good guy. If he’s advertising with one of my campgrounds, I like you. So anyway, so I just, I really enjoy those and I, I literally look at all the ones around the map. My kids who are millennials, they do the same thing. And they..

Brian: No, come on. Your kids pick up the map and they look at all the different avertisement.

No, they don’t. 

Mark: Yeah. That map sits on the kitchen table in an RV. The entire time that RV is at the campsite, those maps absolutely work. Now, if it’s $10,000 replacement, it won’t work. But if it’s 500 bucks, you’re absolutely gonna make that return on that investment as an advertiser.

And for the camper they’re incredibly useful. And I’m really gonna blow your mind, print those rack cards inside the office. Those work too, because when people walk in the door, so you gotta look on the other side, Brian.

Brian: I wanna be proven wrong. This is why we’re having ..

Mark: I’m about to try to prove you wrong. I, it depends if you’re gonna accept my argument or not, but when somebody walks into a Campground let’s do hypothetical. They’re driving Yellowstone, they plan to go into Yellowstone, but they really don’t [00:07:00] know what else is in the area. And I think you may agree with this, the lack of information online.

As a holistic approach, if you don’t know what you’re looking for becomes difficult. So those rack cards in the offices are incredibly valuable just to give you ideas on things to do in the area, zip lines, rollercoaster, whatever. All those different advertisers that put those rack cards in there, that’s this type of advertising, like I call it push marketing.

I don’t know how you would term it, Brian, but you’re pushing your message in front of somebody who may not be expecting to receive it and hoping to elicit an idea that this is something I want to go do and this type of advertising works really well. Cause you’re hitting a targeted audience with something that’s valuable.

The map is valuable, I need it to get to my site, is something that sits on the table the whole time they’re there and is it gonna be a huge return on investment? Probably not like you’re, but you’re gonna get a positive return on investment. You get brand awareness. I don’t see a reason why an advertiser that’s targeting that audience would not do an advertisement on a printed map.

Brian: So I tend to agree on the ROI of the maps. So again, I’m not [00:08:00] a regular camper because I I don’t have time and I can’t afford an RV and for all the other things. No, maybe I could afford an RV. But anyway, Jeff Hoffman’s gonna buy me an RV on LinkedIn. Did you guys see that? 

Yeah, he I asked, he said he posted up as his new mobile office and I replied and said, can I have one? And he said, sure. I don’t know. I think it’s a valid contract right there. Yeah, I think that means he’s gonna, anyway. So I get that, like I think there’s certain business verticals that definitely can benefit from that if that’s what is and I have no reason to doubt you, right?

If it is sitting on the kitchen table or the counter or it gets moved around or shuffled or whatever else. I think it depends on the business, right? I’m not so sure that the emergency pet person maybe is making $500 worth, but for sure restaurant would. Absolutely a local restaurant or a bakery or an ice cream shop, or, things like that.

So I definitely grew that. I’m not, I’m still not sold in the fact that Sandy’s kids are willingly reading the map. I feel like maybe she takes them Camping and she’s no tv, [00:09:00] no phones. What are we gonna do? Here’s a map. And map. 

Sandy: Remember I said my kids are millennials, which means they’re in their thirties, right?

And so they do fight it. 

Brian: I have no data. Again, to refute my claim here, but that’s just the hunch that I’m gonna go with. But yeah, the rack cards is an interesting thing, right? So I look at rack cards two ways, right? For sure. There are people who are gonna go in the store and they’re gonna browse around and they’re looking for things to do and they’re gonna pull up some of those rack cards, right?

And that’s probably a very it’s not that expensive to put those in. To I guess solicit other businesses to put those into your store. It really doesn’t cost you anything, right? I’m not so sure on the flip side of the debate where I wanna spend $10,000 to print these and put them in rest stops all over the place.

I don’t know if that’s there. Maybe it is. But I think that a lot of businesses aren’t tracking this. They’re not using call tracking, they’re not using, UTM or [00:10:00] redirect links on, right? There’s no way to know if these things are actually working. Like you can hand out 20,000 brochures at a trade show, but cool.

They took them, maybe they glanced at ’em, but did they call, did they make a reservation? Did they visit your website? I think there’s a tracking piece component here that could prove one of us, right or wrong, or both of us, right or wrong, right? But the record’s in the office for sure and I think you’re right.

Part of the problem is Google is very unhelpful, especially when you don’t know what you’re looking for. But I think AI Chat will solve some of that for sure. As we continue to get used to it. And again, it. Like Google hasn’t officially launched yet. They’re beta testing it with users in their search.

But I think once that comes and you can actually ask a helpful assistant, what do I do near me? And it knows your location, and I can actually pull from the database of all the things and all the internet and give you like a list, right? Or you can say I have a family with two kids and I’m sitting in this Campground, what do I, that kind of thing.

I still think people pick up the rack cards, but I think less people pick up the rack cards. [00:11:00] 

Mark: I agree. And I know you shy away from the ai, but I’ll give you credit again. You were early on this and a lot of the tools I use from a digital side, you’re right. For example, Canva.

Canva, which is a graphics program for creating stuff now has a full AI experience in there where you can actually tell the ai, Hey, I need to develop a proposal template for this, and it’ll. It’ll develop a very nice proposal template with simply some instructions like that. I agree with you. We’re actually on the cusp of something significant with this AI experience and what’s coming.

And we’re I think you’ve said this, we’ve only scratched the surface on what’s available and what’s actually gonna happen. And so over the next four or five years, the transition here will be so monumental. But that, maybe you’ve done a lot of research..

Brian: It’s be quicker than that. It’s gonna be quicker.

Mark: You think you’ve been faster than four or five years?

Brian: I think we’re gonna have a massive impact on jobs in three to five years. . A massive massive impact where jobs are not going to ever come back. 

Sandy: I would agree with that. And I think it’s gonna [00:12:00] happen exponentially.

It’s gonna happen so rapidly. It used to be that technology had a life cycle of three years, right? It used to be five and then it became three. I think we’re reading. 

Brian: A track to records or records to a track and a track. Like it kept getting shorter. To see the digital to.. 

Sandy: Yeah. And one of the ways they used to measure how fast we were growing with the internet was how many lines of code were available.

And so it would look how quickly are we duplicating the number of lines of code that are actually being used on the internet. And there was an algorithm that actually did that and now it’s like we are exponentially, I mean we are doubling the lines of code 90. It is less than a year now because so much code is going out there.

So I think it is gonna be exponential growth. The one thing that I am kinda watching AI for that I know they will do, but I wish they wouldn’t, is just like with ways and Google Maps, if you are trying to [00:13:00] search for a route, it now will navigate you past their advertisers. It looks to see can I na not what is absolutely the best route, but can I route them past an advertiser?

And you don’t even realize that’s happening. And imagine when AI gets involved. 

Brian: For sure. But I think so. I think some of that is good in some of it’s bad. And I noticed that years ago. I don’t know if you guys ever did, I can’t remember. I think it was ways, but maybe it was Google Maps too.

Like we would see like the Taco Bell, like I think Taco Bell did some kind of national campaign and we would see you’d look on the map and you wouldn’t be zoomed in and see any business, but you’d see the Taco Bell icon right there. For every Taco Bell. Okay. That’s interesting. Yeah. And I’ve noticed like up here in Canada too, like when I search for a brewery or a, somewhere to go to a local brewery when I’m traveling, I always see Tim Horton’s pop up.

That has to be advertising, right? Oh, it is. It’s very clearly not brewery, but it happens in multiple cities. So it’s not an accident. And it’s all the Tim Horton locations in the city.

Mark: And let me go in deeper on this cuz I, [00:14:00] I think park operators don’t realize the impact of personalization within search results.

And for example, I was just talking to a park owner and they were, they’re like our ad doesn’t show up every time that I do the search for my park. And I said are you planning on paying to stay at your park? And he said no, I’m, I obviously own the park. Yeah, Google personalizes your results.

Now imagine where that goes with these AI algorithms that are already in play. There’s already that stuff in the back end that’s going on, tracking user behaviors and then customizing results based upon that. So the reality is tapping into that could be lucrative, but it’s also a little bit scary too because that’s where you start getting silos of information that are going on right now.

Brian: What? It’s all scary. Continue though. 

Mark: And so that hyper-personalization of information is actually leading to the silos that we’re all living in with right now. So based upon your behaviors, your search habits, and not just yours, but everybody else’s own individual behaviors and search habits they start diving down these silos of information cuz the search engines are feeding them what they want. So it’s just a..[00:15:00] 

Brian: But this is not new. 

This has been going on for 10 years with social media. This is how we all hate each other, in the United States.

Mark: Exactly. And that’s if you look at TikTok, I’ve been talking a lot about this because, and I dunno if you’ve seen it, Brian, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, Sandy, but attention spans are .. They’re way down.

And not only are the tension spans down, but the ability to absorb information is down unless it’s in a visual short form format. People are like, wait, I gotta read something. I’m like, wait, I’m not gonna understand this. And I actually had somebody, I actually had somebody in the Facebook group in this, in the main owner’s Facebook group, Brian say this to me, Hey, your video’s more than 20 minutes longer.

It was like a 20 minute video. I don’t have the time to watch it. So I’ve actually been testing, and I know you’ve been testing with it too, doing short form video within the Facebook group of anywhere from one to five minutes long just to get content out to help. 

Brian: Yeah, I did two of those videos and literally no one liked them.

 I dunno if Facebook didn’t show ’em, I uploaded ’em as Facebook reels from my, maybe I just need to put ’em as videos and see. Yeah. But there’s a lot to unpack there. And I I stray away from talking about [00:16:00] AI all the time like I used to because I feel like people are sick and tired of hearing it, but also at, please don’t the same time, how do I balance that?

They need to hear it. They just don’t understand that they do right now. Yeah. If you look at and I wanna unpack some of the other things you’re talking about too, that were unrelated to ai and then I wanna get back to maybe the Google Ads thing too, which we talked, I’ve talked about on the show before, the future of advertising.

I think we just did it two weeks ago, and Sasha was here from, I can’t remember the name of the company. I’m sorry. Sasha Older, I think. But anyway like AI is, if you look at, let’s start with these algorithms, okay? Because people think AI is new, AI is not new. You’re just seeing AI at this current level is new and it’s accelerating exponentially very fast.

And that’s new. But they’ve been using machine learning algorithms in social networks almost since the beginning. And these algorithms were literally programmed to say, right now people, and I’m just making up numbers, right? Right now, last year we had [00:17:00] 50 million people in January consume 40 minutes of content on YouTube per day.

Your goal as an algorithm is to make sure that next year that’s 75 million people and they consume 60 minutes of content every day on YouTube. Go do that. And the algorithm, through trial and error of figuring out what works and what doesn’t, across millions and millions of people across the world figured out the best way to do that was to piss us off and get us outraged at each other.

And welcome to the world that you live in today, and then you get YouTube and Facebook who deny that stuff has ever happened. But that’s actually, that’s literally what happened. Is we were manipulated by social media into, and I’m not saying we didn’t have our differences. Of course we do. But the problem is we can’t find common ground now and that’s.

Not all because of social media, but it plays a large role in that. 

Yeah. And that, go ahead, Sandy. 

Sandy: I’m sorry. I’m gonna leave us a little away, a little farther away from the political back out into the Campground world. [00:18:00] 

Casey: No, that’s fine. 

Brian: But whether it’s politics or. What you like or see, or the campgrounds, you’re, it’s all the same thing, right?

I don’t want to dive into the political end. 

Mark: No, it actually, it’s fun. I’m, and let me dive into, cause I think this will dovetail into what you’re gonna say, Sandy. So there’s on our end as a consumer facing brand, we work with influencers, right? People who have channels out there that are RV related.

And so one of the things we do is we’ll run a test every once in a while and we’ll run some YouTube ads against influencer channels and try to see what type of engagement we get off of that. And that builds our list of influences that we wanna reach out to and partner with. And there was, we got this one channel on there and I forget the name of it off the top of my head.

But, we go and look at the content. Cause we wanna make sure that if this is somebody we even wanna work with in the first place, if they’re an influencer and this person was a young woman attractive. Who basically filmed herself in a bikini, in an RV doing stuff outside. And I was like, I, first off I was like, what the heck?

And she millions of views on all of her videos and every time she post, she has millions of views. And the content was very fluffy. It was just her dancing around in bikini.. 

Brian: You’re gonna walk [00:19:00] us into a landmine, aren’t you already?

Mark: I am. That’s where I’m gonna go. But the point being is that once I, that video once on my personal account, all of a sudden I start getting fed those videos all the time.

And so then my wife walks in and goes, what are you watching? I’m like, I did not do this. I swear to your right. But the point being is that personalization based upon that, that one view of that video that I did pause on, cause I’m trying to figure out what the heck’s going on. Why is our ads being fed on this one?

Why, who is this person? What are they doing? Anyways I think that may dovetail into how the silo siloization of content and filtering it to somebody can dictate not only just political views, but their views of the outdoors of camping, of where they’re gonna go as a destination and how they’re gonna behave when they get there.

Brian: Yeah, I absolutely can. Go ahead Sandy, before we talk about it. 

Sandy: I was just gonna say one of the coolest things I had seen recently related to ai. I do a lot of work outside the Campground industry. I still do a lot of work with developers that are in Israel and they’re constantly testing things and, [00:20:00] but literally they’re able to go in now using ai and you can target it to a general area and you can say have AI go out, count and look every time somebody goes to a website that is like one of the property management softwares.

And if they get to the point where they’ve searched for to make a reservation and it comes back and says, no site’s found, AI can count that. So it can now tell me how many site nights are lost. Based on people looking for a site and it returning, no sites found.

Brian: I don’t know if that’s ai. I could, I’ve been able to do that for 12 years.

Nobody ever asked me to, but..

Sandy: This particular, because there’s so many complex variations on this, that’s why they’re using ai. I’m trying to shorten it cuz you know, I am known for talking a lot, so I’m trying to shorten the thing but it’s getting into very in depth, a lot of if them statements and things like that, right?

[00:21:00] But that’s really important information. If you’re getting ready to build right, people are, are actually searching for a site in this area over a period of time, or if you wanna expand or if you wanna go from being a primarily, seasonal park to a transient park. Those things are super interesting and those are the things that excite me about some of the new things that are coming because.

The thing is I didn’t have to write that or subscribe to somebody. AI figured it out all on its own by somebody saying, Hey, go out and find me this. Somebody just talked to the computer and said, I wanna know this information. And AI went and figured it out and did it. So I thought that was pretty cool.

Brian: It is. And so here’s the thing though, like people don’t understand how fast this is moving now, we talked about the exponential, right? We see 20 to 60 new AI tools come out in various aspects of image editing or text editing or analysis, or insert like 400 other categories. It’s [00:22:00] in medicine. There’s already something in front of the FDA that can recognize cancer on a radiology scan with 99% accuracy.

Yeah. It’s in it’s before the FDA for approval. It’s done. As soon as that comes out, radiologists are in trouble. This is literally every field, every product or service is gonna be touched by this no matter where you’re looking or going. And it’s exponentially increasing. It’s such a rapid speed, but still it’s like an amoeba.

 I can’t remember the guy’s name. I was watching a YouTube video on it later, or I can’t pronounce his name. I should say it’s the guy who wrote the Sapiens book and Homo Deuce and his name is, it is, it’s from Israel. His name’s y’all. Something I just can’t remember his last name or pronounce it.

And so he was using an analogy where he was saying like, cuz he’s a historian, right? He’s not, his specialty is not an ai. And he said, this is literally like the ameba crawling out of the ground 4 billion or however many years ago. That over 4 billion years then evolved into whatever life we have on earth here.

Assuming you subscribe to evolution, which I do, but that’s okay.[00:23:00] But let’s just pretend everybody does right now. So evolved into that through whatever path that it took. But this is what AI is like. The AI that we have today is the ava. Yeah. What’s the T-Rex gonna look like? And it certainly isn’t gonna take 4 billion years to get there.

It’s gonna take 10. 

Mark: There was an article last week some military colonel was at a conference and he commented about, they did some sort of hypothetical or, training exercise with ai and they programmed an ai drone to attack a target. And it received points based upon attacking that target.

And but it did have a human controller who could say yes or no. The final decision on actually killing was yes or no. Yes. And so the AI figured out I need to get points to kill that thing, and this person’s holding me back. So it turned around and went and killed the target. This is all hypothetical.

It didn’t happen in real life, but it turned around and killed the controller. And they said we can’t have that. So they programmed and said, if you kill the controller, you lose, don’t do that. So then it figured out, all right, what I’ll do then is I’ll destroy the communication tower between the controller and [00:24:00] me.

That way I can’t hear the command. And then it can continue on. The point being is where that brings you on. 

Brian: I wanna see that article, but go ahead, continue. What’s that? I believe you, I just wanna read it. 

Mark: Yeah. And there may be nuances in it, right? So it may have been built up, but the general theory is there, and that leads you into the whole idea of what you just said there, Brian, about how fast this is moving.

I don’t think we can conceptualize where this goes over the next three to five years, as you’ve said. And I think it is snowballing really fast because entrepreneurs, businesses see it as an opportunity to improve either their services or their products, or even eliminate employee costs for different services.

When you start doing that in mass in, at the scale of what’s going on, that’s when you see transformational changes. The, I think the easiest one to grasp is automobiles and trucking. And trucking, specifically. Trucking employs a lot of people in the United States, and there are now auto autonomous vehicle entities that are, for example, there’s a route right now from Phoenix to Tucson that runs every day.

Carrying a load. The truck drives what? There’s a driver in the seat, but the car, the truck drives itself, [00:25:00] right? They’ve been testing this and it’s just been doing runs back and forth. So when you take that on alo or even a US scale, where all of a sudden short run trucking that’s destination can start being autonomous, you lose a significant portion of well paying middle class jobs.

 I was actually gonna stop right there. So go ahead Brian. 

Brian: No, I was just gonna say, so like autonomous trucking is a whole nother thing, right? And we definitely like if something you need to pay attention to, but here’s the thing that’s been coming for 15 years.

Yeah. We’ve known self-driving car. Like I don’t feel sorry for you if you’re a truck driver, I’m sorry. Like you can call me cold-hearted or whatever you wanna do. But you’ve known this is coming for 15 years. You’ve had 15 years to attempt to learn a new skill. Like AI’s coming a lot faster than that. I will feel sorry for the people who whose jobs AI displaces because it’s gonna come so fast that they won’t have time to adjust to those kinds of things.

But it’s gonna come very quickly. And what you’re talking about too is a valid point. You’re right about entrepreneurs and the investment that’s coming into the space and how [00:26:00] fast they’re moving and it’s still even with that speed, because you could argue that they move the same thing at the beginning of crypto in the beginning of the internet and the beginning, but it’s still I don’t know I, it’s way surpassed my expectations.

It’s going a hundred times, 200 times faster than I thought. But even on top of that, this is the first technology that’s existed that doesn’t need human intervention to continue to evolve. This is the critical point, right? You can look at every other invention in the history of mankind and this is a great video.

Like I’ll find the link and I’ll share it with you guys if you wanna see it. But in the same video from the guy yesterday, from you all or whatever he was talking about this evolution and one of the examples he gave was Gutenberg’s Printing press, right? Totally changed the world and knowledge and made free, books and printing available to everybody.

But it’s still required a human to make the decision to print the books. The printing press didn’t decide, I want one more Bible, or I want 10 more Bibles, [00:27:00] or I want to add a page to the Bible, or I need to change my distribution to do whatever. And then it stopped. I had to stop when people needed to sleep and AI doesn’t need to do that.

It works 24 7. So not only do you take the exponential scale of the entrepreneurs doing it, you take the exponential scale of 24 7, 365 nonstop. Nobody gets sick work that continues to evolve and it’s insane. 

I even forgot I forgot Casey was even on the show. I feel like I said that before the back end, we were missing Casey too. 

Casey: Yeah, I didn’t even get mentioned for missing.

That’s tough, man. It’s all good. Sorry, meeting went long. How’s everyone doing? What are we talking about? 

Brian: We started talking about Campground maps and then yeah, we got on a..

Sandy: We went something totally traditional and safe to AI. Was a big job. 

Casey: Hey, maps weren’t always allowing map booking maps.

When I, [00:28:00] just four and a half years ago I had to speak endlessly about the value of a booking map being relevant to a park. Literally, it took years to convince a lot of campgrounds that, that, that’s beneficial. But yeah. 

Mark: Brian, I dunno if you called. I actually, I do real fast, Sandy.

So Brian, I don’t know if you saw this, but Campspot has announced that they’re hiring a new role for the summer. It’s called the Seasonal Chief Outdoor Officer, and they will provide a $10,000 travel stipend and a $2,000 monthly salary and a virtual assistant, and all the person has to do is go out and camp all summer long.

So Casey first stop I love this as just a contest giveaway. So whoever came up with it over there, you can take credit for it. Casey, good job. Do you know anything about it you wanna share a little bit? 

Casey: I’m gonna throw my buddy Josh under the bus that we’re finally getting a [00:29:00] legit COO, that’s what I’m really excited about now.

No, it’s awesome. We just rolled it out actually. I just Aaron does a phenomenal job of holding anticipation of things until they’re about ready to release, and then we all get excited about it too. Yeah, we were just actually talking about this today the final stages of it and things of that sort and release going out.

Now it’s something that we’re super excited about, right? And get engagement. Getting people talking about and just get people camping, right? At the end of the day, we want more people camping, we wanna create more camping nights. People think it’s cliche, but it’s the truth. That’s what we’re aim to do is get more people camping and get more camping nights.

Sandy: I think that who you should hire for that? We’ll have to talk offline and it’s not me cause I have too many parks to help, but it might be my husband. No, not really. 

Mark: I think the biggest lesson in this is obviously it’s a cool idea, but for a, for an RV park or a Campground is see what they did.

So they actually hit the, they hit the gut of the consumer. The consumer. Literally when they get in an RV and go travel for a weekend, they wish they could just do it all summer long. Man, I wish I’d get paid to go do this. And so they hit that.. 

Brian: It depends on what experience you have at [00:30:00] the park, but continue.

Mark: In, in general, they wanna go camping and they wanna if somebody’s gonna pay me to go Camping. So I just love the entire concept from a marketing pers perspective. And like on our end, we got the press release, we sent it out to our entire list just cuz it’s a completely awesome idea, right?

So from a marketing perspective for park owners and operators, look at what Campspot’s doing in this giveaway that they’re doing and consider how you could do that for your own park. Obviously not copy this idea, but something similar that hits at the gut of what your guests want when they’re traveling and that’s gonna get them to share the idea.

So I just love it from a marketing perspective. 

Brian: Appreciate that Mark. Question. I’ve not seen it, honestly. It’s the first I heard about it but yeah. Sounds like a good idea. 

Sandy: I have a question for you relating to Memorial Day Casey with some of the other groups that I work with and one of the things we discussed in the innovator group was, it was very interesting that over the Memorial Day weekend, two statistics came up.

One was that [00:31:00] at, there were more parks that had their glamping sites a hundred percent sold out and their RV sites were not, which, that’s the first time they’re just starting to track obviously some of the glamping stuff. But that kinda stood out. And the second thing that I thought was interesting that they said they had the highest number of last minute bookings that they’d ever seen.

So did you see that inside your data as well? 

Casey: Yeah. Yeah. A couple different things there. I don’t have specifics on, lodging versus RV sites as far as availability. We all know that the trends between, whether you call it glamping like a cabin or, the specific, I consider a cabin half these cabins I consider glamping cuz it’s it’s not an attempt or it’s not an.. But that we know there’s a rise of those. We were we definitely saw overall of the, whatever that is, the 23 or 2,400 parks. A huge jump the week right before Memorial Day and then continuing. Right now, there has been a big, like [00:32:00] a breath of fresh air in terms of a spike in camping reservations overall.

So where there is this little oh man, this is, where, there’s just not seeing the numbers here. That, I think a lot of people hope to see or anticipating seeing. It just took a huge jump as that first, just before that first busy camping week and then continuing after, which is even more exciting to see, right?

It’s exciting to see a big jump on a holiday weekend, but what you wanna see is that trend continue right after that means that people are not only booking the one, but then they’re booking another one. Or people didn’t get in on that initial holiday weekend and now they’re like, Hey, summer’s here.

But it makes a lot of sense, right? I’m looking outside right now at our house and there’s, eight kids running around crazy over here. But summer’s out, right? And so as soon as that starts to happen and kids get outta school. It’s parents go, okay, I’m not having this here all the time, right?

We’re gonna find something and we’re gonna go do this for these amenities and stuff like that. So some of that makes sense where I’m sure people aren’t stupid, right? When the people that are Camping Brian, might argue this, [00:33:00] but no people that are Camping, they’re looking at trends, right?

They’re looking at availability. And if you see that everything is booked up, you’re gonna follow suit to that and you’re gonna be like, okay, we need to book this now. And that’s what happened a couple years ago. People realize I can’t book anything, but people are, they’re gonna look and see if there’s some availability.

They might not, they’re not be as big of a call to action to say, I have to book that right now. And there’s a good and bad of that. What the good of that though that we’re seeing right now to ST’s question is reservations are picking up drastically. Like they’re accelerating very quickly and in a lot of cases.

And that’s really exciting to see beyond just the holiday weekend. Because it is, it shows that, like I said that the season is here and it’s not necessarily a painted picture yet. We had a little bit of a picture of what we thought, maybe occupancy was gonna be down a certain percentage, but then we saw this kind of good jump, this good spike.

And so far we’re super excited because it’s showing that’s maintaining. 

Brian: Yeah. I think we, we’ve been telling our clients that [00:34:00] for a couple months now, just, it’s not the same booking window. You need to wait. It’s when, Memorial Day, they start kicking off summer and then the kids get outta school and that’s whatever.

It’s not across the board, but that’s, and now, so what I wanna see now is yes, that trend, we’ve seen that trend too, but does that continue throughout June? Yep. Or is that and then that’s what make me a big believer that it’s gonna be great. It’s gonna be good. But will it be great?

I don’t know yet. 

Casey: You have to define great, right? If you’re defining great as. The main covid year where, everyone was available for the most part to work during the week. That’s tough to compare that. But I think if you put some realistic expectations and you’re just utilizing some other things a little bit better, using your add-ons, better using rate management a little bit better, you’re using just technology in general or you are, you’re embracing some other things to help, bring that ADR up or if you bring that overall invoice up you can definitely make some, you can make some necessary adjustments. 

Brian: For sure you can. And that’s the thing, like you can be down, like there’s a range, right? And [00:35:00] you and I are chatting about this with numbers a couple weeks ago, right? Where some people were looking down and I have had those conversations with other reservation systems providers too, and I think that’s flipped a lot since then.

The conversation is different, but at the same time, a lot of those people who are on the higher end of that down range, they don’t do any marketing. They don’t do any marketing, they don’t do any work. They don’t know where their people are coming from or why they’re coming. And so it’s very easy to then flip that, especially the first couple years after you turn that faucet on because there’s literally 30 levers to pull to.

Casey: We mentioned this, I don’t know if I mentioned this on here, but it was something that we were really excited about that part of like our analytics thing here, and this isn’t obviously a spiel here cause I hate doing that on these shows, but we created a heat map for where parks reservations were coming from.

And it’s just a, it’s just a thing that’s displays on their main analytics page. So they can ultimately, and this is hopefully for them to understand where to market right. To use that as like [00:36:00] the thing to say, okay, now I at least know where my majority of my customers are coming from.

Now let’s put a place, a plan in place to, to expand that awareness in these different areas or pockets that I know we have. Good. Not just rapport from, but where your money’s coming from, right? This is where this is where that is. And so for us, it was something that we were super excited to give to our clients because again it’s incredibly valuable to know like what the customer is, where they’re coming from, where it’s concentrated, and where you can focus some of those marketing efforts or where you can expand those marketing efforts or where you can clone that type of marketing campaign potentially in another area, certain distance away, or something along those lines to help bring in that a different, that additional clientele.

Brian: Yeah. There’s just so many different things and people don’t pay attention to the data. Like you can put the data in front of them. And part of it is some of it is an unwillingness, some of it is lack of tech savvy. Most of it I think is no time. But then you’ve gotta put a [00:37:00] value on that and whether that means you hire a Mark or a me or a whoever, right?

Or and even outside of marketing, if you hire whatever you’re outsourcing, right? An accounting firm like our sponsor, Fireside Accounting by the way. But whoever, right? You need to put a value on those things. And we see that, like some of these free websites that we’re doing for CCRVC, The Canadian National Association for American Glamping Association for some of our other partners we’re seeing people come to us and they don’t value websites at all.

Like we, we talked to somebody yesterday who’s, who literally said I want a website. It was a free website, right? It’s a templated website and I need it done, my booking thing. I’m gonna be ready to go and accept reservations next week on Thursday, and I need the website done by then.

Cool. But no and you’ve known about this for like weeks and you could have, right? And so the pro, so it’s that, but they don’t value the website in general, let alone the time craft care takes. Yes. It templated. Free one [00:38:00] page website, as much easier you get done. But it’s understanding the analytics, how people use those websites in this case, or social media or the billboard or the Campground map or the whatever, to determine the value of that and then assess what piece of that is worth a margin for me to go hire somebody to do that better? 

Sandy: I think that people have a hard time valuing what they don’t understand, right? Yes. I remember years ago when I first started out in tech, I would work with programmers and I think, oh my gosh, why should it take ’em three hours to do that?

It should just be like 15 minutes until I had to sit behind one of ’em and watch what they were doing. And then all of a sudden I was like, okay, now I get it. Yeah. And I think for campgrounds, anything, a lot of times if, especially if it’s a mom and pop kind of thing, techno, they’re in the hospitality industry because they’re people, person, they wanna get out, they wanna visit.

Sitting behind a desk with a computer is the last thing they wanna do. [00:39:00] But the most important thing we can do is teach them If you do what you love and then push off everything you hate to somebody else who’s qualified. Don’t try and make ’em think it’s important, cuz they don’t get it. But just tell ’em, don’t do the things you hate.

It’s just like me. If you ask me to come up with a great new idea, that’s right in my wheelhouse. You don’t like it. Gimme five minutes. I’ll give you another one. But if you ask me to sit day in and day out and manage a park and do the accounting and take the reservations, you will kill me. In about 15 minutes and..

Brian: What should be Campspot’s next feature go. 

 What should be Camp Spot’s next feature? You said you come up with an idea. 

Sandy: Oh, camp’s next feature. Okay. I think Camp’s next feature should be something that’s, that does something similar to what Camp Nav and some of the I think Harvest Host is doing a platform where you’re constantly going out and searching for canceled reservations so that people can put in places that they wanna go to that are normally sold out and get [00:40:00] alerts on those things.

There you go. Go for it, Casey. Do it. 

Casey: I’d be interested to see how many parks across the platform and any really on any given weekend are at 100% capacity. Even at the site type level. I know that happens obviously at a lot of the state parks, right? Like they, that gets all nabbed up right away whether people are gonna use ’em or not.

So if they decide to cancel ’em, and I can’t tell you how many times.. When we did that state association show market I was at, where we went to some of these just incredible state properties. And because they were so cheap, people just don’t show up. They don’t even care about canceling.

 And you had, I mean you had yeah. 10, 15, 20 spaces open and I never knew this, but you can actually go there and after a certain point in time, if they don’t show up, you can just take the spot. And I remember thinking, man, that’s a bold way to think about things. And then I went to some of these places and I’m like, there’s like plenty of availability here.

This is crazy. So it’d be interesting to see how many people actually cancel and how many times you can actually rebook that in time. Be curious to see that. 

Sandy: That is [00:41:00] my idea specifically for you, Casey. And I’m not being negative to any of my other friends. You are the only one that can do it because you have your own marketplace.

Yeah. And you have great parks, which I can’t get into a lot of times. So if you fix that for me, I do want you to call it the Sandy widget. 

Brian: Seems worth at least pulling the data right? To see. Whether develop it or not, I’d like to see the data. That’s interesting.

Sandy: With other property management softwares, I couldn’t do this, but with the marketplace, right? I could go in and say, Hey, I really wanna get into this Campground alert me if there’s a cancellation.

Brian: This is revenue generation, right? So Mark, hold on one second.

This is revenue generation, right? Yeah. So you could have campers subscribe to this, right? And you could have tiers on how fast they get the alerts, right? Yes. So there could be like a dollar 99 tier. There could be like a 5 99 and a 9 99 tier. 9 99 gets text alerts. So they instantly see it. The 5 99 gets emails and the dollar 99 gets a carrier pitch in, [00:42:00] sent to them.

Mark: Lemme add on that, Brian. Cause I was about to go to the same spot with you, but a little bit different play on it, which is, if I’m looking to book a site and I know the site’s $75 a night or whatever, but I want to be there and everything’s booked, I’d be willing to even bid on it and say, I’ll bid 80 bucks if a site opens up and put my credit card in and you book it.

So now of a sudden you’ve got almost like a bidding for sites type of deal. I don’t know how many people would be willing to do that, but that was idea. 

Brian: It depends on how many parks are full. Like Case said, that’s the interesting thing. Yeah. 

Sandy: Harvest Hosts has a new thing that they’re doing with the campgrounds for that, but it’s, they’re only doing state, federal, local parks.

Camp NAB is doing the exact same thing that’s a much smaller Ownership, they’re doing it, but there’s nobody that’s doing it from the pub, the private park, piece of it. Yeah. And at some point when we all get together and we’re working together, maybe that would be an opportunity, but for right now, that’s a space that really only Campspot could serve.[00:43:00] 

Casey: Yeah. Wow. Definitely. Noted. 

Brian: We just gotta see the data, right? Like I, the data’s gonna tell us whether it’s obviously it’s Campspot’s decision, right? But from a smart perspective, like does that actually problem actually exists? Yeah, for sure.

I think for sure it did in 21 and probably in 22. Call me. Call me. Yeah. It still does will do. 

Mark: I can tell you that the perception maintains this year. We still see that from, in fact, RV travel.com does those those clickbaits posts often on our campgrounds full.

And you read the commentary. Campers still believe the campsites are full. Whether that’s real or not they still, that’s still the mindset a lot of folks is that everything’s full. I can’t get anywhere. And I don’t think that’s the reality, but that’s definitely the perception on the consumer side.

Brian: I think it’s the reality in certain markets, for sure. 

Sandy: Mark, that goes back to what you were talking about earlier, was attention span. People will spend about five minutes max trying to find [00:44:00] a site, and if they can’t find it, they’re done. They quit. They said, we’re just not gonna go Camping.

And that’s why I see the ballot. 

Brianb: Who says that? Wait a minute, you need data to back this up. We’re back in full circle now. Who says that? 

Brian: That they’re just not, they’re just gonna give up and go p on their couch. I don’t know about that. 

Sandy: No, I believe through, now we didn’t do a research specifically on this, but do is research.. 

 But what we did do research on is click fatigue. So we can tell you what percentage of campers say that they have click fatigue, which is trying to find a website. Okay. Which basically relates to the same thing. Now, I didn’t go into anything as far as how long did they do that, but I will mention to Scott , to me, the ana, the analytics guru that the next one we do, we need to include that.

But people do have click fatigue and so they will only search for so long because we know their attention span is short before they give up. 

Brian: So this, but this is [00:45:00] all gonna be, so this goes full circle back to what Mark was talking about advertising and personalization too, and. And back to how AI is gonna change this search, right? Eventually what’s gonna happen, and I talked about this with Sasha on the show two weeks ago. I think eventually you’re gonna feed your inventory data directly into these systems, whether it’s Bing or ChatGPT or Google System or whatever it is.

You’re gonna feed your inventory, you’re gonna connect the camp spot, you’re gonna connect the Resn Nexis, you’re gonna connect the whatever, right to these systems. And it’s gonna be able to determine your inventory in real time. And that is going to allow you to be able to search and it will present you with campgrounds that you, it thinks you like, that have availability on the dates that you want to stay, whatever else, right?

And that’s going to get rid of that click fatigue. But it’s also gonna create a better environment for advertisers too. Because now and the example I used on the show was just so people can understand was Delta Airlines, right? If you have, if you’re, if Delta Airlines is running billions of dollars in pay per click every year [00:46:00] to get people on a specific route, and they’re running pay per click against I don’t know, pick one of their hubs, Atlanta to Detroit or something like that, right?

Right now they may run those ads and they’re not targeted enough or they don’t know enough about the consumers, so they waste probably millions of dollars worth of paper clicks because, or ppc, because somebody will click that ad who wants to depart the airport at specific time that flight is sold out or doesn’t exist, or wants to sit in first class.

First class is already sold out or needs an exit row and the exit row is already sold out or whatever, right? Whatever the case may be. And so Delta, even though their intention was like the targeting was good, and the intention for that person was good to get there and to book a flight, Delta didn’t have what was available.

Now, if you feed your inventory directly into that system, all of a sudden now you can bid for that auction just like you would on Google in real time, but only bid for the places where you have availability. 

Casey: The flaw in that, in my, at least my understanding, we’re just talking about this today, cuz obviously we have a whole team that we’re talking about all this stuff with, but we just talked about this today.

The interesting thing with [00:47:00] that is, is how do you see Google specifically, or even Bing, there’s no way they’re gonna give up their number one revenue source, right? Like they’re, they can’t just get rid of that. They can’t just say, Hey, we’re gonna, we’re gonna allow you Delta to spend hundreds of millions of dollars less.

They have to funnel that..

Brian: They’re not gonna spend less. That’s the difference. So here’s the difference, right? So when we look at, mark does this, when we look at Google ads, right? So right now you pay a cost per click. Yep. And then as you work your way down that data metric, eventually when you’re tracking revenue through Camps spot or your reservation system, what you get is a cost per customer acquisition.

Yep. How much does it cost you to acquire a customer? That number is what you’re gonna bid on. So now, because you know for sure that customer is looking for a flight that you offer and a seat that you have at a time, you have a flight to depart. Now it’s almost a 98% certainty that they will book if you put that in front of them in a real time auction.

So now instead of paying $3 a click, you’re gonna pay [00:48:00] $30 a customer or $20 a customer to Google. 

Mark: I got a real word example on this. This was a small park location. They do paper reservations, they’re old school, but they were running Google ads forever with me, and it was just cost per maximum clicks, sending traffic into their website.

And they only spent about $150 a month. So it wasn’t even really enough to drive to, to do anything. And they paused it and they basically, we’re not gonna do it again. All of a sudden they called me up and said, Hey, we need to get some guests in our park. And I’m like what do you want?

And then so I got down to the heart of it. I’m like, you guys want a phone call? And they’re like, yeah. Like, all right, I’m gonna set up this campaign. So all it’s gonna do is generate phone calls. I’m not sending any traffic to your website. It’s just gonna be a call only campaign that runs on mobile.

But the trick is you’re gonna pay a lot more for that. Cause it’s a phone call. And they said, all right, we’ll try it out. So I set it up and about three days later, I hadn’t heard from them. I called ’em up. Cuz the problem with that call tracking is you get the click, but you don’t actually know if there was an outcome.

I call ’em up, I’m like, how’s it going? Mark, this is unbelievable. We’ve got six new guests in the last three days when we were dead before. All of them [00:49:00] called, I know it’s from the Google ads. And I said, all right do you want the news? I’m like, yeah. I said, as of right now, you’ve spent about a third of what you previously spent on Google ads in your paper plate.

So you’re gonna spend, a significant amount more on a monthly basis. Are you okay with that? As long as these phone calls continue coming in? Yes. So to Brian’s point a business owner knowing with certainty that every dollar they spend is bringing in a customer will be willing to pay more than the uncertainty of getting some crappy traffic and having to figure it all out.

Brian: And you’re gonna lose some of those, right? Like Delta, like it’s not a guarantee a hundred percent, but it’s gonna be an 80 to 90% guarantee.. $15 instead of 30, and then if you hit 50% of the time, it’s still 30, but Google’s still gonna make their money. It’s just gonna be better for Google and better for the advertis.

Casey: Yes. 

That’s what I was getting at, is that it’s not gonna be just this new world where Google is providing an easier search option. And not, capitalizing it. Like the cost is so gonna somewhat be there. It’s just a matter.. 

Mark: How it’s, the biggest risk to camps spot is the same risk that like [00:50:00] Expedia and all them face with the hotel side, where originally Google was just taking the Expedia data and showing it.

Then eventually Google launched their own hotel search engine and basically cannibalize that business from those those type of travel services. They could obviously do the same thing in this space. If all the reservation engines are fine or in the data, they could just cannibalize that and take over that market.

So it is a big risk and the reality is the players with the technology are the ones that are gonna win in the end. And so the trick is for everybody else in the world is to try to figure out how you operate a business within the world of giants. How do you carve out a little niche for yourself and your family and your friends in order to make a living in all this?

Which is, I think, dovetails into what Brian’s saying about there’s a lot of people about to get screwed with AI taking their jobs. How do they carve a niche for themselves and survive in that? 

Casey: We talked a little bit about that today, like the differences saying, Hey, find me a three star hotel.

Within five minutes of the city of Chicago with the King Bed and for ai, something like that, I think it makes a perfect sense to say with, with availability within five miles, if that [00:51:00] makes perfect sense. The opposite of that would be, find me a Campground within what, 10 miles of this area with availability that can fit a 23 foot RV with slideouts on one side with two pets.

That, and I, it needs a swimming pool or whatever. And maybe I’m making it more complicated. It is, but these are just very basic..

Brian: You’re not there yet, right? You’re not there yet. You’re there to your first question when Google launches it, your second question though is a year away.

It’s not far right, because Google, because Again, it campgrounds me leg behind this, right? But you’re gonna be able to feed your data into those systems. And if you don’t feed your da, imagine if you don’t feed your data, forget about whether you advertise, imagine if you don’t feed your data into these systems and it gives you a list of three campgrounds, but it pulls from the ones who feed IT data.

Sandy: It’s already there because Google already knows everything about what I need to count, no matter where I go. If I’m making a reservation, it pops up and says, do you wanna pop [00:52:00] pre-populate this information? And it is my rig tight..

Brian: But it’s gonna get even smarter than that, right? Yeah. If that’s the point, it’s gonna, it’s gonna start collecting more information and then it’s gonna just a lot of it, you’re not even gonna have to ask.

It’s gonna know already that you have, and it’s creepy and they’re gonna, we need privacy laws desperately around this stuff. But it’s gonna know you have kids and know you have a dog, and know you have it right, and know what your rig is because it’s got a history of your booking preferences. And it’s gonna just put all it’s gonna know, it’s gonna recommend you based on that.

But that’s not, it’s not there yet. It’s about a year away. May, maybe longer, depending on how privacy, like we desperately need to regulate this stuff. 

Casey: Definitely needs to be regulated and essentially it needs to be what you feel comfortable loading that in, whether you feel comfortable or not.

And so if enough people don’t feel comfortable with that, then they don’t use it. Then that is the potential way, right? If enough people are like, I don’t want, I don’t want them knowing that about me. Like again, turning certain things off on your Facebook accounts or whatever the case is.

We’re like, I don’t want these suggested things. If I say something all of a sudden I’m getting ads for it. You can turn [00:53:00] that stuff off. 

Brian: And but how many people are tech savvy? You have to do that .

Sandy: Human beings are the only ones who are willing to honor anything we put in there about what, you know when you say you want something in place that protects your privacy.

Then another human will honor that if you say that because of laws. But AI’s not gonna do that. It’s like what Mark was saying. AI’s gonna figure out a way around it. It’s gonna say I know she says that she doesn’t wanna share that, but I could do it better if she will. So forget what she says. I’m using her data anyway.

Brian: And here’s the thing though, with your point, right? The point is that when advertising gets good, and it’s not like some of it’s good, but when it actually gets good and valuable and relevant to you, you will share more of that data because it will help you. 

Sandy: Oh, absolutely. We’re doing it now.

I swear I’d never do any of this stuff. Half the stuff I’m doing now, and I’m already doing it because it’s I don’t wanna fill all this in again. I know it’s gonna take me 15 seconds, but I [00:54:00] don’t care. 

Brian: But then the flip side of that is, is right, is we don’t need the toggle on Facebook. We need the government to say, you have to opt into this stuff.

And not opt out. It, I think it doesn’t matter what Europe does, which is what candidate’s trying to do because the users aren’t gonna do it. Yeah. So anyway, we got two minutes left. 

Sandy: We covered the gamut today.

Brian: Out of it. Of it. Yeah. Yeah. It’s just really interesting to me. This is the stuff I like to talk about. It’s not yeah, I’m, yeah. I’m obsessed a little bit with ai. But I think it’s for a good purpose and a good reason and you can it’s not hard to look and see that maybe what I’m predicting doesn’t come to pass Exactly.

Like when I’m predicting it. Cuz it’s just a guess. It’s an educated guess, but it’s very easy to see. Like it’s literally everywhere. And still, did you see the survey? Did you see the survey? That’s certainly 14% of Americans have actually used ChatGPT.

Sandy: 90 [00:55:00] million people a day in the United States encounter AI and whether they know it or not, 

Brian: oh, that’s, yeah, that’s a whole nother topic.

Yeah. But, okay, final thoughts? 

Mark: I love the good news that Casey just shared about that bookings being up following Memorial Day. That’s anecdotal that we, what we’ve heard. So it’ll be exciting to see those trend reports come out and I’m not paid by Kapa, but kudos to Michael for starting to share some of the day that you guys are getting outta your system on an aggregate level.

Cause that can combine with the KOA North American Camping report to really give good insights on where this industry’s going. That’s kinda my final thought here. 

Brian: Yeah, and I’ll put this up real quick. Somebody just put this on LinkedIn and commented, and I don’t know why it doesn’t say the name of the person, but.

AI is a great leveling field as well. Even small mom-and-pop can compete with and deliver an elevated product on par with major operators. And this is one of the things that we should talk about on a future show too. And this is not, again, this is not just campgrounds, right? I think I read somewhere that [00:56:00] 52% of teachers have adopted AI in some form in the classroom to either create a lesson plan or something like that, but the majority of that 52% are black and Latino teachers in underprivileged areas who didn’t have the resources to do it before.

 I think that’s great. I think that’s awesome. Yeah. So it’s gonna level all kinds of playing fields. I’m excited to hear about it, but okay. Thank you guys for joining us another episode. Thank you Sandy, for holding me accountable. Our sponsor, Fireside Accounting, we appreciate them as well. And we will see you guys next week on another episode.

Take care.