Donna Genie shows campground operators how to recover lost revenue from cancellations using waitlists and by repeating popular events. Enable waitlists through your reservation software, call people when spots open up, and expand high-demand weekends like Halloween into multiple offerings.
If you have times when your park is sold out and you have no additional capacity to sell, do you keep a wait list? If you have cancellations on that time frame, do you contact people and fill those spots? Well, if you don't, you could be missing out. Most reservation systems have the ability to set up a wait list and even if they don't, worst case, create a little form on your website, which is pretty easy to do, and ask people to tell you when they'd like to come and get on the waitlist. They can give you their information and you can make a call. If you have a cancellation that comes open during that time frame, that could be critical information to helping you fill spots. Also, if you have weeks where things are sold out, are they or days, are those times because you're having an event or an activity is going on nearby? If so, is it possible to have that event on another date too? A good example of this is Halloween. The world of Halloween Weekends and A lot of campgrounds started out as one weekend a year and has now turned into five weekends a year. They have the same events running multiple weekends to accommodate all of the people who want to come. So if you have a barbecue, cook off one week and you're all sold out, why not looking at doing some more of those events or having perhaps two or three weekends in a row that you do those same events, is it possible? Can you work that out? And also keeping that wait list in mind, even if you get close to an event and you have a partial availability for somebody, that may allow them to still come and experience experience your campground and get at least part of what they're looking for. Without that wait list, you may miss them completely and they may not get a chance to experience your campground or be able to bring in some additional revenue for you. So consider having a wait list when you have full times and see if your reservation software will accommodate that for you automatically.
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