Donna Bordeaux (campgroundaccounting.com) urges campground owners to re-evaluate rigid cancellation/early-departure policies. Using a personal anecdote where a park refused any refund after she needed to leave a day early, she argues that inflexible rules cause unhappy guests and lost revenue, and recommends partial refunds or gift certificates as better solutions.
Hi, I'm Donna Bordeaux with campgroundaccounting.com I know we talked in the past about cancellation rates, but I want to bring up a new spin on this for you. If you have guests who need to leave early, please don't tell them they can't get a refund on any of it. It doesn't help either one of you. It will make your guests leave with a bitter taste in their mouth if they're having to pay for days that they can't stay and enjoy your park. And secondly, it will clog up your reservation systems. You'll lose opportunity costs of being able to rent that site to someone else. I have that particular situation right now. I've actually got to leave one day earlier than my reservation at the park that I'm in. When I contacted the front desk over a week in advance, they said once you've checked in, you cannot leave early. They do not refund anything. So what did that lead to? Let's talk about it for a moment in a little more detail. First off, I told them, fine, don't book my site. I'll pretend I'm still here if that's what I want, or I may leave later than I anticipated, leaving in the normal checkout time. They're not going to be able to rent that site again. If they had told me, we'll give you 50% or we'll give you a certain percentage of that back, or we'll give you a gift certificate towards another day's stay at a later date, that would have made more sense. That would have made me, as the guest, happier. It also would have made them happier because this park is almost full and they probably could have rented that site for an additional day to some other guest who's on their way in. In my opinion, they missed out big time on the customer service side here. Make sure that you look at your policies. Look at it from both the customer perspective and the business owner perspective, and make sure it makes good sense. Don't just keep a rule in place because that's the way we've always done it. Reevaluate, reinvent. These are the types of things that we help with in addition to the financial end of your business. I'm Donna Bordeaux with campgroundaccounting.com.
