MC Fireside Chats – May 27th, 2026

[00:00:45] Brian Searl: Episode of MC Fireside Chats, my name is Brian Searl with Insider Perks and Modern Campground. Excited to be here for our fourth week episode of AI and technology and all the things that we’re going to talk about today that are interesting. Who has had some big announcements, we talked about it briefly on our Outwired show, but I want to bring it to a larger audience on Fireside Chats. Talk about how that’s going to change a little bit about the industry.

 We got a fancy new thing we released today that we might talk about. I might be self-promotional for five minutes during this call, you never know. But yeah, otherwise interesting. And we have it’s the summer now, so I don’t know if we’re going to have this pattern.

 Last week I had one guest on my show. Everybody else claimed they had last minute flight changes, which God bless everybody who is a wonderful recurring guest on our show, but I don’t know if everybody just suddenly remembers they have a flight like 40 minutes before the show. But I don’t know, we’ll let it slide for all those people. But we’re missing a bunch of people today too.

 But I, I will tell you what, last week I had one gentleman on the show, he was a special guest, owned a campground in New York, and we had a really in-depth, interesting conversation with him that I think was quite interesting. Maybe we’ll just kick everybody off the show and just pick one person every week.

[00:01:47] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah, sometimes the smaller conversations are more valuable.

[00:01:50] Brian Searl: Yeah. All right, let’s introduce ourselves. Amber, do you want to start?

[00:01:54] Amber Simpson: Sure. My name is Amber Simpson. I’m the founder and lead strategist at MartrekDigital, which is a digital marketing agency that specializes specifically in outdoor hospitality marketing.

[00:02:05] Brian Searl: Awesome. Welcome, Amber. Thank you for being here. And Cara?

[00:02:09] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah, I’m Cara Csizmadia. I’m president of the Canadian Camping and RV Association, representing roughly 2,000 privately owned campgrounds across Canada. Various programs and services and all kinds of fun work we do for them on a day-to-day basis.

[00:02:24] Brian Searl: Welcome. Thank you for being here. So typically we start the show with our recurring guests, although there’s only one, Cara, who’s here now. And we just say I think it’s been a few months since you’ve been on the show Cara?

[00:02:35] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah, I think I was on last month. Lots of travel for me too, yeah.

[00:02:39] Brian Searl: tell us what’s new in the world of Canada since we’ve last talked?

[00:02:43] Cara Csizmadia: gosh, I will say I’ve had my head down in the, sand focused on a couple of big advocacy pieces, which we technically typically at, in the springtime, we see a lot of that advocacy, pardon me, effort ramp up. Primarily because that’s when the House of Commons sits and, so the timing is good for us to get to Ottawa and chat to them all in one place at one time. So that’s been our primary focus at this point. We’re still working on some issues with the, federal government and some taxation challenges we’re seeing for, specifically for campgrounds in Canada.

 So that, that’s a big piece for us. I’ve had some interesting and exciting conversations with Parks Canada and some of our other public park entities that I think are going to be great opportunities for the industry as a whole. Yeah, really more politically focused this last several weeks. I’m hopeful that we’ll get some of those issues or challenges that have been in front of us for some time addressed soon.

 And I will say, I, it’s, I’ve been going to Ottawa for many years now as in, in this capacity. And this time the sentiments and feelings there were really positive compared to maybe some of the last handful of years. That’s great to see. I’m hopeful that’s going to translate into some actionable, opportunity specific to the industry.

 Otherwise, we’re working on various projects and programming for members that’s, valuable to them and their kind of bottom line and things like that. Some exciting new announcements with various partners on that. So all of those things are keeping me busy while I also this week prepare for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities convention next week. So we’ll have the opportunity to get an audience with all of Canada’s 1,800 municipal kind of leadership and staff officials and things like that, all in one place.

 And lots to talk about there at that level too. We have a fragmented municipal dynamic in this country, which I think is understandable given, the range and variability of regions and things like that. But we do have some challenges at the municipal level that, that those efforts hopefully will start to address. But specific, to the topic of the show today, I think we really haven’t, we still haven’t seen a huge shift with the thumbs up adoption of, some of the great AI tools and things like that are available to members.

 I do think that’s starting to shift. Like I just had a great new supplier reach out to us who does, who’s doing robotic, like lawn maintenance equipment and things like that, all AI operated. And the membership seems to be really starting to embrace and be open to looking at options like that in a way maybe they weren’t even a year or two ago. That stuff is great.

 Those innovations and things like that I’m always excited to see. I think the industry is going to need to figure out some solutions specifically, around labor and things like that. So doing those, doing that in an innovative way, I think is important and valuable and frankly necessary with the way the labor market is right now.

[00:05:54] Brian Searl: Yeah, I looked at a robot lawnmower, but they’re too uneconomical for me. I don’t know, have you ever been to this house, Cara? I don’t think you’ve been to this house.

[00:06:02] Cara Csizmadia: No. No, I haven’t. No.

[00:06:03] Brian Searl: it’s a small yard and it doesn’t make sense. Like it would take me about 11 years to pay off the cost of a $5,000 robot versus the, like I pay $200 a month to a lawn company who does lawn and then shoveling, right? The shoveling obviously disproportionately is the bigger benefit.

[00:06:18] Cara Csizmadia: Oh, Canada. Yes.

[00:06:20] Brian Searl: In the snow removal service or whatever. But the robot arms, like I would love to be able to get one of those and program. Like I could, I think I should start a business for campgrounds where we mount one on the back of a golf cart and it drives around and just picks up all the drunk people and returns them to their site. I think that would be beneficial.

[00:06:35] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah 

[00:06:35] Brian Searl: like a quiet time golf cart?

[00:06:37] Cara Csizmadia: Good luck with that.

[00:06:40] Brian Searl: It would be enter- it would get social media views if you’re looking for influencers or attention or something like that, right?

[00:06:45] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah.

[00:06:45] Brian Searl: we could just have it have its own social media account. What do you think, Amber? Would that take off for marketing?

[00:06:51] Amber Simpson: I think with a husband in insurance, I think he would probably tell you not to do that, but the idea is there for sure.

[00:07:01] Cara Csizmadia: I think, Brian, all of your harebrained exciting ideas that come out I really think you need to buy a campground and then just deploy them all in your own property.

[00:07:12] Brian Searl: I think I need to buy an island and create a country and then put a campground there so that I’m not beholden to these weird insurance rules and all that stuff that modern society has. It’d be much more fun.

[00:07:23] Cara Csizmadia: That’s, good luck getting campers to your island, though.

[00:07:27] Brian Searl: I think they would come. They came to Jurassic Park. Come on. Not campers really, but I just think you’d get people there if it was interesting enough.

[00:07:36] Cara Csizmadia: Another, look what happened. Yeah, yet another great example. A total insurance nightmare. Yeah.

 No I think on the robotic side, it’s, there’s some really cool, exciting things happening. I saw at, in a trade show recently, there was this robot just roaming around the trade show halls, but it was handing out swag, like gifts and popsicles and like all kinds of stuff. It was really great, really well done.

 I absolutely can see applications for that in campground properties and stuff. It’s been a long time since I was a campground owner, but I can imagine, the impact that would have had on my operations. It would have been cool. I think their biggest concern is probably vandalism. That’s, right?

[00:08:20] Brian Searl: Of the robots? Yeah.

[00:08:23] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah. But otherwise, I think it’s a fabulous idea and, I think I’m pretty, quite certain they all have lots of cameras mounted and things like that. We can get back into the insurance talk and…

[00:08:34] Brian Searl: so do the Waymos though, and people are like beating those up quite a bit in the United States apparently, 

[00:08:38] Cara Csizmadia: you’d need some insurance coverage for the vandals. What a world we live in.

[00:08:43] Brian Searl: We need like a self-healing, repairing thing. There’s got to be like some kind of AI that developed. I saw it in X-Men like 12 years ago, right? It’s got to be real by now.

[00:08:52] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah, everything in the movies always eventually comes real.

[00:08:56] Brian Searl: It should. That’s the way it should work. But yeah, like I, I think if you look at where things are going, I’ve had, I’ve been leading, that’s up to somebody else to decide that whether I’ve been leading, but like I’ve been talking about AI for two and a half, three, three and a half, I don’t know how many, it keeps getting older and older, right? In this industry for a long time.

 And I think I always thought it would move faster than this. And I think it is, but I think that people are uncertain about still how to use it today. Like I was on an AI call with the industry that Mark Koep leads, I think every Monday, or every once a month, staggered dates anyway. And it’s a small kind of group call, there’s only about 10, 15 people on there right now.

 But just listening to them talk about how you can use it for marketing and you could use it to do prompting and here’s how you need to follow up. It’s the same kind of conversations, not from Mark, he’s like trying to push the industry forward like I am too. But just hearing how it’s the same kind of conversations that we were having three years ago, right? Like you need to learn how to prompt, you need to learn how to talk about it, you can write your social media posts with it, you can do your…

 And so I just think there’s this disconnect of how fast it’s going to move in our industry related specifically to owners using those tools like ChatGPT. And I think that’s where I’ve realized and I was just listening to Mark speak on the call and he was talking about all some of the cool stuff that he’s doing with his company too, using AI to build CRMs and stuff like that. And I think the disconnect really is people are waiting for ChatGPT or Claude to be this thing that does all the stuff for them. In other words, they’re waiting for Claude to build the tool that does the thing for them.

 And that’s not the best use of AI. The best use of AI, in my opinion, for your organization, is you got to build the tool with AI. Use AI to build the tool that’s custom to your company, and then it can do whatever you want it to do. Instead of waiting for Claude to release the feature that, because that’s how the mindset’s been for all of since software has existed, right?

 I want to wait for Microsoft Word to release a new feature, or Excel, or Google Docs, or whatever, right? And then once I get that new feature, I’ll be able to do what I want. You don’t have to wait anymore, and too many people are waiting.

[00:11:02] Cara Csizmadia: I hate to be the pessimist, as I always tend to end up being on these calls. But I will say, I am getting some feedback from campground owners and operators who, frankly, it is a demographic typically of pretty environmentally conscious people. And so that, that piece of this is coming up in a way that’s standing as a bit of a barrier to their open adoption of it.

 There’s obviously environmental implications and concerns about all kinds of things related to AI, water consumption and all those things just being the tip of the iceberg. And so I do think some of that is, is a barrier. Like we are going to have to acknowledge that’s a continual, pervasive thing that’s going to play a factor in the adoption in an industry like ours that’s quite environmentally conscious.

[00:11:57] Brian Searl: Yeah, but the interesting part about that is most of that’s made up. Like it does impact the media, or it does, sorry, it does impact the environment is what I meant to say. But the, if you actually look at how water works in a data center, most of it is recycled. And it doesn’t waste itself.

 And if you look at, and I don’t have the stats in front of me, I actually looked this up once because it was brought up to me, I don’t know, months and months ago by a couple different people, and I looked up the stats. Like I think the global airline industry, like flying planes around, is 10 times worse than AI data centers, like all of them added up. So I’m just saying there’s sacrifices we need to make, it depends on where the media coverage is pointed at and where the anger goes for the time.

[00:12:36] Cara Csizmadia: and I think that’s part of what I’m saying is we need to be essentially addressing some of those barriers. If we, if you want to set the expectation that we have this broad adoption of these new tools, we need to be addressing those fundamental kind of barrier things in a way that’s accessible. Because, we also have consumers who have those same feelings and who, I’ve already received feedback from consumers who are a bit put off by campgrounds who are obviously using AI tools because of those things.

 I think we need to find a way to have that communication, those communication assets at our fingertips really effectively and stay on top of, exactly what’s happening and make sure that we’re trying to dispel any of those issues that are coming up in a transparent and non-biased way.

[00:13:31] Brian Searl: Yeah, I don’t disagree with you. Like I, I, sorry if I interrupted you, I didn’t mean to. I think my thing is it is bad for the environment to have AI, right? Like it is.

 It’s not as bad as jets or as bad as a few other things, right? But it does certainly have a negative impact on the environment to build a massive data center and cool it with water and all and run electricity and do all the things, right? There’s no question about that. I don’t know that Musk cares.

 I don’t know that Zuckerberg cares. I don’t know that Sam Altman cares. And so I think that this is full steam ahead for all of those big huge companies. And I think that while you’re right about the industry adopting it, I think in some ways they’re going to be forced to adopt it because of where Google is taking it, where Apple’s taking it, where search and discovery is taking it, all the things.

 And it’s just a question then of you, of do you how much do you want to stick by your principles, right? Do you want to be the, I don’t know, I’m trying to think of an analogy but I can’t think of a good one. Like the, do you want to be the witch during the Salem witch trials who refuses to repent and then gets burned at the, like how much do you want to stick to your principles about the environment or take it and use it for your advantage?

 And I think the issue right now is most people can’t see the other side. They can see the environmental impact and that’s a negative. What they can’t understand yet is how they can use it in such a positive way to impact the revenue of their business. And when they start to see that, then they might be willing to make a little bit of trade-offs on the environmental side. What do you think, Amber?

[00:14:57] Amber Simpson: I think that there are, sorry, I have been having internet connections all day. I’m seeing it impact our clients in three different ways. Number one is a lot of our clients are in very rural communities where these things are being built. So they are feeling like, if they’re sitting, a lot of our leaders are on the town council or they’re very involved in their political community because they need to advocate for their park and their business.

 And so they are seeing direct impact in their immediate area. And that’s negative and positive. It’s negative because they’re losing a lot of the housing and the communities. It’s positive in some way because they’re getting more work campers because people are there on the job doing it.

 I also think they’re seeing their internet, their electricity bills go way up. And that’s very scary for them, especially the people that meter and charge back to their customers. And they’re seeing direct feedback, impact, negative reactions to that. So I think that’s one piece that I get exactly why they’re very concerned because there is a real direct cause and effect for these people from AI and they’re seeing it in real time.

 And that’s not made up. That’s for sure real. And they’re seeing it especially in these more farm-based communities, really in the Midwest a ton. It happened with wind turbines too, right? That was the first wave of this and you have a lot of these campgrounds in the middle of all these wind turbines and now they’re seeing AI come in.

 So I think that’s the one piece. I think the other piece is it’s happening with or without them in the sense of now their campground’s not showing up in AI overviews and is their reservation system doing the work that they need to be doing to make sure they’re showing up in Google? And they don’t really know like where to put pressure, where to leverage because they don’t really understand it. And so I think what we all can do a better job of, and what Martrek works really hard to do, is reframing the conversation more about how it’s going to impact their day-to-day and translate that into bookings and revenue.

 And a lot of times teaching someone how to prompt is missing that connection. They’re really not getting how that’s going to help them from a time-saving aspect, from a no, really, this is going to make people not be able to find you and book. They’re not making that connection. And that’s where we have real opportunity in this industry to start reframing that discussion and that conversation, being so cognizant in our minds that they, a lot of our clients are having this directly impact their immediate community.

 And there has to be a balance there. And I think that’s really where there’s still a lot of room to grow for all of us as we support the same the same group of people here. 

[00:18:03] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think those challenges are probably some of the primary a year ago we were saying people just aren’t aware, or maybe fewer people were aware of what was happening. But there was also a inherent can we trust the data coming out of an AI, large language model, all of that. And that, those things are starting to really be addressed.

 You’re seeing more faith and trust in the, those outcomes. But now, these components are much bigger factors, I think, typically in terms of, standing in the way of it becoming a large, sweeping adoption by everybody. I do agree with you, Brian. I think the consumer demand is going to push we’re already seeing Google’s announcement with search if you’re not properly optimized, these AI tools are not going to feed any information about you to a consumer.

 And so whether we like it or not, it’s, we’re in a position now where if you want to stay a player, and, there’s pockets of or sections of the industry that are a bit insulated by this. Arguably, if you’re a seasonal campground operating with, 200 sites and you’ve had all 200 of your sites rented out for the past 10 years to the same families and you have a 50-unit waitlist, you probably have a few years of cushion before any of that’s going to start to really even impact you, right?

[00:19:30] Brian Searl: You’re not wrong. We had, we did a study on this for Florida. I don’t want to interrupt you, but we did a study for this on Florida. When we went to the Florida RV and Campground show and I spoke, we pulled data that showed the campgrounds that have really terrible websites in Florida and have no social media presence charge higher rates and are booked more than the ones who aren’t.

 Yeah. But, and specifically, I don’t know if that’s specific to Florida, but Florida has more long-term people, more of a community is what they advertise, although that doesn’t show up in review words for people who leave five-star reviews, which is interesting too. But yeah, I think that’s, you’re right, they’re more insulated for a while.

[00:20:02] Cara Csizmadia: and that’s also a regional component. You can camp year-round in Florida and the weather’s pretty much always perfect unless you get some extreme anomaly event, right? There’s, we can’t apply those same principles to every region, certainly not in Canada. And there’s a lot of variables that will impact those specific things.

 But we do have a bit of built-in insulation or cushion for certain members of the industry that, others will be motivated far more quickly. If you’re a short-term stay campground who’s, every week running numbers and strategizing dynamic pricing and doing all of that just to, make sure you’re reaching the, capacities, volumes that you are ideal for you, you’re going to be way more motivated far more quickly to make sure you’re primarily optimized for how a consumer is searching today. And the consumer isn’t even choosing to do it anymore.

 It’s just built into the Google now. I joke because my grandma calls her phone her Google box. The Google box is just, it’s just doing it for you. And feeding it to them.

 My grandma has no conscious choice, she has no, she’s not deciding to use AI. It’s, she’s just doing it without any, so it’s going to shift the way, and it’ll be, like I said, phased. Those guys with a bit of cushion will have more time and room and runway to get it done. I think there’s also components of that I have seasonal campgrounds here in, in Canada who ask me every year to take their campground listing down.

 Because they’re like, wait, I don’t have any sites. I haven’t had any sites for 10 years. I don’t have any room to host anybody. I need people to stop calling me asking me for a site, right? Those guys are anomalies, but they’re out there and are far less reliant on, their website performing well in SEO.

[00:22:03] Brian Searl: For now, yeah. I, yeah, for now.

[00:22:06] Amber Simpson: Yeah, I think that’s a good point though, is we’ve had these discussions a lot with clients and we’ve seen it go the other way. We have clients that have hired us because they were 100% full for the last 10 years and now because of major changes in their community and changes to expectations, now they’re 50% full and they can’t even sell their campground because they don’t have enough revenue in the business. And now they’re so far behind and they feel like they’re like, yeah, things happen and they don’t know what to do.

 And so there’s a little bit of that cause and effect. But I think that’s where we have our jobs cut out for us, where we need to meet people in the middle or maybe segregate the conversation. You’re full now, but it’s not going to be forever, maybe you only have 20% that you need to book, and then the seasonal people that have to do this every single year. But I think that there’s a real conversation there and we’re seeing the hotel industry already take flight with this.

 Booking.com, Expedia, the major hotel chains, they’ve already adopted this, they’re integrating directly with Google. And the outdoor hospitality industry is not that far behind knowing how people are taking notice of this and seeing like hotels are buying campgrounds now. This is really where we’re heading in that space and we need to be able to adopt tech. And we can’t just be like we’ve always done it this way.

 I think those are the toughest conversations to have, but it’s real and it’s here and I know we keep saying that, but maybe it’s just we need to have like different lanes to drive people down to break it down better.

[00:23:46] Brian Searl: Here’s where I’ve gotten to. Here’s where I’ve gotten to, because I was where you were, I think, Amber, like a couple years ago. Maybe I’ve still, I’m still there, right? But I’m trying, I can’t figure out, and Cara and I have had plenty of conversations about this too for the association and for, the work we do with Parks in Canada.

 I’m at the point where I don’t think that our industry is going to adopt technology until they have a reason to adopt technology. Until they’re forced to adopt technology. Not because Amber’s saying I’m an expert, I’m a marketing person for campgrounds for MartrekDigital or whatever, right? Not because Brian’s saying the same thing, not because Cara’s saying the same thing.

 And I think hotels have always been earlier for us in technology, right? But they’ve gone up and down for they go in and out, right? Campgrounds, I think if you look back to the foundation of maybe the first campground in Montana, which is like 1962, I think, which I don’t know if you guys are aware, but it was, the first KOA was started because of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Did you guys know that?

[00:24:42] Cara Csizmadia: No.

[00:24:43] Brian Searl: That was totally made up, I lied. It was the World’s Fair in 1962. But I’ve got a thing with Scott where if I say that enough times, then people will just, it’s the same year, so I’m trying to see if I can convince people that it was actually true.

 But it was the World’s Fair in 1962. But if you go back to how, when the first KOA was started, like I think up from 1962 really until like now, campgrounds have never really been, let’s use a metaphorical, punched in the face as an industry.

 they haven’t. Like we got through 2008 just fine. We got through COVID just fine. We got through I wasn’t alive back in the 70s in the hyperinflation, but I’m assuming it probably wasn’t that bad or there wasn’t that many campgrounds built yet, right?

 And it’s been the same boomers and the same audience and the same demands and the same amenities. And there’s been, despite people saying you need to do online reservations, there’s still plenty of parks that are thriving without them. Despite people saying you need to be on social media, there’s still plenty of parks that are thriving without them. And so on and so forth, the same conversation goes with AI.

 And I think now we’re hitting a point where, and I hope, I wish this wasnt true, but I think we’re hitting a point now because of where this economy is going, being exacerbated every day by something that’s happening somewhere in the world, I can’t remember what it was. But that I think people are finally going to see that wow, this is, I’m down this year significantly, and I’m maybe down in 2027 significantly. For the first time in however long I’ve owned the campground, whether it’s been 20 years or two years. Yeah. And I think that’s the point where they act.

[00:26:11] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah and I think things like what Google is announcing are going to, be the catalyst for a lot of them. Maybe not all, like we said, some are insulated.

[00:26:20] Brian Searl: but that catalyst has to show up in the reservations is what I’m saying, right? It’s one thing for us to come on here and say, and for clarity, what we’re talking about if you missed it, probably which most of you did because you have lives and are not a geek like me Google IO was last week, Amber? Week before or something like that, whatever.

[00:26:35] Amber Simpson: Yeah, last Tuesday. Exactly a week ago, yeah.

[00:26:37] Brian Searl: So Google IO released a whole bunch of things, right? But one of the biggest announcements was they’re changing search for the first time in 25 years. And we all I thought for years that what they were going to do was this phased-in approach, which they, I guess they did, where they put AI overviews at the top, they phased it in, your blue links were still there.

 Then they introduced AI mode last year and they phased that in, but like you had to click there to get it. And then they started slowly, phasing it into the Chrome search bar and your Android phone and getting you used to it, right? And then they finally pulled the trigger last week where they said like google.com, at least in the US, is now like AI mode first.

 The search box is going to expand, it’s going to suggest not just autocomplete, but ways to make full sentences. It’s going to let you attach photos of the example they gave was like a dress, which you could easily imagine like putting a campground RV site in there and saying hey, I need an RV site that fits this rig, right? And then it’s going to go out and search for you and it’s going to dump you just right into AI mode.

 And so that’s what we’re talking about primarily is the fact that this is not just a now slow rollout of AI overviews to AI mode to whatever. And I thought they were just going to default to AI mode in a way they did, but I didn’t think they were going to change the whole search box to do it. So now they’ve done that and not every search gets AI mode to my understanding, right?

 But I have to imagine that being rapidly increased over time.

[00:27:57] Amber Simpson: They have said it’s based on how often you’re using it, so some users are going to see it before others, and there’s obviously like workspace users and super users who are seeing a lot of this first, but eventually everybody is seeing it. But it’s basically developing this agentic booking experience where people are no longer going to be searching necessarily “campgrounds near me,” they’re going to be typing in “I need a pet friendly campground in the Ozarks with full hookups for Labor Day weekend.” And Google is going to find it and pull it in there and they book.

 And if you’re not optimized to show up for that, they’re never going to make it to your website. I think we are going to see a huge dip in our traditional metrics and analytics that we’ve been tracking for years and years. And I know that we have been having this conversations for a long time, but just like you were saying Brian, like they haven’t felt it yet.

 And I do really think this is going, this season in particular is going to be especially where our mostly transient campgrounds are going to see that impact along with gas prices and everything else that’s through the roof in the United States at least. I don’t know how bad it is in Canada, but.

[00:29:17] Brian Searl: Yeah, I don’t think AI is going to be the reason that we have a down year in campgrounds, to be clear.

[00:29:22] Amber Simpson: Oh yeah, so sorry, I wasn’t trying to say that.

[00:29:26] Brian Searl: Okay. Like I think that AI is going to be the, if I had optimized for that and if I had paid attention to it for the first couple years, maybe I wouldn’t be as down as far as I would. As far as I what, like we, we have pricing data on all 16,000 private campgrounds in the United States and we look, it was like 61% occupancy heading 12 days into Memorial Day, I think we looked at for like on a macro level some people were more, some people were less.

 But on a macro level 61%, which is not great for the largest holiday in the United States for camping, because by September, Labor Day is arguably equally as big of a holiday, but all the kids are back in school or not traveling around the country like they would be they might have a couple days off. So like we saw that, and then Michael Scheinman followed it up, the CEO of Campspot on LinkedIn, I think a couple days ago, maybe last week he was talking about how transient demand was down 14.7% or something like that. For, I can’t remember if it was Memorial Day or he was just talking about overall.

[00:30:23] Amber Simpson: Yeah, I know we’ve had big impacts in the United States due to weather. Like a lot of these clients do directly feel that Memorial Day was not successful because it was like 50 degrees and raining, and people normally make decisions for bigger holidays more last minute. We’re seeing that shorter booking window, we’ve been talking about that for three years.

 But I do think there is some of that for sure that’s been happening. Texas got ice storms, so it’s been a little bit crazy from a weather perspective. But I absolutely, I agree, and I think part of where we’re really emphasizing with our clients is making sure that if you are using AI and you are using like LLMs to write copy or do things like that, that you’re not forgetting about your personal story.

 And that’s really where we bring in our roasted marshmallow method framework specifically, because we’re not telling campground owners to just produce generic copy and to really be careful of that, because that’s really where we’re seeing pricing not impact our clients is when they’re telling their story and showing the experience that the guest is going to have in a very positive way. So the second that someone gets to their site, it’s immediate that yes, this is exactly what I was looking for, versus I’m not really sure, I’m hesitant, I am going to choose the competitor parked down the way because it’s cheaper, because I just I don’t know what to expect from this part. Because you haven’t justified the price.

[00:32:05] Brian Searl: You’re not, right, there’s, yeah, you’re not wrong. But there’s two phases to that there’s the marketing company who does a good job counseling you to do that, which is what you’re saying you’re doing, and then there’s the operator actually backing up what the marketing company did on their website when they arrive which is not within your control Amber as much as you wish it probably was. So yeah, continue though.

[00:32:24] Amber Simpson: so I think that’s where like it’s, I think that’s where we just want to be careful, and I do see the comparison like we’re obviously expecting state parks and national parks to have a bigger year this year because it’s the 250th anniversary like of the United States, and the US in particular like that data is not shocking to us. And let’s be honest, the pricing gap between those sites and the private campgrounds is not even comparable.

 And that’s okay in our opinion because you’re not getting the same thing. A lot of the times at these state parks you’re getting a maybe even gravel driveway and that’s pretty much it, a lot of times no electric, no, no water, not a lot of amenities. You’re getting the primo location, but you’re really not getting much, and most of our private campgrounds are obviously, there are some exceptions, you’re getting a lot more for that stay.

 And so I think that really emphasizing who your ideal customer is and what their expectations are and what they’re looking for makes such a big difference. And of course we are seeing like the travel window, we used to do marketing and geo fencing to 300 miles around a campground and we’re shortening that to 150 miles like people are traveling closer to home right now because they are price sensitive. But I think it is important to keep the conversation higher than just price and that making sure the owners before they lower their price are looking at those margins and what it’s going to mean for them, because sometimes lowering their price is actually going to hurt them. Yeah, more than it’s going to help them.

[00:34:12] Brian Searl: Yeah, but like you’re saying, you do have to justify the experience, that’s the key. It’s not just the experience between like you and the state park, that’s part of it, I agree with you, I’m not saying you’re wrong at all. But I think that’s a different customer especially now in this economy. I think they’re going to the state park because they can’t afford the private park.

 And like I think they’re willing to trade off on some of the premium typical, and I’ll define typical in a second, the typical RV park experience to go to the state park to save money for the primo location in many cases, yeah. But you’re also talking about differentiating yourself primarily between your private RV park competition in your area.

 And that’s another whole can of worms we don’t have time to unpack on this show, but we’ve talked about many times and on Outwired too with Scott Bahr, where for the last 40 years people have basically built a lot of parking lots and called them RV parks. And they all look the same and they all have the same amenities and they maybe, okay, maybe I added a gaga ball pit, that’s not really enough to justify your $15 a night rate premium. Like it was during COVID, but not anymore. Not anymore.

[00:35:13] Amber Simpson: I totally agree, and just I think that how it relates to AI is just making sure if you do have those things that are truly differentiators, and in some cases it’s the community and the everybody knows your name cheers mentality, and sometimes it’s the views, and sometimes it is your list of amenities that no one else has in the combination you have, but that’s where you can really up, get your opportunity from showing up in AI overviews and adding some of those things. I know that a lot of people are talking about pets and pet friendly things right now and how that’s growing more than ever, and some of those traditional search terms that are now AI overview terms are going to be huge for campgrounds to make sure that they’re thinking about. And yeah, I think it’s just it’s a lot, and I think this is where this conversation right here is where campground owners a lot of times are not connecting the dots. And they’re not understanding how to really optimize for that and how to prepare for that in the upcoming days.

[00:36:24] Brian Searl: you got to figure out what your experience is and that’s the number one thing you could use AI for, in addition to you were talking about buyer personas and what your ideal customer is, and you can use AI for all that and lots of other stuff too, but specific to our conversation is take the content of your website or tell your story and type it all up in AI and say help me find what my difference maker is. Now there’s a very good chance, because we just talked about all the parking lots that have been built since 1980, that AI is going to be like I’m not sure if you have one, but the difference makers don’t require a multi-million dollar water park. They could be little organic soap in the bathroom, they could be a warm cookie at check-in, they could be friendly staff, they could be whatever, so you may not be able to see what your difference maker is from the owner operator on the ground in it every day. So take it, take a third party opinion, and in this case AI can be your third party opinion.

 Don’t think about it, like just take the whole content of your website, copy all the, go to Chrome, click view source and copy all the source code of your website and just dump it into AI, copy paste it and just say, hey look, I’m trying to market my park, I need to look at what is a difference maker for me, what makes me different from an experiential experience standpoint that sets me apart from my competition that I can use in my marketing. And see what it spits out.

[00:37:37] Amber Simpson: I agree with that. I also think that making sure that your about us section of your website is telling that story too, and reminding you as an owner why you did this, why you opened it, why you started it, and making sure that’s aligning.

[00:37:52] Brian Searl: Yeah, you got to get that into AI though, because we have the data, like I’m sure you’ve done heat mapping too Amber, like people are not scrolling down pages as much as we would love them to, just like they’re not reading the rules and the site map as much as we want them to. But still having it there for AI to understand is a difference maker because I think that brings it more close as you get into everybody getting a different AI answer and everybody being personalized and everybody connecting their own Gmail and their own calendar and their own reviews and everybody’s answer is different, the about us and having AI understand that and know that about your campground is truly, yes, one of those other difference makers. Provided again, it’s like maybe you don’t, maybe your story isn’t your thing, maybe you just got it from your dad and that’s not if that’s your difference maker.

[00:38:36] Amber Simpson: Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t even have it though too. Like I see, seen a lot of these about us pages and it’s a Google map and like a contact us form, it’s not really doing that job either, so I think it’s a little bit of both.

[00:38:49] Brian Searl: Yep, agree. What do you think Cara?

[00:38:52] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah, I mean it’s, I could say from an operator perspective it’s can be easy to lose sight of some of those bigger overarching, your whys and all of that when you’re like down in the trenches doing the day-to-day things. So yeah, it’s a such a good thought exercise for an operator as it is, valuable information. I agree that no one’s going to actually probably read it except for the AI guys. The robots are going to read it and then use that to help.

[00:39:23] Brian Searl: But that’s important, yeah. That’s important.

[00:39:26] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah.

[00:39:26] Brian Searl: Structure data, if you mark everything up correctly I’ll do a little bit of self promotion here because this will help you too Amber maybe. We released this morning, we released a WordPress plugin that we designed and developed with AI that you just install, it’s an SEO plugin, you install the plugin on any WordPress, doesn’t have to be our marketing, and it automatically will send all your page content to AI, to a bunch of custom agents that we build in a database and, edge functions and all that kind of stuff.

 And then it will take your page content, run it through AI, figure out everything about you, put it into a database of I understand that you have Wi-Fi or you’re pet friendly or whatever else. It will write your meta titles, it will write your descriptions, it will write your schema markup, it will set up an MCP server for you and then it will just push it back to your site automatically, you don’t have to do anything, there’s no settings, there’s no nothing, you install the plugin, you put an API key in, you hit save and you’re done.

 so that’s where I think like some of that stuff is where this industry needs to go because like you said Cara, like whether you have somebody like a MartrekDigital or whether you’re an independent operator or whether you have both, there’s only so much Amber can do on a day-to-day basis for all her clients and there’s only so much you can do as an independent operator of a campground. So the more that we can use AI to create these tools that we can help deploy and keep it hands off, provided it’s done right and you can’t just trust everybody who says they have an AI tool for everything it does magically, you have to verify, as Fox Mulder said in X-Files, trust but verify. Or am I the only one old enough to know that? Okay but anyway, yeah, so just little things like that we’re trying to help the industry with.

[00:40:54] Amber Simpson: Yeah, and I think that’s where we as industry leaders are going to have to do a lot of explaining because I think that a campground owner is going to hear that and be like, I have no idea, like I understood everything you just said, I think that’s awesome and super exciting. But a regular day-to-day campground owner might just understand the end point and not know anything about what you just said because it’s so technical, and I know that is very specific to our industry, but really understanding like what that means for them in a time saving standpoint, yes, but what is, what does that translate to, how is that going to help you with AI overviews and all that, and I’m sure you already are doing that and this is a short conversation, but I think that’s just another example of a lot of the times our owners just their eyes glaze over and they’re just like, I don’t know what any, I don’t know anything you just said, I don’t know.

[00:41:46] Brian Searl: But that’s why they have people like you Amber.

[00:41:47] Amber Simpson: What that means, yeah.

[00:41:49] Brian Searl: they have, 

[00:41:49] Amber Simpson: yeah. I also just, I worry a little bit about some of the ways that our owners are using it incorrectly and are maybe trying to use it in a way to save time and money, but it’s actually hurting them in the long run. I think Cara you touched on that in the beginning a little bit, but how consumers are seeing it and it’s actually a deterrent and not an attracting thing because I mean I have young kids and they can spot right away, oh that’s AI, that’s not real, and so there’s a fine line for correct usage and smart ways to use it and ways that our campground owners might want to avoid in the long run.

 The way, the example I use time and time again is don’t use AI images of your campground that are not real. Like it’s way better to just use a semi crappy smartphone image that it is to have a completely AI generated one that’s not your campground at all and is going to make people feel like it’s a bait and switch if they think that’s.

[00:42:59] Brian Searl: Yeah, because you’re lying to them.

[00:43:01] Amber Simpson: But I think a lot of our owners don’t real, like they don’t get that.

 and they’re not connecting that yet and they’re using it on social media or on their website or wherever and it’s actually not, it’s not helping them in the way that they think it is.

[00:43:18] Brian Searl: Yeah, I mean there’s just too much noise out there, there’s too many people trying to deceive you and trick you into like just use this, just use that, just replace all your people, do whatever, there are smart ways to use AI, like I, months ago we were using Gemini or when they first came out with Nano Banana, the very first model, we were taking pictures of clients’ parks from their, like real pictures of their parks from their like crappy pictures and just putting them there like I remember one for, this is actually for a very large RV resort, I don’t think they ever published it on social media anywhere, so that’s why I can say this.

 They had just a beautiful professional photo at night of their pool and nobody was in it. And so we just took the photo and put it into Gemini and Nano Banana and put a, to their really good prompts, and put a couple people by the pool. And put a couple people sitting by the chair and by the fire, and to, to us that’s not deceptive because that is actually what your pool looks like for real, and if people were standing there then that’s actually what it would look like, nobody’s going to come to your pool and be like, the guy in the red sweater is not here, this is false advertising, but again, thinking through what you do and how you do it and how you perceive, yeah, you don’t, you have to put yourself in the mind of the consumer when they see this image, what are they going to think, that’s actually my trees and my river or that this is AI generated and this is just something I’m using to marketing, probably the former. So you got to be really careful.

 all that to say, I think that’s a roundabout way of saying I agree with you Amber. Just long-winded. Perks of having a podcast I guess.

[00:44:39] Amber Simpson: Yeah.

[00:44:40] Brian Searl: So what else do we have?

[00:44:45] Cara Csizmadia: I don’t know, I thought you were gonna sell your, sell yourself.

[00:44:50] Brian Searl: No I did, I talked about the plugin briefly, that’s how I sell myself, I don’t sell myself and.

[00:44:54] Cara Csizmadia: Okay. What about your pricing index, are you still doing that monthly?

[00:44:58] Brian Searl: Yeah, we released the OHPI last, was it last Wednesday, might have been last Wednesday. The OHPI.

[00:45:06] Cara Csizmadia: When are you gonna do Canada?

[00:45:09] Brian Searl: When someone shows up to their meetings for me every two weeks that they have instead of saying I canceled it on them.

[00:45:16] Cara Csizmadia: You didn’t cancel it.

[00:45:16] Brian Searl: I did not cancel it.

[00:45:18] Cara Csizmadia: You canceled the last three.

[00:45:20] Brian Searl: we do want to do it for Canada, like we, we just need, yeah, we just need to figure out, like I have a lot of Canadian parks in there already. They’re on online reservations. 

[00:45:29] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah, I’d be interested to have that stuff at our fingertips. Obviously, there’s interesting times up here too. Gas prices and all those things are factors for us certainly as we go into another camping season. And so being able to see that kind of reporting so frequently, on a monthly basis is very advantageous and something we’ve just not been able to ever experience in the past. Yeah, it’ll be a great opportunity, I think, being able to forecast and look at where things are going, it’s hard to do that when you’re, pulling your metrics once a year. 

[00:46:09] Brian Searl: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a bandwidth limitation on our side, like I want to do it for the UK too. I’ve had conversations with a couple people in Australia, Europe, like it’s just a, I don’t have time. I was talking to AI last night and AI was like, you should write a weekly blog post. I was reading, it was Neil Patel I was following, who you know probably Amber.

[00:46:27] Amber Simpson: Yeah.

[00:46:28] Brian Searl: I was reading one of his LinkedIn posts and it was talking about what I already knew is like research and original data, which is why we built an outdoor hospitality intelligence company, we pivoted is one of the big things that shows up in AI first as far as versus commodity blogs and stuff like that. And so I, I just put that, I tend to just have conversations with AI, so I put his little snippet of thing in AI, I said how would this benefit my company or whatever. And it said what I thought it said, but it was like, you should write a blog post every week about research. I’m like, who’s, who has time for that? It’s oh okay, I’ll just build you an HTML template, your devs can build that and then we’ll plug everything in the variables and okay, I can do that.

 So I’m gonna try to do that. I’ve got so much data that we’re sitting on to your point Cara, whether it’s about Canada or about the United States or about, like we have 100 reviews scraped for every campground in America. We have 100 social media posts scraped for every campground in America. We have all the websites scraped for 16,000 parks in Canada and all the HT, or in the United States and Canada for all the data and all the, like we know whether they have miniature golf and pools and, but we’re not doing anything with that data like we could yet. So we’re working our way there as fast as I humanly can go, which is a lot faster with AI now, but not as fast as I want it to be yet.

[00:47:39] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah, I hear ya. That human capacity limitation is my biggest weakness.

[00:47:47] Brian Searl: But cool things like, data, like data is going to be the king of everything, you wanted me to be self promotional, that’s what I’m going to be is data is the king of everything. Like we’re, we built our booking intelligence product that we announced, months ago where you can track the, do the abandoned cart tracking on top of any reservation system. We’re building things like tracking local events and how that can impact your marketing, tracking where people are coming from based on like literally the driving route that it would come from their house to you. And what they can see along the way and what gas prices are along the way and all that kind of stuff.

[00:48:16] Amber Simpson: What about weather?

[00:48:17] Brian Searl: Yeah. Weather intelligence and how it’s going to impact you. Like we’re studying that, like we haven’t built a front end to it yet, but we’re collecting the data on a couple resorts to see do people book like more often when it’s cold in Chicago and warm in Arizona at your resort, and as the weather forecast comes closer, do people cancel. Or do they keep their reservations. So but then it becomes a question of just like everything else, does the owner have time to look at this stuff. So how do we surface that in a way using AI to be proactive to not give them 10, 15 more dashboards when they’re already buried and not have enough time.

[00:48:50] Amber Simpson: I feel like we, like in the room, need that regularly, but I feel like the owners aren’t going to pick it up till November like they’re just like, I don’t have time, I can’t look at it right now.

[00:49:00] Brian Searl: I think that’s okay, in some ways that’s okay, because the one we gave, and I’m done being self promotional, the one we gave with booking intelligence was like, Campspot is, which works with all reservation systems, but just Campspot as an example because I know on the left hand side of their booking engine they have all those filter engine options for 50 amp electric, Wi-Fi, pet friendly, whatever else. And the option we gave to people when we’re talking about this product is we can track whether they check pet friendly on that box. And then if you see at the end of the year in November or December that 483 people check the pet friendly box and you have no pet friendly cabins, maybe you should buy one. So that data still, even if you can’t look at it every week and it aggregates and does have compounding effects.

 anyway what’s the most important thing you think people should be doing in 2026 for marketing Amber?

[00:49:50] Amber Simpson: I would just have to agree with you, we always, our mentality whether we’re doing our mastermind webinar or we’re working one-on-one with clients is that we will never tell you to do something that you can’t measure. We know that our campground owners are so busy, they don’t have time for anything they feel like, and we’re not trying to tell you to do all the things and be on all the channels because that’s just throwing spaghetti at the wall. Really, if you only have time for one thing, do that thing and do it well and make sure that you can measure it so that you actually learn something from it, whether that’s at the end of the season or every week, however much you can digest that information, that you’re doing it in a way that you have learnings from it that you could pivot, keep doing, or optimize next year.

 Obviously a lot of that should have a, an AI component and use AI to get better analytics or to get data faster, or one of my clients every time I send an email he takes a screenshot of it and throws it into Manus and is here’s your results, tell me if this is good or not, and so even doing little things like that are tools that people can do pretty quickly. And I think that and just don’t ignore AI, learn one skill learn one thing this summer that you can implement because it is going so quickly and I just get nervous for the people who are just refusing to adopt any of it, I just feel like they’re going to really feel it bad in the next year.

[00:51:29] Brian Searl: All right, so marketing outside of AI for a second, we know where we’re at, well at least I feel like I know where the industry is at or going with the economy, we have the occupancy data, we haven’t looked at July 4th yet, I promised Scott I was going to do that on the show, so I have 30 minutes between shows to pull that data now, I forgot. We haven’t looked at July 4th yet but we have a sense I think of where the economy is going, which is not in a great place because of gas prices and the downstream effect of literally everything is a result of that.

 It’s going to probably be up 20, 30, 40% for our food in September, October, stuff like that, so knowing that this summer is going to be, let’s call it challenging for some of the transient parks in our industry, what’s the one piece of advice that they should pay attention to or do Amber from a marketing standpoint to help negate that.

[00:52:18] Amber Simpson: We are going hyper local, we are really leaning into Google business profile and optimization there, that is number one, that was in the Google marketing live tidbits as well is just really making sure more than ever that your Google business profile is up to date as possible, that you’re regularly posting there and utilizing that space. And we do have a couple parks that have pivoted and started doing things at their park that they allow community members to attend, and I think that’s so genius because there’s so many people coming in from their local community that are not campers and they’re seeing this park for the first time and they didn’t know it was there, and then they’re becoming tent campers or they’re like renting a cabin. And it’s small things like they do a Saturday morning breakfast every every week for their campers, but they’ve now allowed the community to come in and pay six or 12 bucks for a breakfast plate and they’re getting all these people into their park. And so just thinking about ways that you can leverage the people in your community or close by to cut some of those cost prohibitive things I think is really important.

[00:53:33] Brian Searl: Cara anything?

[00:53:35] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah, no, I think it is going to be an interesting summer. And that, I am seeing just anecdotally from members here similar kind of feelings or sentiment around really focusing on a kind of domestic, close to home market. And all those same things you guys are talking about, shorter booking windows, shorting, shorter stays, a family that used to stay for seven days might only stay for four now, or maybe used to come four times a summer and comes twice. Those kinds of things are, those impacts are going to compound and certainly be felt this summer, I think.

 From my perspective certainly as a former operator, I think it’s important to remember that it can often feel like you’re all on your own and you’re doing, you have to do all of these things by yourself and you have to become an AI expert all of a sudden. But, there are great opportunities and partners and suppliers like you guys out in the industry who are the experts who you can lean on to, to handle some of those big components for you in a way that makes them more manageable. That human capacity component, I think, we talk all the time about AI being able to lift some of that load off of us, but I think that’s some of the crippling part about it so far is it doesn’t really feel at the start when you first start wading into it, it doesn’t really feel like it’s making it less, it’s, it feels like it’s adding to your plate.

 And so finding a way to, you almost have to get wade through that initial period and have, a couple really great tools or, effective things built from it to really start to see, okay, this is actually going to be worth, the bit of effort I’m putting in at the start here to get these things done. But yeah, there are great, industry partners like you guys out there who can handle a lot of those things for you, which, I know everyone’s looking at the bottom line and all of that right now too with the economy the way it is. I have campgrounds across Canada looking at, reducing rates for the first time in a long time and things like that. We almost in some areas overstepped the price sensitivity boundary a little bit with.

[00:55:47] Brian Searl: Lots of people did that during COVID. But go ahead.

[00:55:49] Cara Csizmadia: With the way the economic shifts are happening, we’re not in the same dynamic or environment we were in. And we often talk about like great experiences and all these things that the guest is demanding, and then at the same time affordability. And oftentimes it can, it’s incredibly daunting to think about having to handle both those things simultaneously. And I think AI is probably the key to being able to do that.

 But yeah some partners to help you with the education and learning portion so that you’re not totally covering all of this, trying to wade through the tsunami of information that comes with it on your own. It’s one of the things I’m most proud about this industry, and certainly I can only speak about Canada, but I do feel it in general across North America, that we are very supportive of one another. We’re not this highly competitive dynamic like we see other, the retail sides and things like that are different beasts. We are happy to support and help one another and that’s a great opportunity to learn from those who’ve walked before us.

[00:57:01] Brian Searl: Awesome. Thank you guys for being here. Any final thoughts Amber?

[00:57:04] Amber Simpson: No, I think that’s great.

[00:57:06] Brian Searl: Where can they find out more about MartrekDigital?

[00:57:08] Amber Simpson: You can go to our website marktrackdigital.com or same handle on social media. A great way to just learn more about us is sign up for our marketing Mondays by Martrek newsletter and that’s right on our website and then you would get to know a little bit more about us and what we do.

[00:57:25] Brian Searl: Thanks for being here Amber. Cara where can they find out more about CCRVA and any final thoughts?

[00:57:29] Cara Csizmadia: ccrva.ca or at campincanada on all of your social, favorite social platforms. Or reach out to me, I’m easily googleable on the Google box.

[00:57:41] Brian Searl: TikTok too, do you guys have TikTok videos?

[00:57:44] Cara Csizmadia: yeah, that channel is not overly active, but we’re there.

[00:57:49] Brian Searl: All right, I’m gonna follow you on TikTok. I don’t ever open TikTok, but I’m gonna follow you and then delete the app again and then.

[00:57:55] Cara Csizmadia: That’s a perfect example of me being out of my capacity. I am way too old to understand how to work TikTok. I gotta find somebody to.

[00:58:02] Brian Searl: Apparently there’s this new thing called TikTok Go that they just released a day or two ago that’s going to allow for shopping and booking of travel experiences. But I imagine that’s probably going to require, a PMS that would integrate with that, which we probably don’t have in this industry. Okay, thank you for joining us for another episode of MC Fireside Chats.

 If you’re not sick and tired of talking to me or hearing from me, I will be doing another live podcast in 45 minutes with Scott Bahr on Outwired. Other than that, we will see you next week on another episode of MC Fireside Chats. Thanks guys, I appreciate it.

[00:58:29] Amber Simpson: Thank you.

[00:58:30] Cara Csizmadia: Thanks, have a great day.