Campground Management Blog » Marketing

Yahoo- Microsoft Alliance

PeterK — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:30:42 +0000

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)

ARVC Business Forum

PeterK — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:01:02 +0000

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.

These are just a few of the things that were discussed. I personally do not think they will completely disappear as there is a market niche there. People love toys and A Class motohomes are one big toy. Also based on the length and width of some of the huge fifth wheels out there, they could also be included in this argument.

Now the question is, how does this affect the campground owners? How would we change our park layouts?

Too early to tell. At our park we are not making any changes based on the above discussion. However it is important to stay on top of the trends with an eye towards the future.

Also at the meeting we heard from a representative from REI. They are a huge camping coop retailer in the US. He shared with us that their tent sales have gone through the roof. So as a park owner that does interest me. Those people have to camp somehwere and with a lot of state park systems cutting back and closing parks, we see a real opportunity there. Maybe upgrade our tent sites, put them in better locations and maybe charge a bit more.

I like how the two discussions are diametrically opposed. Kind of reflects what is going on in societal terms. So that is it for now. All comments are welcome.

Peter

Yield Optimization for RV parks and Campgrounds

PeterK — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:40:41 +0000

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