Journal - Horizon Outdoor Hospitality

Two Ways to Turn Problems into Opportunities

Welcome to summer, officially! For most of you, your peak seasons are now in full swing. And while the demand landscape has changed for many properties, we still have a lot to be thankful for in our industry.

We also recognize that the world we live in today can be a trying time for us all; changing trends, politics, and the rising costs of living are enough to test even the most patient amongst us. The unique position we are in - serving our guests up meaningful, memorable, and exceptionally clean and efficient experiences is both a privilege and a duty. We are in the people business, which inherently means we are in for the most rewarding and challenging experiences, but a culture of care towards our fellow teammates and our guests will allow us to achieve the greatest results possible...

Investing in Your Team and Sanity

Let’s face it, the last couple of years in outdoor hospitality beat the record books in virtually every way: record RV shipments, record new camping households, record occupancies, record rates and revenues. We have a lot to be thankful for to be sure, but how we prepare ourselves and our teams for this post-inflection point trajectory is crucial to develop long-term success.

The phrase ‘it takes a village,’ couldn’t be more true of our industry and line of work. Successfully operating an outdoor hospitality property is a labor-intensive task, and it’s no wonder that the hospitality and travel industry has been the number one employment sector to be impacted by national employment trends post-COVID. It’s hard work, and most often, cheap work.

But as our industry continues to advance and grow at warp speed, I don’t see enough focus on new ways to view and structure teams and onsite staff. For decades, our industry focused on low-or-no-cost labor by virtue of a heavy dose of site trade that most often entailed a mostly-retired employment base that would largely work just enough hours to cover their site. And that worked for many years, and I owe a debt of gratitude - and my career - to the countless fellow coworkers that fit this demographic as I was getting my start in the industry the summer after my sophomore year of high school. This generation taught me the value of hard work and treating your guests as you’d like to be treated...

Optimizing Rental Revenue

We are often asked just how revenue management actually works. In short, the answer is in many ways. The art of revenue management is to market the right site at the right rate to the right guest at the right time to achieve an optimal balance of ADR and occupancy.

One of the strategies our revenue management team implements is to monitor occupancies across all site types and increase the rates of the best performing site types to encourage bookings in the lower performing (and assumedly cheaper) site types. This may seem like common sense, but it’s counter to what most operators in the outdoor hospitality space follow: discounting. This age-old school of thought that you should discount your lowest performing sites to encourage occupancy. That mentality essentially requires you to compete against yourself and create value through lowering rates, and as a result your ADR...