Implementing a Revenue Management System in Your RV Park or Campground

With the industry experiencing record occupancy rates and RV shipments soaring, RV parks and campgrounds are in need of strategies to ensure customer satisfaction, optimize pricing, and maximize revenue.

The goal of revenue management systems is to help RV parks enhance their management capabilities in a landscape dominated by OTAs, direct bookings, and guests with high expectations. Today, technology plays a key role in giving businesses the edge they need to thrive in highly competitive, highly dynamic markets. 

Here, we will take a look at how you can effectively implement revenue management in your RV park or campground, and why it can help you fully exploit the revenue potential of your business while you keep providing unique and memorable experiences to your guests.  

What is Revenue Management? 

Revenue management consists of a series of strategies aimed at optimizing inventory and site prices in order to fully leverage an RV park’s revenue potential. To achieve this, it focuses on those actions that lead to matching guests, sites, prices, and timing. All these factors can perfectly converge with an adequate revenue management strategy.

Implementing revenue management at your campground does not require complex skills or unhandy software. As we will see below, you can improve the quality of your operations and your management decisions by leveraging a few simple, easy-to-use, and effective tools and software solutions. 

How to Implement a Revenue Management Strategy

Revenue management is usually defined as selling the right site to the right client with the right price at the right price through the right channel. But how can you possibly achieve all this? With the right tools, it is not as hard as it may look at first sight. 

So let’s take a look at the key elements you need to implement an effective campground revenue management strategy:

Segment Your Target Market

This involves the “right guest” element.

The demographics of the RV park business have experienced a significant shift in the last few years. RVers have become much more diverse in terms of age, ethnicity, and the different ways in which they choose to travel. For campgrounds, this not only means more potential customers, but also the challenge of understanding their demands and adapting to them.

Market segmentation is a key step toward making your RV park a profitable business. It basically involves deciding which group or groups you want to attract and developing a business strategy for them.

Amenities play an important role in attracting the guests you want. To meet the expectations of your target market, you need to plan for amenities always with their needs in mind. 

To this end, and considering access to capital is one of the biggest challenges RV parks are facing today, at Roverpass we have developed a Capital Lending service, which helps campgrounds gain access to loans in a very straightforward manner. 

Generate Demand

In a highly dynamic and competitive market, campgrounds need to foster and enhance those factors that make them stand apart from their competitors. And they need to make these features visible to potential guests and attract their attention quickly.

Today, there are plenty of tools and methods to make your campground visible to new potential guests and highlight what is unique about it. Leveraging Online Travel Agencies is one of the fastest and most effective ways to achieve this.

OTAs are established companies with big marketing budgets and a huge amount of visitors. If you make good use of them, the money they spend on advertising will benefit your campground directly. But once your campground features in an OTA, you will need to create attractive listings in order to boost your capacity to attract new guests. 

Designed to help campground managers and owners convey the most compelling possible image of their RV parks, Roverpass’ Marketplace is a tool that has proved highly impactful for plenty of businesses in our industry. Many campgrounds experienced an increase of up to 20% in earnings shortly after adopting it.

Implement Dynamic Pricing

Dynamic pricing is one of the most popular revenue management strategies in the RV park industry. It consists of optimizing campsite prices based on changing supply and demand. Its main and most immediate benefit is increasing revenue per site. 

Beyond that, dynamic pricing strategies will also allow you to optimize campsite use, improve customer experience, and make your business more agile to adapt to fluctuations in the market.

While dynamic pricing is a key element in an RV park’s revenue management strategy, its effectiveness is directly linked to the quality of the tools that are used to implement it. Keep in mind that implementing dynamic pricing requires the ability to manage prices in real time across multiple channels and OTAs.

Roverpass’ campground reservation software gives you a centralized view with which you can track availability in real time. This helps campgrounds implement dynamic pricing more effectively, customizing rates based on occupancy, season, time of stay, or any other criteria that can be used in a dynamic pricing strategy. 

Importance of Implementing a Revenue Management System in your RV Park or Campground

Though the main goal of implementing revenue management is to maximize revenue in an RV park or campground, it definitely goes beyond that. There is a wide array of benefits that your campground is likely to experience soon after you start implementing revenue management.

These include:

• Improving your ability to forecast demand
• Increasing occupancy rates 
• Optimizing the use of your RV sites
• Keeping real-time availability tracking
• Simplifying the process of making reservations
• Improving customer satisfaction
  

In a highly competitive business landscape, making use of revenue management software solutions like the ones mentioned above is key for effective implementation of your campground’s revenue management strategy.

At Roverpass, we are committed to developing solutions designed to tackle the most important challenges of the industry today. From marketing to reservation management, from website building to access to capital, we help RV parks solve problems and drive growth using advanced digital technologies.

If you are looking to dive deeper into the current challenges and opportunities in the industry, you will find many articles in our blog that will help you understand how to thrive and grow in the exciting RV park business.