Leader Spotlight: The transformation of outdoor hospitality, with Cole Reinhardt
Cole Reinhardt is Vice President of Digital Strategy at Kampgrounds of America, Inc. (KOA). He began his career at Cynroc, Inc., where he managed digital marketing strategies for local small businesses, including website development, SEO, email marketing, and analytics. From there, Cole joined KOA as a digital marketing coordinator and, over his 14-year tenure, was promoted to manager, director and senior director before his current role.
In our conversation, Cole talks about how KOA is meeting the evolving needs of both campers and campground owners, especially as the industry has continued to change post-pandemic. He also shares the work his team is doing to manifest a physical offering, like campsite booking, into a digital experience, including filtering and interactive site maps.
Meeting camper expectations as they evolve
The product management landscape as a whole has changed a lot in the time you’ve been with KOA. What has that evolution been like?
1997 was the first time we had a digital presence for our company. When KOA went online that year, our digital product was an informational website — a digital campground directory. Back then, product management wasn’t even defined as a function. Our role was about getting our campground information on the web. Over the years, as camping reservations and traveler expectations moved online, the role of product management at KOA expanded tremendously.
We shifted from simply posting content to actively designing and optimizing full-fledged digital experiences for our guests. In the early 2000s, we pioneered the first real-time online campground reservation management system that we call KampSight. We’re now on our second iteration, which is K2, but that original system was a huge step in using technology to serve customers. Today, product management is at the core of our strategy. It’s data-driven, customer-informed, and continuously innovative.
We now manage everything, from our proprietary reservation platform to mobile apps to AI products and data products. For example, we introduced an AI-powered chatbot to KOA.com two years ago to help campers plan trips in real time. We leveraged years of camping data and content on the depth of our website to fine-tune and provide intuitive trip planning recommendations. This kind of initiative shows how far we’ve come. We continue to keep pace as things change, which is a fun environment to work in, especially for people who are creative, analytical, and technical.
Are there any key choices that you made that were critical to how the product works today?
Totally. I started in 2011, which was about a decade after we launched the first website. We built APIs out of our first property management system. It was an AS/400 green screen type of thing, and it was the first ability for guests to book camping reservations online. We were the first ones to offer that, so we saw the internet becoming more of a zeitgeist for everybody back then.
One of the early initiatives I had once I came on was building the first m-Dot site. We saw Apple release the iPhone, and there was an influx of mobile traffic. Back then, it was smaller — probably 20–30 percent of our traffic — but we saw it coming. So, we built a fast, easy-to-use m-Dot site. Then, when native apps started to take over as app stores started to build out their capabilities, we sunset the m-Dot site. This is when responsive web design came about, so we thought, so we built a responsive site and, at the same time, rolled out a native app for iOS and Android to meet those consumers.
The users of our applications are more of our loyal guests. People who stay with us regularly are predominantly those who use those things. The website has now evolved into helping guests plan trips. We’ve even seen a lot of new campers, especially post-COVID. We’ve started to emphasize how we can make it easy for them to understand camping and camping at KOA. We also want to reduce the barrier to entry to that type of lifestyle or activity. Camping means different things to different people, so we have to design your experiences around that. We’re always doing persona work and segmenting our customers to build a strategy that meets their needs.
Balancing camper and campground needs
The KOA product serves people who want to book a campground site, but there are also owners of the campgrounds who use your product. Do you run into situations where those two groups conflict with one another?
Constantly, for sure. There’s a new area now, too, because we have revenue management teams that are trying to optimize yield and revenue from a campground standpoint. We have to work within all three of those bounds. For example, one of the things we can offer is same-day reservations online. Some campgrounds say, “We don’t want anybody making a same-day reservation after noon.” They have to ensure that they have the space to fit them into the site. Other campgrounds are like, “I don’t care when someone makes a same-day reservation, as long as they make the payment.” That’s unique to KOA — operationally, our franchisees all get to operate the campground the way they want to within some confines.
We have to make our technology and products robust enough to meet these customers’ needs, and there is some conflict for sure. Often, campers can go to rec.gov, find a public campsite, and select it. They’ve become used to that. But, in a private campground, they like to optimize how many nights they can fit. It really comes down to the campground and who their target market is. Do they have more of a transient park? Are they more of a family-friendly destination? Those things will determine what levers they need to pull from the technology and set-up standpoint to meet their operational needs.
If you’re trying to implement a new feature or respond to feedback with a fix, you have to be conscious that if your tool is not reliable, it’s useless for customers. How do you balance those two things — reliability and iteration?
That’s a tough one. We have great QA and testing setups. We set nuances within our property management system and how that flows and shows up on KOA.com, for example. I think we like to approach things with baby steps, so we’ll pilot something, work on it manually, and validate it, and see how customers react. If we get an initial lift from that or see some good positive feedback, then we’ll go into A/B testing mode. We’ll refine it and throw more traffic at it to start to understand where that goes. Once we feel comfortable that it’s stable and we have a mini case study to prove it out, we’ll start to roll that out to the rest of the campgrounds.
Manifesting a physical product online
This is different from many other tech products in that it has such a tangible, real-world component to it. People who are going camping don’t necessarily want to be thinking about technology, yet you need them to use your tool for their experience. How do you think about those two things together?
That’s a unique challenge to our industry for sure. When we talk about our product, we refer to the technology, but we also view a campground or campsite as a product as well. How do we manifest that physical product online so people can understand what we’re doing?
It goes a few ways. For example, when I think about Wi-Fi, it’s become an amenity, like electricity and water. People expect it, even though they want to disconnect when they’re camping. They still want that lifeline. Wi-Fi also enables people to camp more. As there’s more flexibility in work environments, they can say, “Cool, I can check in on a Friday and check out on a Tuesday because I can work using the campground’s Wi-Fi.” When you install the Wi-Fi, though, you want to blend your access points and infrastructure into the scene of the campground — making it not-so-obvious that technology is there.
Further, we have night registration. Some campgrounds close their stores at 9:00 p.m., for example, but if someone is coming in after that, they have to check in by themselves. That usually involves writing down a credit card number or dropping money into a mailbox. But we can do that a lot better, so we’re looking at how we can power that with technology through the KOA app and QR codes. It’s more of an assistance if you need it, but it’s not something people need to rely on to stay with us.
Another initiative we’re working on is the ability for guests to basically check in on their phone, the same way you can at hotels. We’re thinking about ways to geo-fence them, for example, so when they’re 10 miles out from the campground, we can send them an SMS or push notification to pre-check in. Then, they’re checked in, and all they have to do is drive to their site or go in and get their site number from the front desk. That helps a lot from guests out because if they’re traveling in an RV with kids or family, they don’t have to stress about the check-in process. We want our technology to assist, but not get in the way.
There are so many factors that affect whether or not someone can rent a camping spot, and you need accurate information from the campgrounds to assess those factors. How do you solve for the potential that the campground could overestimate their capacity, for example?
There are certainly instances like that. We’ve got a great support and onboarding team that works with campgrounds to help them set up their property management system. We’ll go through and do some QA checks as well to make sure everything’s showing up as available online. But, it only takes one experience where a guest wasn’t able to stay on that site to say, “Oh, I have to adjust that. That didn’t work.”
We probably tackle 95 percent of these instances upfront and catch most of them. It comes down to our inventory type, which isn’t commoditized like other types of hospitality. A hotel room might offer a queen bed versus a double room, but most of the hotel rooms are the same size. You might get a suite, you might not, but RV sites are a lot more nuanced.
Because RV sites are so nuanced, the matching process of an RV to a site is as well. What are all the components or attributes of the RV? What’s its electricity demand? Is the campsite’s electrical infrastructure going to be able to support an EV RV, for example? With new EV options, not only is it charging, but it’s also running its AC, fridge, heater, etc. on that electricity. There is so much nuance in the attributes from both the RV and the site that have to align to make a successful match.
Pushing for better
How does customization play a role? Is there a point where it becomes frustrating for the user because they have too many options?
Yes, that is a challenge. If you have to choose between more than five or seven things, your ability to make an easy choice diminishes. So, if you look at a campground that has 300 RV sites, it could be overwhelming if we listed every site in a list view. We’ve attacked that challenge in two different ways. One is to group sites into what we call pricing groups. This reduces the amount of decision-making because the sites are priced similarly and have similar attributes, so you can choose between them. For example, someone can choose the one that’s closest to the pool.
This is where Select My Site comes in. We’ve been leaning into interactive site maps, which provide a map view of the campground that has interactive tiles over each site. That way, you can see 360-degree photos of the site, filter by pricing groups, and more. That allows users to refine their needs better, and that helps us match them better. This all makes it easier for them to create more context for how the campground is laid out and what they might be getting out of it. They therefore can make a more informed decision and, ultimately, be more satisfied with their stay.
You mentioned that COVID changed not only the clientele that seek out campgrounds, but also campground owner behavior. There’s much more investment in those kinds of businesses now. How did that change your approach to the product?
It’s been good because it’s pushed us to be even better. It’s created competition in a lot of ways. With private equity-type buyer groups, there are certain technologies, data, and reporting that they’ve come to expect through the other industries they’ve worked in. That pushes us to provide a better experience with different features. How do we develop our products to make KOA an appealing opportunity for them to invest in? We look at all of our campground owners as investors in our business, so what types of features do we need to build to make it more appealing for them?
We talk to them a lot to understand their pain points and build those features in. Similarly, it shined a spotlight on our industry. There’s money to be made here, and the industry is ripe for disruption. People didn’t use to view camping that way. Outdoor hospitality is a little bit different now, and we’re forced to think about how to keep up with these innovations and consumer expectations.
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