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

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.

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

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:)