Greg Gerber, Editor, RV Daily Report, wrote an editorial regarding a trend he sees in the campgrounds and RV parks industry pricing model. Below is an excerpt.
Campgrounds and RV parks will make more money by adopting an online pricing strategy similar to that used by airlines to price tickets based on supply and demand as the outdoor hospitality industry embraces technology to allow online reservations.
Here’s how t would the model works:
RVer visits CampgroundsRUs website and looks for availability on specific dates. A cookie is placed on that computer and the visitor’s IP address is logged in the system.
The reservation system immediately scans available inventory and determines what spaces are available. If there are plenty of open sites, the price returned is relatively low.
However, if there is a lot of interest in sites for those particular days, as tracked by the software system, the price goes up a bit. If the system detects, say, five reservation requests for those same days in the past 72 hours, it may sense a trend being developed. Perhaps there is a local concert, family reunion or other big event in the area during those days. The days are then flagged by the system for monitoring.
As more reservations are made, the price increases incrementally each time.
The closer to the date the site is needed, the price will rise considerably. Booking a site within a week of travel would yield the highest prices compared to someone who booked a reservation six months earlier. Drive into a campground without a reservation and you’ll be paying the highest price possible for your space.