How to Prepare Your Campground Booking System for Peak Season¶

The first Friday of July is not the time to discover your deposit settings are misconfigured.

By the time guests are actively booking, you should already know that your online portal loads correctly on a phone, your confirmation email fires within two minutes, your cancellation policy is visible before checkout, and your holiday weekend minimum stays are locked in.

Most campground owners do a physical walkthrough before opening — checking sites, testing hookups, repainting posts. This guide is the same thing, but for your booking system. It takes a couple of hours. It catches things that would otherwise cost you money, refunds, or reputation damage mid-season.

Why This Matters More Than It Used to¶

A decade ago, peak season prep meant printing enough reservation slips and making sure the phone line worked.

Now, your online booking portal is often the first impression a guest has of your campground. If its slow, broken on mobile, or missing key information, guests don't call — they close the tab and book somewhere that works. You'll never know they were there.

The stakes are also higher on the back end. A misconfigured minimum stay on a long weekend can let guests book a single Friday night that should have been a three-night requirement. A deposit setting at $0 means you're collecting nothing upfront. A waiver that doesn't trigger leaves you legally exposed on an arrival you didn't even notice.

Peak season prep is now a systems job. Here's how to work through it before it matters.

Step 1: Audit Your Lot Configuration¶

Start here before touching rates or emails. If your sites aren't configured correctly, everything downstream is wrong.

Check for sites still marked unavailable from last season¶

At the end of last year, you may have blocked certain sites for maintenance, renovations, or winter storage. Before any marketing goes out or guests start browsing, confirm that every site intended to accept reservations this season is set to available — and that the date ranges are right.

In PitchCamp, you can review site availability settings and brownout date ranges from the Lot Management section. If you set specific blocked periods last fall, verify that they either ended correctly or are still intentionally in place.

Confirm RV length restrictions per site¶

If you run an RV park, your per-site length restrictions are what prevent a 45-foot fifth wheel from booking a 25-foot back-in. Review your minimum and maximum RV length settings on each lot. A guest who shows up with a rig that doesn't fit is a problem that starts with a system setting that wasn't checked.

Review lot categories, names, and descriptions¶

If you reorganized site categories last season or added new lot types — cabins, glamping tents, premium pull-throughs — confirm that each site is assigned to the correct category and that descriptions on your public booking page are accurate and current. This is where previous-season edits often get left half-finished.

Step 2: Review Your Rates Before Anyone Else Does¶

Your rates are the core of your revenue. Give them 20 minutes of attention before the season opens.

Verify base rates across all lot types¶

Check that nightly, weekly, biweekly, and monthly rates are correctly set for the current season. If you adjusted rates this year (which most parks should, given ongoing cost increases), confirm the new rates are applied across every relevant lot type — not just the ones you remembered to update.

Check your Scheduled Rates for peak periods¶

If you've configured scheduled rate overrides for long weekends or high-demand dates, pull up each one. Confirm the date ranges are exactly right. A scheduled rate that runs three days longer than intended will charge peak pricing on a date you didn't mean to, and guests who notice will ask for the difference.

Review your seasonal rate cap¶

If you offer monthly or seasonal stays, your seasonal rate tier acts as a price ceiling — stays don't cost more than that amount regardless of how long they run. Confirm that cap reflects your current pricing, not what you set two or three seasons ago.

Configure minimum stays for holiday weekends¶

If you require a minimum two or three-night stay on long weekends, this is the time to set up gated dates. Gated dates enforce minimum stays on your online booking portal so guests can't book a single Friday night on a weekend you've designated as three-night minimum. Set these before you open public bookings, not after you've allready accepted a handful of one-nighters you'll have to honour.

Step 3: Do a Full Test Booking on Your Phone¶

This is the step most owners skip. Take 15 minutes and go through the complete guest experience as if you're a first-time visitor to your own park.

On a phone — not a desktop — navigate to your booking page. Select a site, choose dates, fill in guest details, and go through to the payment step. You don't have to complete the transaction, but go far enough to verify:

The availability calendar shows the correct open and unavailable dates
The pricing displayed matches what you configured
The booking form collects the information you actually need
The deposit amount at checkout is what you intended
Your cancellation policy is visible before the guest confirms
The waiver appears if you have one configured

If anything looks off on this walk-through, you've caught it before a real guest did.

Check mobile specifically¶

More than half of campground reservations are now made on mobile devices. A booking page that looks fine on a 27-inch monitor but breaks on a phone screen is losing you bookings you'll never see. Test on at least one iPhone and one Android if you can.

Verify your Book Now button works on your website¶

If you've embedded a booking button on your campground website, click it. Make sure it loads the portal correctly, that the link wasn't broken by a recent website update, and that it lands guests in the right starting state.

Step 4: Walk Through Every Automated Email¶

Your automated emails run without you — that's the whole point. But they only help if they're configured and firing correctly.

Confirmation email¶

Every new reservation should trigger a confirmation email immediately. Create a test reservation and time how long the email takes to arrive. Then check:

Does it arrive within two to three minutes?
Are the reservation details correct?
Is your cancellation policy included?
Does it include your contact information?
Does it render cleanly on a mobile screen?

Pre-arrival email¶

If you've set up a pre-arrival email timed to send a certain number of days before check-in, confirm it's scheduled correctly. Make sure it includes useful, accurate information: site number or location, check-in time, gate code or access instructions if applicable, and any campground rules guests should know before arriving.

Waiver email¶

If you collect digital waivers at checkout, verify the waiver email triggers correctly after a test booking. Confirm the waiver language reflects your current rules and that signed waivers attach correctly to reservation records. A waiver that isn't being collected is worse than no waiver at all, because it creates a false sense of coverage.

Post-stay email¶

Confirm your departure or thank-you email is set to fire within a day or two of checkout. This is your best opportunity to invite repeat bookings and ask for a Google review while the experience is still fresh. An email sent two weeks after they leave hits differently than one sent the day after.

Step 5: Review Payment and Deposit Settings¶

A misconfigured deposit is one of the most expensive quiet mistakes a campground can make.

Confirm your deposit amount¶

Review the deposit amount required at online checkout. Confirm it reflects your current policy — whether that's full payment upfront, a fixed deposit amount, or a percentage of the total. If this setting was changed for testing at any point and never restored, a guest could complete a booking without paying anything.

Review your cancellation policy settings¶

Your cancellation policy should be clearly visible to guests before they complete their booking — not discoverable only in a confirmation email they may not read carefully. Review:

How many days' advance notice qualifies for a full or partial refund
What happens to the deposit for cancellations inside the window
Your no-show policy

If your policy changed since last season, update it in your booking system settings and anywhere it appears on your website. Guests who are surprised by a policy at checkout become guests who dispute charges.

Test a manual refund¶

Walk through one test refund — even a small amount — to confirm you're comfortable with the refund workflow before you need to do it under pressure during a busy weekend.

Step 6: Check Gate Access and Kiosk Settings¶

If you use an automated gate or a kiosk for waiver signing, peak season prep includes a physical check of these systems, not just the software settings.

Test the gate¶

Before season opens, run a test with a valid reservation code and confirm the gate responds correctly. If your gate assigns access codes per reservation, verify the code format is what guests expect and that your pre-arrival email communicates it clearly.

Confirm GEO check-in if you use it¶

If you've enabled geo-based self check-in (where guests open the gate from their phone when they're on-site), confirm the geofence boundaries are correctly positioned and that the guest-facing instructions are clear. Guests shouldn't need to call you to figure out how to get through the gate at 10pm.

Prep your kiosk tablet¶

If you use a tablet kiosk for waiver signing or late-night arrivals, make sure it's charged, connected to wifi, and displaying the correct screen before the season opens. Set a calendar reminder to check the battery weekly during the season.

Step 7: Pull a Pre-Season Report¶

Before the first guest arrives, take a baseline reading of where things stand.

How many reservations are already on the books compared to this time last year?
Which lot types are filling fastest?
Which long weekends are allready at or near capacity?
Are there any unpaid balances or outstanding deposits on existing reservations?

Understanding your pre-season position helps you make smarter decisions. If Canada Day weekend is 80% booked in April, you might open a waitlist and raise rates for any remaining sites. If a midweek stretch in August is empty, you have time to run a targeted bulk email to past guests before the season even opens.

Peak Season Prep Checklist¶

Frequently Asked Questions¶

How far in advance should I do this review?

Six to eight weeks before your first major holiday weekend. For most Canadian campgrounds, that means completing this review in April ahead of the Victoria Day weekend in May. That gives you time to fix problems before bookings are actively coming in.

What if I find a rate error and guests have already booked at the wrong price?

Honour the booked price for those reservations and correct the setting going forward. Retroactively changing a rate after a guest has already booked — and received a confirmation showing the original price — creates disputes and refund requests. Catching it before it happens is the whole point of this review.

Should I notify guests if my cancellation policy changed from last season?

Yes. If your policy is materially different from what returning guests experienced last year, send a bulk email to guests with existing reservations explaining what changed and why. Most guests will accept a policy change if they're informed proactively. Finding out at cancellation time is what creates friction and chargebacks.

How do I know if my automated emails are actually being delivered?

PitchCamp tracks email delivery and open status for every email sent through the platform. You can check delivery and open rates from within the email section of your account. If you're seeing unusually low open rates, it may indicate a deliverability issue worth investigating before the season starts.

What if I don't have time to do all of this before opening?

Prioritize steps three, four, and five — the test booking, the confirmation email, and the deposit settings. Those are the three areas most likely to produce a problem a guest notices immediately. The rest can be caught in the first couple of weeks, but those three should be verified before a single real booking arrives.

Don't start peak season guessing.

PitchCamp's configuration is straightforward enough that this full review takes under two hours. If you're not on PitchCamp yet and want to be live before the season opens, book a demo now — most parks are set up and taking bookings within two days.

Book a Free Demo or Start for Free — free to get started. 🍁

Tags: campground peak season preparation · campground booking system setup · campground opening checklist · RV park peak season · campground management software Canada · PitchCamp · campground pre-season