hone eagle wrote:
Interesting and thanks for your insight.
I have filled out the online survey and commented that they should raise prices for the most popular parks (closest to T.O.) until people move farther out to less populated parks,just a few bucks a year until equilibrium is reached.
I know not fair to cash strapped families but its all I got
interesting thought, however where the handfull of parks that they closed are concerned the smartest thing they could have done was offered special deals for those parks, and for other less popular parks as well, a little focused marketing could never hurt as well.
weekend warriors only provide a 2 day income out of seven,most stay within 3 hours drive of home, most bring everything with them, as its only 2 days and who wants to spend time shopping when you only have 2 days,,, or realistically 1 full day and one half day. so the benifit for the surrounding community is minimal
an incentive for longer term campers to head out the extra distance, in specific parks, each based individually, the most common that would attract would be to have lang stay deals, say you have a week off, you could stay at killbear pay full price,, or,, drive an hour more, another $20 or so in fuel, but book your first 5 days and get the 6th for free, book anther 4 and get your 11th for free and for every 4 paid after that you get another free (up to the max stay)so if you go for 6 days you pay for 5, 11 days you pay for 9, if you go for 16 days you will end up only paying for 13. they could in some cases if called for take it a little farther and ad a free bag of firewood with each day over X# days, the object would be to put people on sites for as long as possible, even if that means taking an empty site and only collecting a fee for 5 out of 6 days its occupied, the savings to the campers are not huge but its enough to offset fuel costs in getting there or more for longer stays. the loss to the park is in reality nothing ,, as the site would have been empty anyways, so there is only gain for them. the surrounding towns could also kick in and offer to pay for a free day or half price day, or coupon for free firewood for say a 2 week stay, or whatever amounts, through the local business association, because if you stay somewhere for a week or more its pretty much gaurenteed you will end up in town shopping, fuel, groceries, browsing local shops, perhaps at a festival, or whatever,, it puts people there with their money for an extended period of time.
a false gain could be argued on the parks behalf as the camper would have spent the money at another park, however, by moving some campers out of the more popular parks and on to less used / popular / distant parks that will free up space for more people to get in to the more popular parks, thus reducing the demand on them to expand, by better utilizing the facilities they have. I have friends who can barely afford to go camping due to the cost, and fuel(=distance) to them is a factor in the cost and the more popular parks are the ones close to them.
as for the parks to give the discounts, the gains for the surrounding communities means quite a bit especially for more isolated communities, my last trip (last week) we spent over $500, food refreshments, went out for ice cream, bought a new lawn chair to replace a broken one, a couple more water toys for the kids, had a bicycle repaired, went to a local festival for a day, spent over a hundred there. a little less income for the park could translate to more for the community, therefore more taxes for the government, possibly less support money from the government
looking at your location (essex) we were at rondeau last week of september for 5 days doing some bird watching there and at peelee point, it would be nice if the feds would see the need for camping parks and put in maybe 150 to 200 sites at peelee point.
we also volenteered on the great canadian shoreline cleanup that was held the same saturday we were at rondeau, (what a mess the beech was)
