Industry-wide blacklist in the works

Operating an RV park and campground—indeed, running any kind of customer-service business—has never been easy, but in recent years has become a whole lot more unpleasant. Just as our political interactions have become more brutish, so too have our commercial and cultural spheres, increasingly marred by entitled customers with socially oblivious demands and expectations. More and more people want what they want, when they want it and without regard for how that might affect anyone else.

Bad behavior has always been a problem to some extent, of course. When we bought our campground, in 2013, we were shocked to learn how cavalierly some people would treat our property—a campground into which we had sunk every bit of personal wealth and income, not to mention our sweat and dreams. Our customers stole showerheads, fire extinguishers and hanging plants. They would chop down live trees for firewood, drive their RVs across lawns and other sites as a shortcut, dump their trash into our fire rings. Our rental cabins were used to turn tricks and deal drugs, “stealth” campers would show up late and leave early without checking-in or paying, and our efforts to enforce basic rules would prompt scathing, one-sided reviews on social media sites.

Eventually we learned to take it all in stride, recognizing that the bad actors were just a tiny sliver of the camping public, albeit with an outsized impact on our facilities and good humor. But we also realized that we had a right to protect ourselves, and so after our first year we started compiling a blacklist of campers who had abused out staff or property and who under no circumstances were allowed to return. Desk clerks were given a list of prohibited customers, our reservation system was programmed with names that would be refused a reservation, and in most cases I would follow up with a letter advising the offenders that they would spare themselves the embarrassment of being turned away by not returning.

Eventually, our blacklist grew to more than a hundred names. And while it didn’t entirely cure the problem—there’s a never-ending supply of fresh jerks available—it made a significant dent, most notably among repeat offenders from the local population.

Given all of the above, you might think I’d enthusiastically endorse this past week’s introduction of MayiStay, an “RV renter rating app empowering park owners with anonymous ratings, searchable database, and customizable criteria.” And indeed, there’s definitely a need for something of the sort, some way for RV park owners to screen out the vandals, rule-breakers and snowflakes who think the world should cater to their every whim. If campground owners have to grit their teeth when unfairly assaulted on Google Reviews or Trip Advisor, why shouldn’t they have an equal opportunity to assail their malefactors?

As MayiStay points out, bad guests can do more harm than just property damage, hurting a park’s reputation and causing an immeasurable loss of business. Among the top ten complaints it cites that lead to a loss of return business: loud parties and gatherings, dog poop, dogs off-leash, trash, parking on the grass, not checking out on time and camping on the wrong site. “The best way to avoid these problems is by stopping potential troublemakers before they even sign a site agreement,” the MayiStay website observes. “But how can you tell who will be a problem when they seem so nice? That’s where our secret sauce comes in!”

And that’s also where the script gets flipped so completely that it invites a different kind of abuse. Because what MayiStay offers is a new kind of cartel, one that doesn’t fix prices but which comports with the more historical definition of “a coalition or cooperative arrangement intended to promote a mutual interest.” MayiStay’s “secret sauce” is to provide campground owners with a platform to share anonymous evaluations of campers with each other, “ensuring that you can make informed decisions without causing any awkwardness”—that is, without alerting the campers themselves and possibly ticking them off.

Or as this new venture would have it, “With MayiStay, you can provide honest opinions about a guest without fear of retaliation or backlash. The platform ensures that your feedback remains impartial and accurate. . . . MayiStay’s powerful search feature lets you dig into a guest’s history, revealing any red flags that might indicate they’re a potential problem.” The whole process, it concludes, “allows you to use multiple criteria to zero in on potentially troublesome guests, ensuring you can filter out undesirables.”

Well, yeah—that bit about “undesirables” is always Big Brother’s go-to line, excusing all kinds of oppressive behavior. But when it’s done on the QT, with the “undesirables” ignorant of the fact that their behavior is being monitored, recorded in a secret file and then shared anonymously with others, any concept of accountability is out the window. Campground owners are just as capable of personal vendettas or going off the rails as are campers, claims that their feedback “remains impartial and accurate” notwithstanding. And while campers spilling their bile on social media sites do so publicly, MayiStay is a sub rosa operation whose targets may never learn they’re on a potentially industry-wide blacklist and who will never have an opportunity to correct misstatements.

MayiStay’s rationale that campground owners can honestly appraise their guests only in secret, so as to avoid “retaliation or backlash,” speaks to the temper of the times: these are not idle fears when people increasingly are prone to becoming violent when feeling “disrespected.” But it’s also in jarring contrast with all the increased chatter about how campgrounds and RV parks are in “the hospitality industry,” which evokes grace and service rather than a Kafkaesque dystopia.

At the very least, RVers and campers who end up in MayiStay’s data bank should be informed of that fact, as well as be given a chance to review what’s been said about them and to present their version of events. But that’s not going to happen, of course. That would be too “awkward.”