Brian Searl opened the December 10th, 2025, episode of MC Fireside Chats by welcoming the audience to the final Guest Experience show of the year. Reflecting on how quickly 2025 has passed, Brian introduced the panel for this session. The lineup included recurring guest Jeremy Johnson, owner of Kona Hills Campground in Marquette, Michigan; Tyler Duffy from CampLife, a reservation and property management software company; Greg Rose, President of Camp Nauvoo in Placerville, California; and Joe Duemig from App My Community, a provider of mobile apps for RV parks. The group began by introducing their respective businesses, with Tyler Duffy noting that CampLife is celebrating its 20th anniversary next year, and Greg Rose describing his 86-acre property which focuses on glamping, tent camping, and weddings, having been purchased from the Boy Scouts ten years prior.
The conversation quickly turned to the topic of extending the camping season and the concept of immersive guest experiences. Jeremy Johnson shared his focus on winter recreation, given that his location in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan receives approximately 300 inches of snow annually. He discussed the success of winter glamping domes near the Twin Cities, where occupancy remained high despite the cold, driven by the novelty of the experience. Jeremy highlighted the potential for winter activities like fat tire biking, skiing, and ice climbing—noting that Munising, Michigan, hosts one of the largest ice festivals in North America—to attract guests during the traditionally off-season months.
Discussion then shifted to the nuance between novelty and genuine guest experience. Jeremy drew a comparison to immersive art experiences like Meow Wolf, suggesting that while novelty attracts a first visit, deep understanding of the guest is required for repeat business. He posed a theoretical question about whether a theme park ride knows a guest is a "super fan" and adapts accordingly. Tyler Duffy provided concrete data from CampLife’s system regarding repeat customers. He noted that while 2024 saw an impressive 87% repeat customer rate, that number dropped into the high 70s in 2025, though repeat visitors remain a substantial portion of stays across their client base.
Greg Rose chimed in regarding his own statistics at Camp Nauvoo, stating that he sees a solid 75% repeat customer rate. He attributed much of his remaining business to word-of-mouth recommendations from those loyal guests. This led to a broader discussion on customer acquisition costs, with the panel agreeing that marketing to existing customers through a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is significantly more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. Tyler confirmed that CampLife includes CRM functionality allowing parks to automate rewards or early booking access for guests who have stayed a certain number of nights, such as 10 nights a year.
Tyler Duffy presented specific statistics regarding traveler behavior over the last year. According to CampLife’s data, the average distance travelers traveled to a park was 305 miles. However, the data followed a bell curve distribution, with nearly 60% of travelers coming from less than 100 miles away. Long-distance travelers, those traveling 700 to 800 miles, accounted for only about 5% of the data. This reinforces the trend that a vast majority of camping guests are locals or regional travelers rather than cross-country tourists.
The group explored the competitive landscape between private parks and state parks. Jeremy Johnson observed that in Michigan, state parks are often as crowded and developed as private parks, creating a market gap for true rustic experiences. He highlighted pricing data to support this demand, noting that he rents rustic tent sites for $45 a night, whereas the average daily rate for full hookup sites in Michigan was roughly 60, a difference of only $15. This suggests that guests are willing to pay a premium for a curated, rustic experience that offers solitude, provided it is convenient to local amenities.
This led to a debate on the concept of "disconnection." Brian Searl and the panel discussed whether Gen Z and other demographics truly want to be offline. The consensus was that while guests desire the feeling of being in the woods and disconnecting from work, they still require connectivity for safety and modern conveniences, such as calling an Uber or checking restaurant reservations. Jeremy noted that despite his park being in the woods, guests have 5G service, allowing them to use nature apps like bird identifiers while still feeling removed from the city.
In a round-robin question segment, Tyler Duffy asked Joe Duemig about his recent business expansion into Australia. Joe noted that the markets are quite similar, though Australian parks often feature camping on grass rather than concrete pads and utilize "annexes"—tents attached to the side of RVs—which are rarely seen in the United States. He also observed that New Zealand parks tended to be slightly less amenity-rich compared to their Australian or American counterparts, though water parks and high-end facilities do exist in specific locations like Sandstone Point.
Joe Duemig asked Jeremy about the trend of smaller parks offering high-end food amenities. Jeremy confirmed that food is a major focus, citing the rise of farm-to-table dining in rural areas. He mentioned a high-end property nearby where a stay can cost $1,500 a night because it includes meals prepared by a Michelin-caliber chef. While Kona Hills isn't at that price point yet, Jeremy expressed a desire to integrate a hospitality and food component in the future to blend the rustic outdoors with modern culinary comforts.
Finally, Greg Rose asked Tyler about integrating reservation systems with third-party platforms like Airbnb and Hipcamp. Greg mentioned that Hipcamp fees have risen significantly and that Airbnb was not effective for his venue. Jeremy Johnson advised Greg to focus on direct bookings, revealing that after just one year, Kona Hills receives 99% of its bookings directly, significantly reducing commission costs. The episode concluded with Brian Searl directing listeners to the guests' websites and teasing the next show on Outwired featuring Ari Smith.
Transcripts
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[00:00:10] Brian Searl: I feel like it just started a few months ago. And then you get to this new point in January where you're like, I have this whole new year and then boom, it's November again and it's conference season and everything else.
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[00:00:33] Brian Searl: Welcome Jeremy Johnson, who's going to be one of our recurring guests. I'll let you introduce yourself in a second, Jeremy. Tyler Duffy from CampLife, who's our special guest. Greg Rose, who I can't see his picture but is the president of something. And introduce him—
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[00:00:46] Brian Searl: It's who where?
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[00:00:50] Brian Searl: Camp Nauvoo in Placerville, California. Do you have a video, Greg, or?
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[00:00:55] Brian Searl: Okay. And then we have Joe Duemig from App My Community. Welcome back, Joe.
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[00:01:10] Joe Duemig: So I'm Joe Duemig from App My Community. We make mobile apps for RV parks. Been on here for a couple of years. Not, I don't get in as much as I should, but been getting busier and busier every month,
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[00:01:22] Joe Duemig: That's right.
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[00:01:26] Tyler Duffy: Yeah, Tyler Duffy, CampLife. We have reservation and property management software across the US and Canada.
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[00:01:42] Tyler Duffy: I think it sounds better when you say it. No. Yeah, we've been next year, we'll be celebrating 20 years. It's for a tech company, I feel like I should have more gray hair. That's old.
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[00:02:00] Tyler Duffy: That's a lot of that's a lot, that's a long time for a tech company.
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[00:02:08] Tyler Duffy: Yeah.
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[00:02:11] Jeremy Johnson: Yeah. I'm Jeremy. I own Kona Hills Campground in Marquette, Michigan. Just had our first year in 2025 and closed up for the winter. But getting ready for next year, building a couple cabins and also planning for future winter recreation opportunities going forward.
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[00:02:37] Greg Rose: Yeah, I'm sorry you can't see me too, but maybe that's okay cause I don't have any hair either, so it's we're all good.
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[00:03:12] Greg Rose: We we actually have been there 10 years. We bought it from the Boy Scouts and had to do major upgrades after they neglected it for 10 years.
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[00:03:25] Greg Rose: When we bought it, it was to buy it as is. And, some of that stuff is true to word. They were very honest. They tried to sell it to me without a well, but the well was working when I looked at the property, so they had to fix that. But they had a beautiful meadow where we do our weddings and it was pretty much a dirt meadow when we bought the property. That was probably the hardest thing to come back from.
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[00:03:54] Brian Searl: So to our recurring guests here, they're typically how we kick this off. Joe knows, Jeremy, you're new, but we just ask in the last month since we've been together, is there anything that's come across your guys's desk that you specifically think we should be chatting about this week?
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[00:04:12] Jeremy Johnson: In terms of guest experiences, I got to say like I where I'm going at least and where my mind has been at lately, especially seeing people like Travis Chambers or Ben Wolf is the immersive side. And for me, I think they're focused on two different things. Travis is really focused on that fantasy world. Where Ben is really focused on health and wellness.
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[00:04:59] Brian Searl: What are some early ways that you're tossing around in your head? Because that's one of the things that we've talked to many owners here who, some of which are like, "I'm out, it's the end of the season, I want to go to Florida," rightfully "i've dealt with the kids all year or the families or the screaming people or whatever."
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[00:05:31] Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, I had a chance to run into Zach Sultenberg while we were in Kentucky, a lot of us together. And Zach was telling me about a project that he just finished about, I think 45 minutes north of the Twin Cities. And none of what he told me was surprising, but I know he was surprised by it, and I think the rest of the country is.
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[00:06:07] Jeremy Johnson: And he was like, "I just don't think the numbers are going to work." But to his surprise, not to the couple's surprise they killed it during the winter. People were people from the Twin Cities were going up and booking these domes all year round.
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[00:06:35] Jeremy Johnson: And then beyond that like simple fact of being in a novel experience, like we're thinking about winter recreation at a pretty high level. And I'm lucky that we have a local economic development group that's focused on that. We have one of the largest sled dog races in Marquette, Michigan next to the Iditarod. It's a qualify qualifying event actually. We have a massive fat tire biking community up here.
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[00:07:25] Jeremy Johnson: And then the last one, which is like off the wall but ice climbing. Michigan is or Munising, Michigan, 40 minutes down the road for me, is actually home to the largest ice festival in Michigan and I maybe North America at this point. It's been running for 25, 26 years. And people from all over the world, Europe, Asia, come to climb ice at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. It's becoming a bigger and bigger sport.
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[00:08:37] Brian Searl: I'm curious your thoughts on this because there's a lot of good nuggets in what you just said. But one that I'm curious about from your perspective is the difference between, if there is one, novelty and guest experience. Because novelty brings people in, but does novelty make people come back?
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[00:09:17] Jeremy Johnson: But he was just talking about the ability to understand your guest at a deeper level and react based on that information. So like his thing was he was talking about, I think it was Star Wars, right? And he's "Sure, I'm going on a Star Wars ride at Universal or whatever or Disney, whatever theme park it is. But does that ride know that I've watched every single Star Wars movie 15 times? And I've spent, 500 hours in the Star Wars universe compared to maybe the person sitting next to me who's only, casually watched those."
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[00:10:16] Brian Searl: That's— I would love to see Disney building in 20 years where I can go through a ride and it would know all that stuff. And then the next time I go through the ride, it's different. I feel like AI and robots might make that happen in 20 years. That would be super cool.
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[00:10:35] Tyler Duffy: One thing your question there about creating repeat customers. We've and looking at the data from our system, we've got in 2024 we were at a 87% repeat customers. So a lot of customers were repeat customers. We've seen that percentage drop in 2025 into the high 70s. But that those repeat customers are a good portion of stays at least for an average across all of our campgrounds.
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[00:11:14] Jeremy Johnson: So we just had our first year, so I haven't had any quite that's not true. So we had a quite a few repeat customers throughout the year actually. And I do track it in our booking software and CRM. And we didn't do anything necessarily to attract it. I think right now our key value prop for those people is our location and the convenience of it.
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[00:12:01] Jeremy Johnson: But they stayed with us because of the convenience. And I think that's a factor you can't overlook as well. And then going forward, our focus is really on year over year improvements. We started with just 30 rustic camping sites, nothing more than that. And so our one of our goals in terms of development is every year when people come back, there's something new for them.
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[00:12:30] Joe Duemig: Hey, you opened the doors, right? That was a huge feat.
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[00:12:42] Joe Duemig: Going back to Brian's question about niche versus novelty. I think one of the things with that would be size would matter as well. When if you're a smaller campground and you're catering to a niche audience sure it's a novelty, but you can only have so many people there in a year.
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[00:13:18] Joe Duemig: But if you had something that was Star Wars themed, like it's got staying power for the past, 50 years. And so you're going to have even if it was a novelty, you're going to have a few repeat customers, but you're going to have enough new people in the doors that it doesn't matter unless you're, a couple hundred sites. And then you have to worry a lot more on your repeat customers, I would think.
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[00:13:47] Joe Duemig: Possibly, possibly not for a type of novelty item like this, right? Because you're going to end up, I would imagine they would end up having a lot of virality and things like that would go with it.
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[00:14:21] Jeremy Johnson: Yeah. I don't know I don't know what Travis's acquisition cost is for Outpost X, but it I bet it's pretty low and it's mostly production costs because of that virality of his videos. He puts that out and people come from all over to the middle of nowhere Utah to stay in his building.
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[00:15:10] Brian Searl: Greg, how do you think about this?
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[00:15:33] Greg Rose: And I experience the same thing where I get repeats the same year. I there's one gal that comes in every year and her daughter's adopted me, but she's it was three times this past year her husband and the little girl. And you see them grow every year. And a lot of times we are used as a base camp as well because we're so close to Lake Tahoe and a wilderness area and that type of thing.
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[00:16:11] Greg Rose: We don't use a lot of money in adver in marketing. And so there's word of mouth goes a long ways for us.
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[00:16:22] Greg Rose: Yeah. For exactly.
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[00:16:40] Brian Searl: Yeah, you can. You should be able to in the bottom and then Jessica will just have to add it to the screen. But while you do that, yeah, that was I and I'd be curious too, Tyler, if you have a sense of how that repeat number went from 84 to 70. Because you have a lot of good data you collect. I remember being super impressed by, I didn't make it to the Canadian show this year because I was in France at their show, but last year I remember being impressed in Ontario about how you had all that really interesting data that you shared.
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[00:17:06] Brian Searl: Yes.
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[00:17:39] Brian Searl: Which is what we expect to see. Is that a big change over 2024 do you think? 2023?
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[00:17:57] Brian Searl: Because I think that's what Scott Bahr has seen quite a bit in his data and his research for KOA and some other organizations is that as the economy and other external factors happen, like people are obviously shortening the amount that they're willing to travel to go to their parks. Like you've seen that, right Joe, too? At some of the places you deal with?
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[00:18:32] Joe Duemig: As opposed to, no one's going to go to winter Floridaring because they live in winter or live in Florida. They're still going to be traveling. And then, when you look at the big mega parks that are a thousand sites I doubt that their I haven't ran data on it, but I doubt that their travel has changed quite a bit over the years. And I—
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[00:18:57] Joe Duemig: Yeah. And the transient, the large transient parks, the ones that are you know have the huge water parks and stuff like that. They're getting the same they're getting the repeat customers like we were talking about. Whether those repeat customers are from, 200, 300 miles away or 100 miles away, it's that is their summer vacation. I would imagine the parks that are more, the 1 to 200 sites and offer a few amenities, you might be able to find something a very similar park closer to home sort of thing.
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[00:19:30] Joe Duemig: Exactly.
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[00:19:52] Joe Duemig: Yeah, if they have one that's closer to them and they go to that one that's closer instead of the one that's further. And I think that makes a lot of sense because of the brand. The brand a lot of them over the past eight years have upgraded tremendously. When we started eight years ago a lot of the parks were really nice and some were hit or miss. Now they're all they all have pretty heavy amenities it seems. And they're a little more on par with each other. You definitely still have standouts, but I think now that's the case and there's more there you know there's more of them. When we when we started our business, there was one two of them that were within a couple hours of us. Now there's four. It's doubled in terms of our size.
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[00:20:56] Brian Searl: And I think it's important for you not you, but like all the people who are watching the show who are trying to figure all this stuff out, to understand that you need to figure out who your audience is, who your people are, why they're coming to you, and then go after those small individual things that are going to make their stay really special and memorable, right? Is that fair, Jeremy?
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[00:21:37] Jeremy Johnson: So across our 80 acres, even at max capacity where 40 sites, that's like you know pretty significant spacing. And I mean we had people that would come and stay at another park maybe a mile or two away on Friday night, but then on Saturday night they would book with us and say, "Hey, we heard about you from a neighbor or some or a restaurant in town and we had to get, we were a tent sandwich between two RVs and we had to switch over here, and there was even a moment where like this was like a kind of odd moment in reservation, but early in our season, we had a someone book who ended up emailing at one in the morning saying, "Hey, I just want you to know like I left because I didn't see anybody else around. I you know, I was a little scared. It felt like I was the only person out here in the woods." And like we felt really bad for that person and we emailed them and had a great conversation.
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[00:23:11] Brian Searl: so let me ask you this question, Jeremy. And I'm not, believe this, I'm just playing devil's advocate because I want to get your take on this. We've long heard this and maybe Joe you'll agree with me on this, like we've heard this argument, maybe not an argument, a debate, a difference of opinion, a whatever in the industry that there's really two types of parks, 20 40,000 foot 60,000 foot view, right? The private parks, the RV parks, the you know with the hot tubs and water slides and or the swimming pools and the miniature golf courses, the KOAs, the whatever, and the state parks that love to hate each other, right? Sometimes in our industry.
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[00:24:04] Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, that's a good question. And honestly something I hadn't thought too much about. I would say that when we went set out to build ours, we just wanted to build an experience that we would have liked. And I would even say at least in Michigan state parks are changing dramatically. If you look at Traverse City State Park, which is the most highest volume state park in the state of Michigan, it is like a private park. There's not a you know there's not a pool, there's not a water park in it, but people are jam-packed in there. You're one after another. You got kids ripping around on e-bikes and people that set up for long-term at this state park too.
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[00:25:00] Brian Searl: Yeah, I think I for sure Traverse City maybe is I don't know. I guess I'd choose I would like to believe that Traverse City is the exception to the rule, but then I've been to Kentucky State Parks and they're the same and that was 10, 15 years ago, right? And I've been to Florida State Parks and they're the same. So yeah.
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[00:25:36] Jeremy Johnson: Tent and then we do cater to like car truck tent or truck van camping. But no hookups at all. So no electric, no sewer, yeah.
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[00:25:59] Jeremy Johnson: Yeah. We I know we have a not a state park but a a county park in Marquette County that's added a couple yurts over the last few years and those are like very popular but it's a very remote park so it doesn't see too much volume.
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[00:26:40] Tyler Duffy: I think it highlights the point though to lean into your niche. If you have that niche with the you know out in the wild and no nobody around you, lean into that with your marketing and everything because you're going to attract those the customers that are looking for that and they'll become those repeat customers that you're going after. Or if you've got the pool and the hot tub and the miniature golf, lean into it.
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[00:27:25] Brian Searl: But you understand what I'm saying, right? Like I mean there's so many people who like I've said this so many times, like people come to me, come to us for marketing in Insider Perks. Who do you want to attract? RVers. What do you mean? That's a that's a lot of people. You got to narrow that down. So I think just this taking time to step back and consider that and you can do a lot of that with AI now. Like even if you didn't know how to do it before. You can go in and use a tool like a ChatGPT and you can say, "Hey, go look at my park and browse my website and come back and give me all the details on it and tell me what you know about it. Who do you think the ideal customer is who comes here? What are the types of buyer personas that typically would come here? How do I reach those people in marketing? What do I say in my website? What do I say in my email marketing?" If you know how to talk to it, you can get a lot of nuggets that would cost you like tens of thousands of dollars before to hire a pro agency to do this stuff.
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[00:28:58] Brian Searl: Do you have any kind of CRM built into your CampLife, Tyler?
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[00:29:02] Brian Searl: Okay. I was just curious because like I bet you could ask the question in a room at OHI or KOA, "How many people use a CRM?" And they would just look at you and stare and there'd be like two people in the room.
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[00:29:15] Jeremy Johnson: Yeah.
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[00:29:53] Brian Searl: Do you have that stuff set up to automat like I'm throwing you a softball here Tyler so you take it and run with it. Do you have that stuff set up within CampLife? Because I think that is important. I don't think every reservation system has that kind of CRM functionality.
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[00:30:44] Brian Searl: How about you, Joe? Anything in your app that helps people do this?
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[00:31:20] Brian Searl: Greg, do you do any of this at your park? I don't mean to keep forgetting about you, but you're just like you're a blank screen and I forget you there you're there sometimes.
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[00:32:19] Greg Rose: And so the same way we don't have the generator stuff but we do communicate with our past guests and update them about anything that comes up. End of season specials, we do that as well to our regular customers.
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[00:33:12] Brian Searl: Is there a sense that there's going to be or is been has been more of a demand of this for the last few years and it's continuing to grow? Because some of that stuff surprises me. Like we were doing Scott and I were doing some research into Gen Z and there's this kind of ongoing narrative in the industry that Gen Z wants to stay connected and they want more Wi-Fi and this is what it needs it takes to get them out to your campground. And when you actually study this stuff and look at psychologically, that's really not what Gen Z wants. They want to be disconnected. They want to not talk to the people at Jeremy's campground. Like they want to you know they have this nervousness like Earl from Black Folks Camp Too which is now the Unity folks, his expanded his brand into other verticals probably includes some form of Gen Z too. Like these people don't know how to camp. They were not taught that, they weren't taken by their parents when they were children. So they're nervous and they like a big thing with Gen Z is they don't want to be embarrassed. And so I just think—
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[00:34:09] Jeremy Johnson: I've seen a couple of things that like I guess I don't know that anybody's really dove into this, but like one, I think Brian to your point like Gen Z, right? Like they do want to always be connected but then they crave those disconnections as well and it's like a little bit of a di dichotomy and like how can you mesh that. Like I actually don't see a problem like and our park is unique because we're so close to town yet we're in the woods. And so like you have full 5G service at our park no matter where you are. You are in the woods, you are not in town, but you still have service.
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[00:35:05] Jeremy Johnson: And I think Joe, I didn't talk to you about this in Kentucky, but I think I was talking to somebody on your team about this like I'm totally happy that if somebody's walking through my campground on my trails using a bird call identifier app to be like, "Oh, there's the Kirtland Warbler and holy crap, you can only find that in Northern Michigan during these two months out of the year." Or "Oh, here's this other bird." I that the Kirtland Warbler is the only one I actually know the name of because I call it the Costco Warbler.
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[00:36:00] Jeremy Johnson: And then the second thing is is that demand there? I don't know that anybody's measured it, but I can tell you this, I combed through both the Newbook and the Campspot data that got released at the end of the year and I really just focused on Midwest and Michigan. But one thing that I noticed that stood out heavily to me was the average daily rate for rus rustic sites versus full hookup sites. It was like a $10 difference. I rent rustic tent sites for $45 a night in Michigan and the average daily rate for full hookup sites in the state of Michigan is was like 60 bucks. So it's like why am I going to spend the money on infrastructure at every site for water, sewer, electric when I can—
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[00:36:50] Jeremy Johnson: And like I think that speaks to the demand too, right? It's like people are you know no longer are people just paying like 10 or 15 bucks a night for a camping experience like if they can get a rustic camping experience close to the city and pop in town for dinner, they're going to pay for that convenience,
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[00:37:36] Brian Searl: Wait, right now you have six children or you always have six children?
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[00:37:40] Brian Searl: Okay sorry.
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[00:38:02] Joe Duemig: And so while people are disconnecting might still mean they want to watch their Netflix show at night. It just means they don't want to be tethered to their phone for work or tethered for a another reason.
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[00:40:30] Greg Rose: Yeah. They want to make a reservation for the hot restara restaurant in town and then take a shower before they go. And then come back to sleep in the woods. And we do get the Uber so we've had people that they'll Uber their food out here from town. And it's only 13 minute drive but if they can connect and they'll get an Uber driver to bring them out, they you know whatever food they want they got delivered in 15 minutes.
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[00:43:34] Greg Rose: Hello.
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[00:43:51] Greg Rose: Why can't I ask you?
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[00:43:51] Greg Rose: I'm going to I'm going to go to Tyler cause I think you're working with more reservation system? Is that correct?
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[00:44:02] Greg Rose: Okay so it's a reservation system.
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[00:44:05] Greg Rose: So we're always looking at ways to enhance our booking opportunity because we don't maintain our own booking system at this point. So we've used people like Hipcamp and we use Airbnb one year, different things like that. So I just be interested to know how your system integrates with other systems.
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[00:44:53] Brian Searl: All right, Tyler, your turn. You get to ask a question for either Joe, Greg, or Jeremy.
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[00:45:06] Joe Duemig: Yep.
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[00:45:18] Joe Duemig: Yeah I think I think they're quite similar. The look is a little different. So less pads. So you might be a little more on grass. You your camping will be on grass as opposed to on pads a lot of times. They I mean just like here they have a mix of long-term and short-term stays. They definitely have some interesting things that we never see here that a campground owner here would most of them would say never. Annexes. They're like tents that come off the side of your rig. And so it makes you a little like sunroom area. We've never seen that here and every a ton of people had it at those campgrounds.
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[00:46:13] Joe Duemig: Now New Zealand, that was that's a little more a little less amenity rich. Actually a decent amount less amenity rich than what is offered in Australia or here. You definitely have things that have those amenities but it's just that was what I noticed at least.
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[00:46:33] Joe Duemig: Will yes, we'll be going to Australia again in May. The show down there was great for us. It's a lot of fun. The people are very enjoyable. Long flight for being in a for being in a trade show for a full week. But but it was good for us. So we'll definitely go back.
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[00:47:06] Joe Duemig: Luckily my wife is part of the business so for the four years in a row that I missed our anniversary for Carvic, she was okay with it. So
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[00:47:18] Joe Duemig: She was fine with it cause it was part of her business as well. So now now we have other people that can go to that.
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[00:47:26] Joe Duemig: So Jeremy I think I have a this actually was what I was going to use for Brian asked what's new, what are you seeing more of. And so one of the things that I'm seeing a lot more of is smaller parks or glamping parks that are offering you know they don't have a ton of amenities but they're offering a lot of catered like high quality food catered amenities. And even larger parks now are doing this where they have a limited supply of charcuterie boards or a limited supply of this special dinner that they're going to offer from their chef. And so I mean you're a little more rustic I think than would a lot of these would be, but for the glamping type is that something you've thought about? Is that something you've seen? And what do you think?
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[00:49:16] Jeremy Johnson: I don't think we'll ever be at that level. I don't have a Michelin star. I can't command those prices. But at the same time, that's something we think about and something that we think as we grow maybe year five, six, seven, I would love to add that in. You know we're lucky that across our 80 acres we have about three acres that are adjacent to our campground that are on the main highway, US 41, which runs from the Upper Peninsula all the way down to the Florida Keys. Longest continuous highway in the United States. But we've got this commercial frontage on 41 that like I want to build a full hospitality concept from health and wellness and spa to that food aspect. So it's like how do you blend that? How do you keep that rustic experience rustic, unique in the woods but then bring those modern amenity in? And I don't have the answer but I do think about it and I want to figure it out,
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[00:50:12] Brian Searl: All right Jeremy, you are left by process of elimination with Greg
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[00:50:33] Greg Rose: Our goal is to do that. We don't plan to do it soon. Actually we added Staylist to our venue and traded off Airbnb cause it was useless. And Hipcamp although they started us and really have helped us, but their fees have gone just through the roof this year. So they're up in fees to us as a host and to customers. And that's making me think about looking at other stuff. Maybe we move into the direct booking right away. It just requires more hands-on timing and with the fact that it's you know just the wife and I as far as the booking goes, it would be more hands-on time sitting at that computer dealing with the booking until we master that avenue I guess.
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[00:51:20] Greg Rose: We're Camp Nauvoo. N-A-U-V-O-O. And it's not the one in Illinois. It's Camp Nauvoo in California.
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[00:51:43] Greg Rose: Yeah. Thank you for that. Now you guys it sounds like you're you know you started you had to build your whole infrastructure because you're still working the toilet channel. We came with flush toilets when we got there
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[00:51:58] Greg Rose: Good luck on that one man. It helps a lot.
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[00:52:07] Tyler Duffy: Yeah Greg you should check out using direct bookings with somebody. Your the cost is way down and your the ease of just taking online reservations is great. Out of all the PMS systems Tyler who would you recommend? Recommend CampLife. I will admit I am partial. If you want to learn more about CampLife software.camplife.com.
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[00:52:33] Joe Duemig: Yeah I'm I'm impartial on the POS book or PMS booking systems. I try to be at least. I tell everybody to talk to them all, figure out which one works for you and which one doesn't. I I do try to relay information I've heard. Like one of the things I'll say what I always hear about CampLife is their support's amazing. So that's what I that's what I typically tell people when they're asking different questions about the different PMS systems. But anyway yeah you can find more about App My Community at appmycommunity.com.
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[00:53:06] Jeremy Johnson: Yeah. CampKonaHills.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn. Jeremy Johnson. Cannabis and Campgrounds. That's the tagline.
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[00:53:24] Greg Rose: CampNauvooPlacerville.com.
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[00:53:44] Brian Searl: I probably should know that before I have an hour before the show starts so I can research that. But he's he's a really good guy who spoke at the Glamping Show, went to MIT I think and is really big in robotics and has is doing some really cool stuff at his property with custom things that he's building. So excited to talk to him on Outwired as our first guest ever.
