If you run a campground with a phone number and a paper ledger, you already know the problem: the phone rings while you're fixing a water hookup, the voicemail fills up on Friday afternoon, and half the callers just want to know if you have anything open for the weekend.
The fix isn't complicated, and it isn't a marketplace. It's a booking page.
Marketplace vs. booking page: know the difference
Most software pitched at campgrounds is really a marketplace: your park becomes a listing on someone else's website, next to your competitors, and the platform charges the guest (or you) a fee on every reservation. In exchange you get exposure — which matters a lot less than the sales pitch suggests, because most small parks get their guests from Google Maps, word of mouth, highway signs, and repeat visits.
A booking page is different. It's a single link that belongs to you:
- You put it on your Google Business profile, your Facebook page, and your voicemail greeting.
- Guests pick dates, pick a site, and pay. Done.
- Nobody advertises the RV resort two exits down next to your sites.
What the setup actually requires
For a park under about 100 sites, a working online booking setup needs exactly four things:
- A site list — every site or cabin with its type, hookups, and capacity.
- Nightly rates — with seasons if your summer and shoulder rates differ.
- Taxes and policies — your lodging tax, deposit, and cancellation terms, applied automatically so you never do arithmetic on a sticky note.
- A way to get paid — card payments that land in your bank account, ideally daily.
That's it. Everything else — dynamic pricing engines, channel managers, POS integrations — is resort software, priced and complicated accordingly.
The two things that must never go wrong
Double bookings. If your calendar can put two rigs on one pad for the same night, nothing else matters. Ask any vendor how they prevent it. "Staff are careful" is not an answer; the right answer involves the database refusing to save an overlapping reservation, ever.
Where the money goes. Know the answer to three questions before you sign anything: who processes the card, how often payouts reach your bank, and what each transaction costs. The answers you want are a major processor (like Stripe), automatic daily payouts, and a processing fee you can see — no platform fee stacked on top of it.
Doing this with Bunkpost
This is exactly the shape of Bunkpost: you list your sites, set rates, taxes, and policies once, connect payments through Stripe's guided onboarding, and share one booking link. Reservations can't overlap — the database physically won't allow it — and payouts are issued to your bank daily. Most parks are taking their first booking the same afternoon they sign up.
However you do it, the goal is the same: the phone rings less, the ledger retires, and Friday afternoons go back to being about firewood sales instead of voicemail.