Discount Camping Memberships

travelnutz wrote:
bukhrn,



Simply put, renting any site at even the 50% rate is much better for their bottom line than getting nothing at all!

This is the only part of your post I disagree with. On the surface it sounds like a no brainer, however there is more to it than that . Say the park is a one hundred site park and has 70 full fee guests (i.e the park is not full, so it isn't turning away full fee for PPA). Now lets make the full fee $40. Say they now decide to add PPA and they get ten percent more guests. That's 7 additional guests at $20, so they gross $140.00 more. However, it is very likely that several of the full paying guests are also PPA members, so they would have gotten the PPA discount as well. If that number was 10 percent, 7 of the original full price guests would have paid the $20 PPA rate instead of the $40 full rate. Now the park will have the same exact revenues, but will have 10 percent higher utility charges, 10 percent more garbage, etc. If the percentage of those original full paying guests who also have PPA was greater than 10 percent, the park is losing gross revenue. Even if the percentage was less than 10 percent, say only 4 of those full paying guests were also PPA, that would mean the park loses $80 on the original full rate guests converting to PPA while gaining $140 on the additional PPA guests. That means the park only grosses $60 on those 7 guests, or about $8.60 each, not $20, yet they still have 10% more utility costs and added labor. And all these assumptions are led by the assumption that 10 percent more guests will appear due to PPA every night, which is not a given.
The other argument PPA makes is that those PPA customers will return in the future as full paying guests. I have no stats or figures to quote, but my gut reaction is a bargain hunter will always be a bargain hunter. If they paid $20 to stay this year, they are not likely to want to pay $40 to stay next year.
Finally, PPA parks have a reputation as being further off the beaten path, parks will little in the way of amenities and that they are basically bare bones operations (with some exceptions). If a park becomes a PPA park it inherits that reputation. That is something I would gladly give up a small amount of revenue to avoid.