Campground Management Blog

Hi Folks,

With the recent announcement that Microsoft and Yahoo have formed a partnership I thought I would take a quick look at what that announcement means to the average consumer and average advertiser. I have been doing lots of reading on this and I thought I would share my thoughts. We are an advertiser on Google with both Campground Manager Software® and especially with Bookyoursite.com ,as we are trying to drive traffic to our partner campgrounds and get reservations.

Fist off, what does this deal entail? As you may or may not know Microsoft recently launched   a new search engine called Bing. This is their latest attempt to take a run at Google and their massive advertising revenue. The old MSN.com was obviously not working. So Yahoo’s ads will appear on the sidebars and headers and footers of the Bing website. Bing (using the massive power of Microsoft search technology) will power the search portion of the consumer input. So this partnership effectively puts Yahoo out of the search business but still in the advertising business.  Yahoo will get 88 percent of the revenue for the ads and the pay per click (PPC) revenue.

What does this mean to the consumer?

More competition for Google is the goal here. Together Yahoo and Bing together will account for just under 30% of the searches on the Internet. Now that is dwarfed by the Google 67% but is still much more formidable than two other competitors at 15% each. With more searches you get more revenue. With more revenue you can drive better quality targeted advertising. With more revenue you can drive more innovation. With more innovation you can produce a better product that will benefit the consumer. All the search engineers at Yahoo that get laid off can get off the Titanic because let’s face it Yahoo was dying a slow painful death and move over to the evil giant Microsoft. Think of it- Microsoft the underdog- who’d have ever thought we would say or think that?

What does this mean to people like advertisers like us?

More competition for Google. No longer is spending money on Yahoo or MSN.com like throwing money out the window at 60 miles an hour. No longer is doing an ad buy on Yahoo or Microsoft a gesture of protest against the Google behemoth. At 30 percent market share there is a serious number of people using this search engine. “YaBing” will be able to build a long term relationship with advertisers which will lead to more revenue and more innovation. More innovation should lead to more business and value for advertisers like us. Like they say the bigger the ship, the harder it is to turn it around. You have to think Yabing will be much more nimble than Google.

Our Bookyoursite.com ad spend on Google is being done almost out of spite as no one else can drive the volume like they do. Yet we know we have to be there.

Google ads are becoming more and more expensive and less effective. Hope fully this deal will put a small dent in their armor and give us what everyone wants, more choice and better value. More customers in a cost efficient manner for our partner campgrounds on Bookyoursite.com . ( Statistics and some editorial ideas are gleaned form many sources on the Internet especially Searchengineland.com)

Hi folks,

I was recently in Colorado at the ARVC Business forum meeting. We meet twice a year and make recommendations to the ARVC Board. We, as outside vendors, bring a different view to some of the issues facing ARVC. The ARVC board does not have to take our recommendations or indeed even respond to them however lots of ideas and policies we have suggested have gone on to be adopted by the board.

It is a very loose group of mostly vendors and corporate suppliers and it can be very informative. Recently the most interesting thing I took out of the meeting centered around the discussion of A Class motor homes. With 4 out of the top 5 A Class manufacturers no longer in business there was some discourse as to whether the A Class segment of RV’s would ever return. Is the A Class segment dead? And of so why? These are the reasons we discussed:

• They are not on the top of the list environmentally. They are very large, use a lot of fuel and have a huge carbon footprint.
• They take up a lot of square footage in campgrounds.
• 30 amp used to be the standard but now 50 amp is and soon will be a 100 amp for some of these big machines. That is a lot of energy usage.
• They are not easy to drive and maneuver.
• In some cases people require off-season storage as the home owner as no room in the driveway. Whereas you can put a pop-up or tent in your garage.
• Some municipalities do not allow driveway storage (could be said of all RV’s).
• The society wide trend of stripping away the decadence in a time of recession, does not bode well with the A Class segment.

Hi folks,

In the past you have heard me pontificate about the trust of the consumer and more specifically how it relates to setting rates at park level. To be more precise, over the years there has been some pressure to move toward yield optimization of parks automatically. In other words, the rates go up in your park every time you sell a site. The rates are adjusted by your software program based on an algorithm that you configure in your system.

My argument has always been that the outdoor hospitality business is different than the airlines or hotel business. That there is a certain social interaction you see around the campfires that you do not see in other industries. If you charge one person one rate and the next per a higher rate you end up breaking the trust of the consumer. It will cost you a lot more than the extra $10 per night you might have gotten, to get that customer back. Recently I had an experience to illustrate this fact.

My older brother just turned 50 years old. To celebrate the entire Kearns clan went to Vegas. Twenty of us. Now Steve is a new year’s baby so we went down over this past New Year’s. It was fun but I always had this underlying feel of distrust that I was being overcharged because it was New year’s. Turns out I was. Now Vegas are the absolute masters of supply and demand. My hat is off to them and they make no bones about it. They are there to deliver a customer experience and extract the most amount of money possible from your pocket. But at what cost?

For example, we stayed at the Mandalay Bay Casino. Very Very nice. Our room were $278 US per night. Got home on the Friday night. The following Sunday I had an email from their marketing department offering me the same room for $77 per night. I understand supply and demand. I get it. However I had just a bad taste in my mouth and a lingering odor of rip off when you receive that kind of treatment. Beer was $9, Cocktails $14. Corn beef sandwich $19. When I asked the waiter, was this the regular pricing he said no , it’s new year’s eve! Get over it!

I got in a cab to somewhere in Vegas and I chatted with the cab driver.  He tells me it is out of control. He says the hotels built too big too fast. He showed me the new 9 billion $$ CityCenter project that sits idle. He tells me the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) is moving because the costs are too high. That is the hidden cost of breaking the trust of the customer and relying solely on supply and demand. Once you take the human eyeball element out of it you risk the wrath of your customers.

I had a good time in Vegas however I will not go back on New year’s. Not because I can’t afford it, because I don’t like to be taken for a ride. Let’s not go that route in our industry.

That is it for now. Hope that invokes some discussion.

Peter

Hi folks,

Just returned from two solid weeks on the road. My longest road trip in 25 years of traveling. First we went to the LSI Jellystone trade show in Cincinnati Ohio. This was our 12th year in a row at this show with the good folks at LSI. We are the recommended software vendor for the Jellystone parks and we support them by attending their show.

I flew through the Chicago O’Hare airport the day of the federal election in the US. The airport was just buzzing with excitement. At any rate the flight was full to Cinci and the hotel was full and made me wonder again about the actual “on the street” effects of the financial market crisis. Now, if the car company’s go down there will be massive layoffs and I think it would accelerate the downward spiral and you would really see the effects at street level.

We left that show and went to the ARVC In Sites show just down the road in Nashville. I actually just stayed down in Cinci for the weekend and did not make the long trip home. While there I visited the National Underground Railway Museum. Absolutely spellbinding. You want a reality check on good we have it? Check out that museum.  I then continued on to Nashville on the Monday.

The ARVC Insites show is a show we do every year and as far as shows go, the best attended. This year the attendance at the show was very disappointing. Something like 600 people showed up as opposed to the usual 1100. Yes our booth was very busy, yes most of our major customers were there however I have this underlying feeling of discontent. Not sure why. Was it because not too many people pulled their wallet out in Nashville? Was it because people are constantly bombarded with bad news that the bad news in itself was causing more bad news? Kind of a self generating maelstrom of discontent and worry.

Was it because we were in Nashville during the CMA awards? (Where, the night of the awards, there was just an orgy of opulence pulling up to the Sommet Center to unload the VIP’s of the country music industry). Into this environment we held the ARVC trade show which is a grassroots back to nature industry (not exactly aligned with the County music corporate business).

I am wondering if the shows would be better attended if they were “free” for the campgrounds. ARVC would have to charge it’s vendors a lot more however if we got a lot more people maybe it would pay for itself. Include the InSites admission in the park’s ARVC membership fee. Put the membership fee up a bit but then attach this “value add” of the tradeshow admission to their membership. Just an idea. With some of the state associations moving away from ARVC this might be the best opporunity for ARVC to “move the cheese”. For ARVC to start building their brand equity. To stand on the value they deliver to their 4000 members. To change their revenue model. Food for thought.

So I home now, getting out my curling gear and sharpening the edges of my skis getting ready for winter here in Calgary.

As always I welcome your comments.

All for now

Peter

Hi Folks,

As is my daily routine, this morning I was up early riding the recumbent bike. I was getting my exercise and watching the doom and gloom news. I try not to watch the news as I feel like any other industry they need to sell product and they can’t do it with good news. However with all the turmoil on Wall Street I felt it was best to check it out in between sports highlights. So after seeing the details of the market slump and figuring out that I now have to work till I am 93 years old, I decided to channel surf as all males do. And what do I come across? The movie Wall Street at 6 am in the morning. What a brilliant piece of TV scheduling!

That got me thinking about Michael Milken and his x-shaped desk. I was also pondering the Gordon Gecko “greed is good” speech in light of the market turmoil. These last two days have been this generation’s Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken stock market upheaval. (Reminds me of how old I am).

I am wondering how this upheaval will affect the campground business or even the normal man on the street. Is this problem mainly confined to the guys on Wall Street? Indeed the economy is still in a period of growth albeit at glacial speed. The harried family man is more concerned about the price of gasoline then he his is about the financial ABCP default derivatives market. I am sure there will be some fallout at street level and the Chapter 11 lawyers will be able to buy another house to add to the 3 they already have, but for the life of me I cannot see it really impacting our business to a great degree in the rv and campground business.

Peter Drucker said one time , “Business is about building things and selling them”. Fairly simple and straight ahead. So my question is why didn’t these  brilliant minds at that top of these firms take step back and do that? Instead of creating a bunch of hopelessly complex financial instruments that brokers pushed out to the street without any idea of how they worked or the risk involved. As my buddy Harry says,” I am beginning to think that Wall Street is the only sector affected, by the mess they created for themselves.  Somebody at the top needs to get these huge financial institutions back to the basics (i.e for banks lending money to individuals and businesses, and for insurance companies to insure ordinary course stuff).”

People still need to take holidays. What better way to get back to the basics then go camping?Those are my thoughts for today. Your comments are welcome.

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:)