Campground software or a hotel PMS: why site booking differs

A hotel system groups rooms into types. A guest books a king room, and the desk picks any clean one on arrival. That logic breaks the moment a 40 foot motorhome calls to ask for a pull-through. Tent pitches and cabins bring yet another set of rules.

Pitches carry attributes that decide whether a booking is even possible. Maximum rig length, slide-out clearance, pad surface, electric amperage, water, sewer and tree cover all matter. Neighbours can be nothing alike.

So the first test is simple. Ask the vendor to book a rig of a given length, with a slide-out, needing 50 amp power. The system should offer only the sites that fit. No guessing.

Room plans in a hotel are lists. A campground plan is a drawing. Staff need to see loop A beside the creek, the overflow field, the dump station and which pitches are blocked by a fallen branch.

Look for a drag-and-drop map that shows arrivals, departures and gaps. Gaps matter most. A pitch free on Tuesday and Wednesday only is hard to sell, and a good map shows where moving one booking would open a longer stay. Ask whether staff can move a booking from loop B to loop C with one drag and see the knock-on effect at once.

Most room systems rarely draw this. They show a grid of numbers by date. That works for forty rooms. It is clumsy for a hundred and twenty pitches spread over eight loops of winding gravel road, each with its own hookup panel.

Many parks host weekly, monthly or full-season guests. These guests pay on a schedule, often with metered electric on top. Room folios are built for a nightly rate and a checkout bill. Nothing more.

Ask three things. How does a monthly rate drop after the first week? How is a meter reading taken on the first of each month added to the folio? Does a deposit apply to the final night? Cancellation windows change by season too.

Seasonal guests bring more. They return each year, want the same pitch and expect a renewal notice. Without a guest history tied to a pitch, someone keeps that list on paper.

Cabins, yurts and lodge rooms behave like hotel inventory. They have housekeeping status, linen, key cards and a clean-by time. A campground tool that treats them as pitches can feel thin. Housekeeping tasks should reach a phone, not a clipboard hanging in the laundry room.

Some parks run both. The question is which side is bigger and which is harder to fake. Cabins can be approximated inside a pitch-led system with a unit type. Pitches are very hard to approximate inside a room-led one.

If you do run both, check that one guest can hold a cabin for two nights and a pitch for the rest. One reservation, one deposit and one final bill is the goal.

Write five real bookings from last season. Include a long rig, a monthly stay, a group of tents, a cabin and a cancelled booking with a deposit. Ask each vendor to enter all five on a demo.

Count the workarounds. Every time the vendor says use a note field, that is a task your staff will repeat each day. Two or three is tolerable. More than that and the system is the wrong shape.

Then check the payment side. Confirm that online bookings respect rig length, so the website cannot sell a pitch the rig will not fit. Ask who maintains the map when you add a new loop or retire a worn pitch.