Campground rates keep going up, driven by increased demand and industry gentrification, the predictable result of RV parks getting acquired by investors whose only motivation is return on equity. But now there’s another development that inevitably will goose the trend: this week’s release of a computerized database enabling campground owners to see what the competition is charging in real time.
The reporting dashboard, called Signals, draws on the massive amount of data compiled by leading reservation software provider Campspot, which currently claims to have a customer base of approximately 2,100 private campgrounds and RV resorts. More than 3 million campground reservations were made through Campspot’s app last year, with millions more expected this year, and all the data from all those millions of reservations is crunched by Campspot and funneled into Signals—enough, as Campspot acknowledges, for Signals to be “the only product . . . for the outdoor hospitality industry at such a large scale.”
While Campspot emphasizes that this information flood is anonymized, blended into pools of parks with “similar” profiles, it nevertheless allows individual campground owners to compare their metrics, such as average daily rates, occupancy rates and revenue per available site, with what everyone else is doing—and to make adjustments as desired, usually to increase revenues. Or as Campspot puts it, “With these tools at their fingertips, campgrounds are able to stay ahead of the competition, make confident pricing decisions, and unlock their park’s full potential.”
I forecast just such a development last October, in a post titled “Can ‘dynamic pricing’ beget cartels?” that reported on the monopolization of data within the apartment leasing industry, how that had enabled the development of algorithms that came perilously close to price-fixing, and how Campspot was positioning itself to do the same with campgrounds. That post was followed by one this past March, “In a lockstep march to higher prices,” that detailed Campspot’s growing domination of the reservation software industry “with the ready compliance of campground owners who see nothing but more profit for themselves.”
Fawning industry observers like Ohio-based Modern Campground, which bills itself as “a dedicated news source for the outdoor hospitality industry,” see no reason to be concerned by such developments—indeed, Modern Campground praises Signals as a long overdue “comprehensive, large-scale tool for competitive benchmarking.” The new database “offers campground operators unrivaled insights to inform their pricing strategies and sharpen their competitive edge,” it rhapsodized yesterday, explaining that the previous lack of such a resource created “challenges when it comes to optimal pricing and maximizing revenue,” but Signals will “change that narrative by offering a unique benchmarking solution that could transform how the industry operates.”
It doesn’t take a genius to decode that a campground’s “optimal pricing” is a camper’s inflated invoice, while “competitive benchmarking” is an oxymoron that describes an anticompetitive practice. But there’s little doubt that Signals and similar computer-driven innovations are indeed transforming how the industry operates, leading not just to higher prices for campers but to a greatly consolidated software reservation industry—a development that campground owners will come to regret, once they realize how much that tail will be wagging their dog.
In other words, in the long run everyone will be a loser. Everyone, that is, except for Campspot.
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