Somewhere in the last few years, a new line item showed up on campground checkouts: the site lock fee. Pay it, and the site you clicked on is guaranteed to be yours. Skip it, and you've reserved a category — "30-amp pull-through, water and electric" — and the park decides which actual site you get when you roll in.
Big reservation platforms have leaned into this hard, and plenty of large parks now treat it as a standard revenue line. So the question lands on your desk: should a small campground charge one too?
Our honest answer: probably not — but not for the reason you'd guess. Let's walk through what the fee actually does, why it makes sense at 400 sites and mostly doesn't at 30, and what to do instead.
What a site lock fee actually is
A site lock fee is an optional charge — usually somewhere between $5 and $20 per stay — that a guest pays to guarantee a specific numbered site instead of just a site type. Guests who don't pay can still book, but the park reserves the right to shuffle them to any comparable site.
Guests, by and large, do not love it. Spend ten minutes in any RV forum and you'll find people who feel like they're being charged for something that used to be free — the basic act of knowing where they're going to park. It gets mentally filed in the same drawer as resort fees and the booking fees marketplaces tack onto every reservation: a charge that appears at checkout without adding anything the guest can see.
Why big parks charge it anyway
Here's the part that's easy to miss: for a large park, the lock fee isn't primarily about the $10. It's about assignment flexibility.
When you have 400 sites and thousands of reservations, letting every guest pin themselves to a specific site fragments your calendar. You end up with one-night gaps scattered across the grid — a site booked Friday–Sunday here, Monday–Wednesday there, and a Sunday night in between that nobody can use. If most guests book a site type instead of a site number, the park (or its software) can play Tetris behind the scenes: repack the assignments, close the gaps, and sell more nights on the same inventory.
So the fee is really a price on lost flexibility. The guest who pays it is compensating the park for taking one piece off the board. At scale, with a revenue-management team and an optimization algorithm, that trade is worth pricing. That's a genuinely clever system — for the parks it was built for.
Why the math flips at 30 sites
Now run it at your size.
Say you take around 1,000 reservations a year and 30% of guests would pay a $10 lock fee. That's about $3,000 a year — real money, not life-changing money. Against it, weigh what the fee costs you:
- Checkout friction. Every extra decision at checkout loses a few bookings, and an extra fee loses more than most. One or two abandoned weekends can eat a big bite of that $3,000.
- Goodwill. At a small park, your repeat guests are the business. The family that books site 14 every July doesn't experience a lock fee as revenue management. They experience it as being charged to keep the site they've had for five years.
- The optimization you're not doing. The fee's real justification — algorithmic repacking of hundreds of sites — mostly doesn't apply to you. With 30 sites, you can see your whole grid at a glance. There's no black-box Tetris to protect.
Meanwhile, the thing the fee gates — choosing your own site — is one of the strongest cards a small park holds. Guests are pinned to a category at the big park down the road and charged $15 to escape it. You can hand them a real map, let them pick the shaded spot by the creek, and charge nothing for the privilege. That's a differentiator, and it costs you nothing to say out loud.
The honest trade-off
Free site choice isn't free for you. When every reservation is pinned to a specific site, you inherit the fragmentation problem the big parks charge to avoid: orphan nights, awkward one-night holes between stays, and less room to shuffle when a rig doesn't fit where its owner thought it would.
At small scale, you have workable answers:
- Gap rules and minimum stays prevent most fragmentation before it happens. A two-night minimum on summer weekends does more to close calendar holes than any lock fee — we've written about when minimum stays pay and when they cost you.
- Ask before you move. If you genuinely need to shift someone, a phone call — "we'd like to move you one site over, same hookups, a little more shade" — almost always gets a yes, and often earns you points instead of losing them. The lock fee exists so big parks can move guests without asking. You don't need that power; you need thirty relationships.
- Price the site, not the click. If some sites really are worth more — the pull-through on the river, the double-wide with the view — charge more for those sites, plainly, on the nightly rate. Guests accept "the riverfront sites cost more" instantly. It's the same revenue as a lock fee with none of the junk-fee smell.
If you're determined to keep a lock fee in your toolkit, limit it to the two or three holiday weekends when you're guaranteed to sell out and shuffling matters most. But make it the exception, not the default.
The takeaway
Site lock fees are a big-park solution to a big-park problem. At a small campground, site choice is the product — give it away, advertise that you give it away, and recover the revenue by pricing your best sites at what they're worth.
This is roughly our whole philosophy on fees. Bunkpost was built so guests book on your website, under your brand, pick their actual site from your actual map, and see exactly what they're paying — no percentage fees, no lock fees, just a single flat $3 booking fee shown as its own labeled line. It's a deliberately different model from the marketplace platforms that popularized site locking, and the park side costs nothing: Bunkpost is free for the park, full stop.
If you want to see what a checkout with one honest line item looks like next to the fee-stack your guests are used to, the pricing page shows the whole model — it takes about a minute to read, which is sort of the point.