How to Leverage Online Travel Agencies for your RV Park
Online Travel Agencies have changed the hospitality landscape, and the RV park industry is no exception. Increasing your online exposure by registering your RV park at different OTAs can make a huge impact on your capacity to maintain high occupancy rates and maximize revenue.
But let’s back up. What are OTAs, exactly? Even if your campground is not listed in an OTA, you have probably come across them while doing research for your own personal travels. Expedia, Booking, Airbnb, and Agoda are among the most popular OTAs, with the first two controlling a huge portion of the market.
OTAs are internet-hosted marketplaces where travelers can research, explore alternatives, and purchase travel-related services of all types. In a digital landscape flooded by overwhelming amounts of information, OTAs help customers navigate through their options, offering them the opportunity to analyze reviews, compare prices, and easily book online.
Research shows that 70% of travelers use OTAs as they look for inspiration for their next trip. So if you’re not on at least some of them, then chances are you are missing out on an enormous opportunity to attract more visitors to your campground.
By leveraging the audience, credibility, and effective marketing tools provided by OTAs, RV parks can improve their reputation, increase bookings, and maximize revenue.
Importance of OTAs in Growing an RV Park Business
Fully integrating technology into your RV park business is one of the keys to maximizing revenue. OTAs now play a key role in an RV parks’ business strategy in the context of our digital era.
What makes OTAs most attractive for RV parks is how much they boost their reach. This powerful online presence allows RV parks to gain exposure to a huge audience of potential guests that would not have otherwise had the opportunity of discovering these properties. This makes OTAs one of the best resources RV parks can leverage to attract new guests.
Generally, OTA websites are the first thing travelers see when they search for information on Google. Most OTAs spend heavily on advertising and use SEO techniques to ensure they keep themselves at the top of users’ searches. This essentially means that million dollar marketing budgets that you don’t have to spend a dime on are going towards advertising your business!
In general, OTAs are established brands, so associating your RV park with them tends to enhance your reputation and increase guest confidence.
Unlike other marketing channels, OTAs don’t have high entry costs that are prohibitive for many small and midsize businesses.
They also provide highly efficient reservation systems and thus contribute to simplifying the process of booking for both RV park owners and guests.
With travelers looking to grab hold of as much information as they can, using OTAs is the most direct route toward reaching a wider audience and building a strong online presence for your RV park.
Getting Started with OTAs
To start taking reservations through an OTA, you’ll first need to register your property at the OTA’s website. The registration process is generally quite simple. Most OTAs will have a few requisites to make sure you are a trustworthy business and that you will play by the rules.
As an example, you can see how the registration process at Booking.com is pretty straightforward. After you have provided all the required information, your registration will be reviewed and you will receive a confirmation email once your property has been set up.
Even though you will be guided to set up your property listing details during the registration process, we suggest you go back to it once your registration has been approved and thoroughly adjust the details to create a great profile (more on this below).
Now that your business profile is uploaded to the platform, you need to attract the attention of as many of the OTA’s users as you can.
Strategies to Leverage Online Travel Agencies for Your RV Park
A well-designed marketing strategy is one of the things that you will need to develop in the journey toward running a profitable RV park business. And in a world in which digital interactions are the main drivers of the economy, building a solid online presence plays a key role in businesses’ marketing initiatives.
But as much as digital channels are essential for today’s businesses, they are also a highly competitive battleground in which companies need to go the extra mile in order to capture the attention of potential customers.
Listing your campground in OTAs gives you the opportunity to potentially reach a huge audience of travelers. But how can you make them stop scrolling and want to learn more about your park?
Enhance Your RV Park Listing
Once your registration is approved and your property has been set up, you should focus on creating an attractive listing for your campground in the OTA’s platform. Keep in mind that this profile will be seen by visitors as they search through the OTA looking for RV parks to stay at.
Setting up a highly optimized profile will attract attention to your campground and eventually increase bookings. Listings can vary slightly from one OTA to another, but we’ll take a look at the items that most RV park profiles include and also see a few tips to help you enhance them:
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Overview
Write an overview of your RV park highlighting features, amenities, location, and available campsites. You can use this section to provide travelers with information about your campground’s goals, achievements, and general spirit.
Photos
Good pictures sell sites. It’s as simple as that. Make sure you provide high-quality photos of your campground’s RV sites, facilities, amenities, and surroundings.
Availability, Rates, and Types of Sites
Provide information on availability, rates, and what’s included in the sites’ prices. This information should be clear and consistent to prevent visitors from being confused or frustrated. Many campgrounds also offer the possibility of choosing exact sites.
Reviews
Listings usually display reviews from previous guests commenting on their experience at your campground and rating different aspects such as location, comfort, cleanliness, staff, and more. Whenever possible (and convenient), encourage your guests to write reviews after their stay. Make sure you answer promptly both to positive and negative reviews.
Rules and Policies
Write policies and rules around check-in and check-out times, pets, garbage disposal, quiet times, length of stays, fire pits, picnic tables, and more. This will help guests have a clearer picture of how your RV park is run.
Nearby Locations and Activities
Make a list of the different activities that visitors at your campground will be able to enjoy, as well as interesting nearby locations and tips to move around the area.
Creating Listings with Roverpass Marketplace
Of course, the quality of your listings will ultimately depend on how good the platform provided by the OTA is.
Roverpass Marketplace is an example of a platform that helps RV parks create listings that attract the attention of RVers, highlight their most attractive features and amenities, and truly convey what is unique about their property.
This is just one of Roverpass’ software solutions for RV parks that has shown a significant impact on revenue growth. Some RV parks increase their earnings up to 20% after starting to use it!
Use Software to Optimize Management
Until recently, managing listings across a number of different OTAs represented a continuous hassle for RV parks. Whenever a reservation was made, they were forced to manually update OTA listings one by one.
This problem experienced by many RV park owners and managers can be easily sorted out by using adequate software.
Roverpass’ Channel Management Optimizer allows RV parks to manage reservations from multiple OTAs in one single place. Real-time updates on availability, rates, and reservation information eliminates the possibility of double bookings or overbooking, making your calendar much more trustworthy.
With optimized channel management, you will be able to connect to a bigger number of OTAs without losing efficiency. This in turn increases your distribution network, reach, and advertising awareness.
Additionally, this tool makes it much easier for you to develop a dynamic pricing strategy, which can help you maximize revenue and optimize occupancy at your campground.
Roverpass Solutions: Helping RV Parks Leverage the Full Power of OTAs
Today, no RV park willing to thrive can ignore the importance of OTAs, since they have evolved to become the most preferred tool for bookings for travelers across the world. By 2019, 39% of bookings were made through them. And after a brief setback in the pandemic, OTAs rapidly rose again.
As part of our mission of making booking a reservation for outdoor travel as easy as possible, at Roverpass we have developed integrations with the most popular OTAs, including Airbnb, Booking.com, Agoda, and others. We recently announced our integration with Expedia, as well as the beta launch of our integration with Vrbo, both of which can help campgrounds massively increase their reach.
By creating the largest network of bookable RV parks in North America, we aim at helping both RV park owners and travelers. Increased visibility and optimized channel management for RV parks result in easier paths for RVers choosing a destination for their next trip.
Bringing together software solutions and the joy of outdoor travel is our passion and our goal. Keep reading our blog to learn more about the most important topics being discussed in the RV park industry today.
Also, if you’re seeking a forum to exchange innovative ideas and collaborate with like-minded RV park owners, we encourage you to join our Facebook group—a thriving network dedicated to fostering growth and adaptation in the ever-evolving world of RV park management.