Short RV Park/Campground Website Poll

Good survey. Though not "scientific," it will provide useful information.

"Somewhat" is the answer. There are those that run a top notch RV park that may not be tuned into the on-line world "yet." This is but one, but a useful test of the quality of a RV site, always done at a distance and with less than complete information.

In the old days, I used to do this by calling the park and asking for a brochure. Just they way they handled this request told me something about the park, though it only might have told me about the competency of the person they hired to answer the phone that day.

My main criteria for picking parks is rvparkreviews.com. I look at the rating, but also at the distribution of ratings and at the lower ratings to determine if they have some off-the-wall bone to pick or had some unreasonable expectation for the park.

A lot of the time

I would say it affects my decision a good bit of the time, but my definition of the quality of the website is probably somewhat different than what you're thinking of.

Content is king. A dated looking website with up-to-date information is in my opinion much preferable to a snazzy looking website that is all fluff. Photos are nice (particularly photos of the campsites), but a current price list is much more important, along with dates of operation and at least an overview of policies and similar things. A site with a simple layout that loads quickly (especially important on e.g. a phone) is often handier than one with fancy swooping slideshows and videos and big background pictures that look pretty once they eventually are fetched by the browser.

It's probably not quite so much of a problem for campgrounds, but I am sometimes amazed at what basic information is omitted from small business websites. I've more than once happened upon the web site for some place that sounds like it would be fun to visit, and seen all sorts of pictures and upcoming special events and such like but found no clue as to what state they are located in. I've seen more than one church website that fails to mention what time their Sunday morning service(s) start at. It seems many places give a lot of thought about what they want to communicate to the world (which is not a bad thing to do) and less thought about what someone looking them up might be trying to find out.

It affects our decision significantly

Significantly.

Not having online reservations, is a big factor for me.

It affects our decision significantly.

We figure that a website it relatively cheap advertising and if it is old, outdated, no pics, etc, then there must be something they are trying to hide.