Maximizing income during your busy season
Most RV parks have an online reservation system available for their customers. If you don’t, that’s a subject for another blog post that you should absolutely read.
Whether you track reservations in an online system, local computer program, or a whiteboard, there is a facet of managing your reservations that can increase your income. CAMBY Management calls this method “optimizing the grid.”
Many parks have periods during the year when they get close to total capacity. Whether it’s due to your park being a destination on its own or because of local events is irrelevant. What is relevant is the common practice of assigning a site number when a reservation is made.
CAMBY Management Solutions adopts the standard practice of assigning site types to a reservation rather than actually assigning a site number. What’s the big deal, you ask? How about 18% more revenue? Are you interested now?
Here’s the case in a nutshell. I’ll use an example of a park with only 10 sites. This doesn’t mean it only works for small parks; it’s far from the case. I’m only using small numbers for ease of illustration. The larger your park, the more important this is. You can quickly multiply the 10 sites by your number of sites to see how the income improvement can be exponential.
Let’s look at a month at a park with these 10 sites. The reservations were all assigned a site number. In other words, the customer made a reservation and was given the exact site number where they would be staying when they arrived.
Let’s agree on a few definitions before we begin, as CAMBY has found that many campgrounds have very loose definitions of certain things.
Reservation
A reservation is a stay by a customer that is contiguous. A customer may have a stay that includes three days and then another stay later in the month or season for three more days, this is considered two reservations.
Site Number
A park may use numeric site numbers such as 1 through 100 or Alphanumeric site numbers such as A-1 through A-20 to delineate different park areas. A site number always means a very specific location within the park that does not change. Site A-1 is always site A-1.
Site Type
Most parks have different site types. The following factors can determine the site types:
- Infrastructure, i.e. 30 AMP, water and sewer
- Perceived benefits, i.e. Mountain View, lake front, etc.
- Ease of use, i.e. Pull-thru or back in
A site may have all of the above that determine a site type and others, such as a deck, dock, fire pit or BBQ.
Park Nights
This is a figure of the total number of nights that could “theoretically” be booked. So in our example of a 10-site park, during a month with 31 days, there could be a theoretical maximum of 310 park nights sold. When CAMBY staff is helping to implement grid optimization, this is the most important figure to track.
Often, a reservation system will allow a customer to click on a site and see the infrastructure, perceived benefits, and ease of use. This is a popular way of allowing people to book a site, which seems to automatically dictate that the customer should be assigned an exact site number.
So, let’s take a look at our grid for this fictitious 10-site park for a random month:
You receive a call from a potential customer who wishes to book a site for a 50 AMP Pull-through from the 16th through the 19th. At first glance, you don’t have that available. Assuming you charge $75 a night, you lost $225 of income. However, if you have your customers booking by site type, then you have the flexibility to see that site 7 on the 17th and 18th is a two-night reservation; it could be moved to site 6, thereby freeing up site 7 for the stay for this customer.
If you think this is rare, CAMBY Management Solutions case studies prove otherwise. A worthwhile exercise would be to have all your staff write down any time they are unable to accommodate a customer and analyze whether changing to site-type reservations would allow you to realize more income. CAMBY knows from experience that it will.
