Campground Management Blog

Hi Folks,

Today’s topic is PCI Compliance and how it applies to a RV Park and/or campground .  From wikipedia, “PCI DSS stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.It was developed by the major credit card companies as a guideline to help organizations that process card payments prevent credit card fraud, cracking and various other security vulnerabilities and threats. A company processing, storing, or transmitting payment card data must be PCI DSS compliant or risk losing their ability to process credit card payments and being audited and/or fined [1]. Merchants and payment card service providers must validate their compliance periodically. This validation gets conducted by auditors - i.e. persons who are the PCI DSS Qualified Security Assessors (QSAs). Although individuals receive QSA status reports on compliance can only be signed off by an individual QSA on behalf of a PCI council approved consultancy. Smaller companies, processing fewer than about 80,000 transactions a year, are allowed to perform a self-assessment questionnaire.”

We have recently gone through a compliance process for our Bookyoursite.com online booking system.

We hired an outside independent firm called Securris (www.securris.com) to conduct this on our behalf. Great company and very professional. After a security scan Securris gave us a list of changes to the system we had to make in order for them to give us their stamp of approval as being PCI Compliant. Pretty eye opening and fortunately for us we did not have to make too many changes. The process is not cheap. At any rate we are getting a few questions from our customer base as to whether or not we are PCI compliant or not. We are in the process of getting Campground Manager Software® certified and Bookyoursite.com will be certified in the next couple of weeks. However that does not mean that you are certified. Basically we have said ” we’ve done our part” to make sure you are complaint. Now you the owner/operator have to do your part.

PCI Compliancy involves the entire system, from software to the hardware set up at park level to Internet access on your network. It encompasses all facets of the information processing package and the financial transaction package. Firewalls, encryption, access controls are all taken into account. I started thinking about that and how it applies to the local computers at park level of some of our smaller accounts. Identity theft and cc fraud is a real problem. The credit card companies had to address it. I am thinking of it in terms of the credit card companies creating a new industry that has to go around and provide compliancy tests for each business location. Is that right? Is it affordable for our customer base? For the most part I would say no it is beyond their scope. So hopefully they will fall under the 80,000 transaction mark and can do the self assessment. I also started thinking about it in terms of us expanding our SAAS model (Software as a Service). I really believe that with the security controls that will have to be in place in the near future in order to take credit cards, especially online, we will be putting more and more parks on our server and then running  from there. All a park will need is a computer with a high speed internet connection to run the system. We handle all the security and upgrades and backups. Our servers are behind the appropriate firewall and encrypted security features. We store them at a top of the line colocation facility.

For anyone who decides to go on our SAAS product we will meet the PCI compliance test for that portion of the IT package. This will go a long way towards helping the parks become compliant and letting them keep their ability to process credit cards. Your comments are welcome.

Peter

Hi folks,I thought I would post my thoughts today on the very popular hot topic in our industry- yield optimization. For those of you who aren’t clear on what I mean by this, I am referring to the automatic adjustment of rates at the park based on the occupancy. So as your park reaches certain occupancy thresholds the system automatically applies a algorithm to the rate structure to increase the rates. In other words as occupancy goes up so do the rates.  The classic model of supply versus demand. As we are in the software business we get asked about this a lot. Previously I have posted my thoughts on this subject in the ARVC report. No less than Dave Gorin responded in the next monthly report refuting my thoughts and taking the opposite side of the debate. (Which is healthy and OK with me). It looks like now we will be building this feature into the next major rewrite of Campground Manager Software® however philosophically we are against it. I know hotel programs work this way and airlines work this way but rv parks and campgrounds are a different animal. In a RV park and campground there is a basic level of trust between the customers and the park business owners/staff. We own a park (Jellystone Niagara) and we are on the front line every day to see the social interaction. Once the camper sets up his RV the first thing he does is meet his neighbors. The discussion starts with the RV hardware and then the talk invariably turns to how much they paid for that evening for the site. By charging different rates for different people based on the time of day they called or arrived at the park you are risking breaking the bond of trust between you the business owner and the customer. Plus you cannot post rates in with any sense of confidence. Once you break that trust with  your customer he will either take a round out of your park staff or worse, keep quiet and go somewhere else. Is that worth the extra  5% or more you might get for that night’s rate? It will cost you many times more than that to get the customer back. (If you ever do). Hotels are different. You check into a hotel you don’t go next door to ask the people in the next room what they paid. Everyone also knows that with front desk people at hotels, if you stand their long enough, will reduce the rate. Do you want that at the front desk of your park? In the current version of Campground Manager Software® we already have yield management albeit in a different version. You can have off season and on season rates. You can have long weekend premium rates. You can have a different rate for every day of the week if you want. In my opinion that is the way that you maximize revenue without breaking the trust of the customer. Besides why are we patterning ourselves after the airline industry? In the same week that two more airlines have declared Chapter 11(Aloha and ATA airlines ) in the US, why would we want to follow that model? As Warren Buffet says “I will no longer invest in the airline business. The airline business as not made money as a sector since flight was invented.” I would be interested in your thoughts.  Peter 

Hi Folks,Just returned from 10 days on the road. Visited some family, went to head office, went to Morgan Management Head office and attended the NCA trade-show in Springfield Mass. Long road trip but I have a couple observations. The folks at Morgan Management are very good to us and have a good grasp of who they are and where they are going. They have strategy that is well though out and are implementing it on a daily basis. Chris Rhodes and myself attended the meeting and came away very impressed with Bob Moser and his staff. We visited their new call center which runs our Campground Manager Software® Central Reporting Module and were just in awe. Really well thought out IT plan for the parks and the call center. We are proud to say they are a customer.Chris and I then went and walked the trade-show floor for 2 days and I had a couple of observations.

1. I was impressed by the growth in Internet knowledge that the average campground owner now has. That works in our favor for our Bookyoursite.com interface as we are not promising them the moon as far as traffic is concerned. We will get them some traffic but they realize that most of the traffic will come from their own website. So they have to own their domain and be in control of their site. An absolute imperative. Unlike our competitors who promise million of visitors to their website portals and try to infer that you will gigantic traffic and business from those visits, we focus on the quantifiable business that can be measured from your own website. The camping public will go to the park’s page first before they book a site. We believe the portal strategy is dead. After all if you were going to go golfing this morning would you go to Golf.com? I don’t think so. You would search in Google for a course where you wanted to play and book from there. The same with campgrounds.
2. We have the greatest customer base in the world. Service service service is the key. It is so unheard of in today’s world that the value of service just keeps increasing.

So 10 days, 7 different hotels and home last Sunday. Feel like Willie Nelson. All for now, come back soon. Please feel free to post a comment:)