Hospitality Across America

Soft Demand Does Not Look Like Empty Sites Anymore

Soft demand used to be easy to spot. Empty sites. A quiet phone. A Saturday that never filled.
That is not what it looks like anymore.
Right now, I am walking properties that look busy. The park is full. The staff is running. And the revenue is not there.
In July the Insider Perks Outdoor Hospitality Pricing Index recorded its highest occupancy since it launched. In the same month it posted its first rate decline since the index began.
Full sites. Lower rate.
That is the season, and you cannot see it from the front desk.
One note before I go further. This is an RV problem. Glamping is holding up better. If you run both, do not let what is happening on your RV side drive decisions on the other.

A Full Park Is Not Proof That Your Pricing Is Working
Occupancy is the number that feels like winning.
Occupancy shows up on its own. Rate you have to go get.
A park can be full and still be underpriced. Full tells you people are booking. It does not tell you what they paid.
If your occupancy is holding and your revenue is flat, you already have your answer. You are buying volume and paying for it out of rate.

Your Guests Learned to Wait
Booking windows have collapsed. I am seeing it on the properties I walk, and many of the operators I talk to are saying the same thing. Guests are deciding later and staying a little shorter.
That is not an accident. We taught them.
Somebody in almost every market drops rate two weeks out. Guests figured out that waiting pays, and now they wait.
Hotels learned this the hard way and it took years to undo. We are teaching campers the same lesson right now.
Most rates are still built around a guest who books in spring for a July trip. That guest is not gone, but there are fewer of them every year.
And if your answer to a soft week is a last-minute discount, you are training the next guest to wait too.
Stop rewarding the wait.

The Softness Is in Transient, Not in Camping
People have not stopped camping. Participation is holding. What softened is transient.
Long stay and seasonal business is where the strength is right now, and it has been building since spring. The revenue moved. Most operators have not moved with it.
Go look at your mix honestly. Not what you wish it was. What it is.
I have heard from more than one operator who took a hard look at their transient inventory this year, moved a portion of it to seasonal, and finished flat instead of down. That is not a rescue plan. That is reading the market and adjusting to it.
The properties that struggle this fall will be the ones still waiting for transient to come back on its own.

Your Best Sites Are Still Called Site 14
Here is the one number from July worth committing to memory.
Premium and deluxe designated sites passed waterfront sites for the first time. The gap between a named premium site and a standard site is now the widest that index has ever recorded, about 24.5%.
Read that again. Naming a site is now worth more than owning the water.
You cannot build a lake. You can name a site this week.
This is the cheapest revenue on your property and almost nobody picks it up. Walk your park and find the sites people request by name. The corner one with the shade. The one with the extra space on the patio side. The one at the end where nobody walks past.
Those are premium sites. Call them that. Photograph them. Price them.
And charge for the pull-through. At most properties I walk into it is free, and it is one of the first things a big rig owner asks about. That is not a hookup. That is a convenience people will pay for, and you are giving it away.

Your Weekday Rate Is Solving a Problem You No Longer Have
Midweek is not the ghost town it was five years ago. Retirees, remote workers, and flexible travelers filled a lot of that in.
But most rate cards still carry a weekday discount that was built when Tuesday was dead.
Pull yours up and ask a simple question. Is that discount still earning anything, or is it just a habit you are paying for every week?

Labor Day Is the Last Big Weekend. Price It Like One.
It is the final holiday of the season, and I keep seeing it priced like an ordinary weekend.
Two-night minimum at the least. Three if your market supports it. Hold your rate and do not blink when it fills slowly, because it will fill later than it used to.
Go look at what you are holding for it today, not in three weeks.

Fall Is Being Priced Right Now, With or Without You
Forward rates for September through November have been drifting down. Not sharply. Steadily.
Winter is the part that concerns me more. Snowbird rates had been climbing on their own all spring, and that stopped. The market is not going to build your winter rate for you this year the way it did last year.
If you want fall and winter rate, you have to go set it. In the next six weeks, not in October when the calendar is already filling at whatever number you left up.

What I Would Do This Week
Soft demand is real. It just does not arrive the way we were trained to look for it.
You will not find it in your occupancy report. You will find it in your average rate, in how late your bookings show up, and in a comp set that keeps quietly sliding down without announcing it.
So stop grading yourself on how full you look.
Walk your park and name your best sites. Charge for the pull-through. Look hard at whether some of your transient inventory should be seasonal. Check your weekday discount. Price Labor Day like the last big weekend it is. Set your fall and winter rates before the season sets them for you.
None of that requires the market to cooperate.
All of it is inside your gate.

This is the work we do at Hospitality Across America. We help RV resort owners and operators read their own numbers correctly, price their inventory to what it is actually worth, and protect rate through a soft season so occupancy is not the only thing they have left. Reach out at www.hospitalityacrossamerica.com.

Your Best Worker Is One Bad Week From Quitting

Earlier this year I wrote that training, not hiring, is the real staffing solution. I still believe every word of it.

But there is a part two that nobody talks about, and we are sitting in it right now.

You can train the best team you have ever had and still watch them walk out the door in August.

The back half of the season is where good people quit. They are tired. The magic of opening weekend is long gone. And every park down the road is short staffed and hiring, which means your best worker is one bad week away from someone else's offer.

Losing them now costs you more than it would have in April. You already paid to recruit them, train them, and get them good.

Replacing a trained person in August means starting over with a stranger during your busiest stretch. That is the most expensive hire you will ever make.

So let's talk about why they leave, and what actually keeps them.

They Leave Because They Feel Invisible

This is the one that gets missed, and it is the one that matters most.
Your best people are usually your quietest. They show up, they solve problems, they do not complain. So they are easy to overlook. You spend your energy on the squeaky wheel and the strong, steady one gets nothing but silence.

Silence reads as invisible. And nobody stays where they feel invisible.

The fix costs you nothing but attention. Notice the person who handled the septic backup without being asked. Say their name. Say it in front of other people. Tell them you saw what they did and it mattered.

I am not talking about a plaque or an employee of the month photo nobody looks at. I am talking about you, walking up to a real person, and telling them the truth about the job they did.

People do not leave places where they feel seen.

They Leave Because There Is No Upside

Pay matters. I am not going to pretend it does not.

But here is what I have learned in thirty years. People rarely quit over the wage they agreed to. They quit when they cannot see the wage ever changing. No path. No growth. No reason to believe next season looks any better than this one.

You do not have to hand out raises you cannot afford. You do have to show people a future.

Tell your strongest seasonal hire that you want them back as a lead next year. Give the front desk person the reservations training they keep asking about. Show the maintenance tech what the next rung looks like and what it pays. A person who can see a future does not go answer a competitor's ad on their lunch break.

The upside does not always have to be money. But it always has to be real.

They Leave Because Their Boss Is the Problem

People do not quit parks. They quit managers.

Your on-site leadership is the entire experience of working for you.

You can have the best property, the fairest pay, and the best
mission in the world, and none of it survives a shift lead who plays favorites, blows up under pressure, or disappears when the work gets hard.

This is the part owners hate to hear, because usually the problem manager is loyal, has been there forever, and is drowning right along with everyone else.

Loyalty is not the same as leadership. A manager who is burning out your team is costing you more than the empty positions they cannot fill. Support them, retrain them, lighten their load if that is what it takes. But do not confuse how long someone has been there with how well they lead. Your good people are watching how you handle it.

They Leave Because the Schedule Is Breaking Them
This is the most fixable one, and the most ignored.

By midseason, your team has been running hot for weeks. Short staffed shifts. No real days off. Someone always calling out and someone always covering. It is survivable for a month. It is not survivable for a season.

The math is simple and brutal. A person who never gets a true day off will eventually take all of their days off at once, permanently.

Protect their time like it is inventory, because it is. Build the schedule two weeks out so people can plan a life. Guard days off like they are real, not the first thing you sacrifice when someone calls in. And when your team is slammed, you get on the floor with them. Nothing burns out a good worker faster than watching the boss stay dry while they drown.

Rest is not a reward you give when the season slows down. It is the thing that gets you to the end of the season with a team still standing.

What This Actually Costs You

Nothing on this list requires a budget.

Seeing people costs attention. Showing them a future costs a conversation. Fixing a struggling manager costs some hard honesty. Protecting a day off costs planning. None of it costs what you think it does.

What it saves you is the thing that is hard to see until it is gone. The trained, proven person who already knows your property, your systems, and your guests. The one you cannot replace in August no matter how much you spend.

The parks that finish the season strong are not the ones that got lucky with hiring. They are the ones whose best people never left.

This Is the Work We Do at Hospitality Across American

We help RV resort and campground and glamping operators build schedules, leadership, and recognition that hold a team together through the hardest stretch of the season, so the people you trained in spring are still with you in fall. Reach out at www.hospitalityacrossamerica.com.

What the Fourth of July Just Showed You

If you are running a glamping property, an RV resort, or a campground, the Fourth of July weekend is the most informative seventy two hours of your entire operating year. For most properties it is also the highest revenue and highest occupancy weekend on the calendar. Maximum demand, maximum guest expectations, and a team running at full tilt. That combination is exactly what makes it your annual stress test. Whatever weakness exists in your operation, this weekend just put it on display. The only question is whether you are paying attention.

If you wait until Labor Day to do the post mortem, you have already lost the second half of your season.

The Window Is Open Right Now

This week, the team remembers everything. The frustrations are fresh. The breakdowns are still tender. The wins are still on the surface. By next weekend, the memory starts to fade. By August, it is gone entirely.

The smartest thing you can do for the rest of your season is take three days this week to do an honest audit of what just happened. Not a long meeting. Not a survey. A real, focused look at the operation while the evidence is still sitting in front of you.

Read the Reviews Coming In This Week

Your inbox is about to fill up with Fourth of July weekend reviews. Read every single one of them in the next ten days.

Look for patterns, not outliers. One angry guest who wanted to leave a one star review because the pool closed for an hour is not your problem. Three different guests mentioning slow check in, distracted staff, or a broken golf cart is your problem.

The reviews are giving you the operational audit for free. Most operators ignore them, respond defensively, or skim them. The smart ones treat them as the actual report card.

Walk the Property Now

The grounds tell the story. Walk your property today. Slowly. Like a guest, not the owner.

What got beat up over the weekend that has not been fixed yet. What signage is faded or damaged. What landscaping took a hit. What amenity needs repair. What spaces feel exhausted because the team has been running for seventy two hours without a chance to reset them.

The properties that look tired on July 6th look completely exhausted on August 6th. The reset has to happen this week, not next month.

For RV Resort and Campground Operators

The Fourth is the weekend your reservations workflow, your check in process, and your security protocols get tested at full volume.

How long was the average check in. How many guests were waiting in line at three pm on the third. How did the late arrivals go on the fourth. How did the team handle the noise complaints, the dog issues, the alcohol incidents, the spot disputes.

Talk to your front gate team this week. They have stories. Most of those stories contain the exact fixes you need to make before your next holiday weekend.

The other thing to check is your seasonal community. The long term residents watched the weekend with their own eyes, and they will tell you everything if you ask. They saw what worked and what did not. They know which transient guests caused problems. Their feedback is the closest thing you have to a free property inspection.

For Glamping Operators

The Fourth is the weekend that exposes whether your operational lift can actually handle peak demand.

The housekeeping turn time you planned for is the housekeeping turn time you got. The chef who handled forty covers in May handled ninety on the fourth. The reservations team that answered every call in June missed twenty over the weekend. Every system in your operation just got tested under maximum load.

Look specifically at the moments where two things happened at once. The check in that overlapped with the chef dinner service. The late arrival that coincided with the next morning's prep. The guest issue that hit during a housekeeping crunch. Those are the seams in your operation, and they are where the next breakdown will happen if you do not address them this week.

And look at your guest journey from start to finish. Did the arrival experience hold up. Did the in unit setup match what you promised. Did the team have time to be present, or were they just executing under pressure. Glamping guests pay for presence. If presence broke down this weekend, they noticed.

The Team Reading Is Just as Important

Talk to your team this week. All of them. Not in a group meeting. One on one or two on one.

Ask three questions. What worked. What did not. What do you need to make the rest of the season better. Listen to the answers. Take notes.

The team just spent seventy two hours under maximum stress. They saw everything. They know what is broken. They have ideas. They have also been quietly deciding whether they want to stick around for the rest of the season, and how you handle this week will inform that decision.

This is also the moment to thank the people who carried the weekend. Specifically. By name. In front of others where appropriate. The team that just held your operation together through the most demanding stretch of the year deserves more than a generic great job everyone.

Build the Fix List

By the end of this week, you should have a list. Real items. With owners and deadlines. The reservations workflow gap. The housekeeping bottleneck. The security protocol that did not hold. The communication breakdown between front desk and grounds. The maintenance issue that should have been caught in May.

Not all of it gets fixed this season. Some of it is for off season planning. But the items that affect the next holiday weekend or the next high pressure stretch need to be locked down by Friday.

The Rest of Your Season Lives or Dies This Week

The operators who treat this week like a regular operational week miss the chance to fix what just got exposed. The operators who treat it like the most important audit of the year set themselves up for a strong second half.

The Fourth of July just told you what is broken. The only question is what you do with the information.

If You Want Help With Your Post Holiday Audit
This is the work we do at Hospitality Across America. We come in this week, listen to your team, walk your property, read your reviews, and build the fix list with you and for you. By Friday you have a clear plan for the back half of your season. Reach out at www.hospitalityacrossamerica.com.

The Booking Softness Story Is an RV Story, Not a Glamping Story

If you read Woodall's Campground Magazine a few weeks back, the headline is hard to miss. Bookings are soft. Memorial Day was down. Fuel prices are up thirty seven percent year over year. Operators are nervous.

Every word of that reporting is accurate.

But here is what got lost in the coverage. Nearly every data point in that story describes RV and campsite inventory. The hardest hit properties are pass through parks dependent on long haul drivers. The most resilient are short haul destination properties.

That is not a glamping story.

A few weeks ago I wrote about why outdoor hospitality holds up when the economy softens. This post takes that one step further. The segments inside outdoor hospitality are not all holding up the same way, and that distinction matters.

If we keep lumping the two together, we are going to make operators in our segment defensive when they should be on offense.

The RV Story Is Real

The numbers in the Woodall's piece are sobering. Campspot data shows transient bookings down 2.2% year over year, with May running nearly 5 % below 2025. KOA, Blue Water, and Advanced Outdoor Management all reported softer Memorial Day numbers. The Southeast is the hardest hit region. Pass through parks along the interstates are taking the worst of it.

What all of those properties have in common is that they depend on long haul drivers. The cross country traveler. The retiree pulling a forty five foot diesel pusher from Ohio to Florida. The family making the eight hour drive to a destination park.
When gas goes up thirty seven percent, that math changes. People do not stop traveling but they shorten the trip. They book later. They stay fewer nights. They pick a closer destination.

That is a real challenge for operators in that lane. It is not a glamping problem.

Glamping Is Structurally Different

The glamping side of outdoor hospitality is built on a completely different traveler.
According to Sage Outdoor Advisory’s database of operating glamping properties, there are 584 verified glamping properties across the US representing more than 7,800 units. 56 percent of those properties are concentrated in just ten states, led by Texas, California, North Carolina, New York and Utah. 41 percent of the inventory is hard sided structures like cabins, tiny homes, A frames and treehouses, commanding an average retail daily rate of $325 a night. The median property is nine units, a boutique profile that historically holds rate even when broader markets soften.

That is a different industry. Different inventory, different price point, different guest profile, different economics.

The 90 Minute Guest Is Not Worried About Gas

The traveler choosing a $293 a night glamping stay 90 to 120 minutes from home is making a fundamentally different decision than the family weighing a cross country RV trip with gas up thirty seven percent.

The glamping guest is not driving 2,000 miles. They are driving 80. Fuel is not the friction. The decision is whether to take a long weekend, whether the property is worth the price, and whether the experience will be memorable enough to justify what they spent.

That is a question of marketing and operations, not gas prices.

The Cautious Consumer Is Not Skipping the Trip

Here is the pushback I expect on this one. What about the guest who is feeling the economy and pulling back on discretionary spending, including a $600 a night glamping trip?

It is a fair question.

Soft economies do not stop people from traveling. They change what people are willing to pay for and how far they are willing to go to get it. The $5,000 Mexico all inclusive gets cut. The four day cruise gets cut. The Disney trip gets pushed to next year. Big ticket, far away, multi day spending is what gets reconsidered first.
What does not get cut is the long weekend away. The anniversary getaway. The kid free reset. The drive to escape that feels indulgent without feeling reckless.
That is the glamping product. We are not on the list of things that get sacrificed.

We are on the list of things that replace the sacrificed things.

A family that was eyeing a $6,000 Disney trip and is now feeling nervous about the economy is not staying home. They are booking a $1,200 three night glamping stay 90 minutes from home and walking away feeling like they gave their kids a real memory without the price tag.

This is the case I made in my earlier post on outdoor hospitality and the economy. Our segment is not the sacrifice. We are the smart trade.

What Glamping Operators Should Be Doing Right Now

If you are running a glamping property this season, the strategy is not to panic about the booking softness headlines. The strategy is to lean hard into what makes your segment structurally different.

Market to your drive radius. Know exactly who lives within 90 minutes of your property and put your marketing dollars in front of them. Stop chasing the cross country traveler who is not your guest anyway.

Hold your rate. The Sage data shows boutique scale properties hold ADR in softening markets. Discounting your way through this season trains your guest to wait for a deal and erodes the very value proposition that brought them to glamping in the first place.

Sell the experience. The $293 guest is buying a memory, not a place to park. Make every touch point from the booking flow to the welcome to the fire pit setup reinforce the story they are paying for.

Take care of the guest in front of you. Your repeat guest and the referrals they bring are worth ten cold leads. In a noisy market, the operators who win are the ones who turn every stay into the next three bookings.

It Is Time to Tell a Different Story

The industry needs to start talking about glamping and RV camping as two separate businesses. They share an outdoor hospitality umbrella but they are not the same product, the same operator, or the same guest. The booking trends are not the same. The economics are not the same. The strategy for this season cannot be the same.

When the press writes about outdoor hospitality softening, glamping operators should not nod along. We should be making the case that our segment is built for exactly this kind of economy.

A traveler trading a $4,000 Florida cruise for a $900 weekend in a treehouse 90 minutes from home is not a problem for our industry. It is the entire opportunity.

Credit Where It Is Due

Thank you to Sage Outdoor Advisory for the supply side data that makes this case so cleanly. Their database work is essential for operators, lenders, and investors trying to make smart decisions in this segment.

If You Are Running a Glamping Property This Season

This is the work we do at Hospitality Across America. We help glamping operators sharpen their drive radius marketing, hold their rate discipline, and tighten their guest experience so this kind of economy becomes their opportunity, not their problem. Reach out at www.hospitalityacrossamerica.com.

Glamping Is Not Just a Pretty Tent

Walk into any hospitality conference right now and you will hear the word glamping thrown around like it is the next gold rush. Developers are pitching beautiful renderings. Investors are writing checks. Pretty tents are popping up on hillsides across the country.

And a lot of them are going to fail.

Not because the demand is not there. The demand is real and growing. People want unique stays. They want experience over checklists. They want a story they can post and a memory they can carry. Glamping delivers all of that when it is done right.

The problem is that too many people are designing a glamping property like it is a real estate play. It is not. It is a hospitality business with a very specific operational lift, and if you do not respect that lift before you break ground, the property will eat you alive in year one.

Let me say what nobody is saying out loud.

The Tent Is the Easy Part

The unit itself is maybe twenty percent of the work. The other eighty percent is everything you cannot see in the rendering. The arrival experience. The housekeeping protocol. The staffing model. The food program. The maintenance plan. The training. The standards.

If you spent six months obsessing over the tent supplier and six minutes thinking about how you are going to clean it between guests, you are already in trouble.

Housekeeping Will Make or Break You

This is where most luxury glamping operators get crushed. A glamping unit is not a hotel room. You cannot turn it in twenty minutes with a cleaning cart and a vacuum. There are decks. There are linens that have been exposed to the elements. There are wood stoves and outdoor showers and fire pits and hot tubs.
A proper turn on a luxury glamping unit can take up to 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours. Sometimes more. And your guests have rightly high expectations because they are paying four, five, six hundred dollars a night.

Now multiply that turn time across thirty units on a Sunday checkout. Do the math on labor. Look at the logistics of getting linens, cleaning supplies, and team members out to units that may not have a paved path. Think about what happens when it rains.

This is the conversation that has to happen before you finalize your site plan, not after you open.

Staffing in the Middle of Nowhere

Most luxury glamping properties are in beautiful remote locations. That is the whole point. But beautiful and remote means your labor pool is small and your housing options for staff are limited.

Where are your team members going to live? How are they going to get to work? What is your plan for housing seasonal staff? How are you going to train and retain people when the closest town has three hundred residents and one gas station?
These are not problems you solve six weeks before opening. These are the questions that should be shaping your development from day one.

Food Is Not a Side Project

A lot of new glamping operators think they can throw a few charcuterie boards on a menu and call it a food program. Then they open and realize their guests expect breakfast, want a curated dinner option, and are asking about dietary restrictions, local sourcing, and wine pairings.

Food and beverage in a remote luxury setting is one of the hardest operational challenges in hospitality. You need a real chef. You need a real supply chain. You need a real plan for cost control, waste, and labor. And you need to decide what you are not doing as much as what you are doing.

If your food program is an afterthought, your guest reviews will tell you about it very quickly.

Guest Service Cannot Be Vibes

The brochure says immersive experience. The reality is your guest is locked out at eleven pm in the rain and your team is forty minutes away.

Luxury guests do not care that you are rustic. They care that you solve their problem fast and gracefully. That means real on call protocols. Real radio coverage. Real after hours coverage. Real training on what to do when the unexpected happens, because in a glamping environment the unexpected happens every single day.

Your service standards have to be written down, trained against, and audited. Vibes do not scale. Systems do.

You Are Running a Hotel With Harder Infrastructure

That is really what this comes down to. You are operating a boutique hotel in a setting that has less infrastructure, more weather exposure, harder logistics, and more demanding guests than most traditional hotels. You do not get to wing it.

The properties that win in this space are the ones built by people who respect the operational reality before they fall in love with the design. They plan their housekeeping flow before they pick their tent vendor. They build their staffing model before they finalize their unit count. They write their SOPs before they open their reservations.

The pretty tent is the invitation. The operation is the experience. And it is the operation that gets your guests to come back, refer their friends, and leave the reviews that fill your calendar next season.

If You Are Building or Operating a Glamping Property
This is the work we do. We help developers think through the operational reality before they open, and we help operating properties tighten up after their first or second season when reality has hit. If you are in either spot, reach out at

www.hospitalityacrossamerica.com.