Do I need Campspot or RoverPass if I already have a website?

Updated October 11, 2026

A hardware store has a cash register and it has a store. The register takes the money, keeps the count straight, tells you what sold, and stops two people buying the last chainsaw. The store is the thing people walk into: the aisles, the signs, the smell of fertilizer by the door, and the guy who tells you which drill bit you actually want.

Want this handled instead of DIY'd? See pricing and get a fixed-price quote.

You need both. Neither one does the other's job. A register sitting on a folding table in a parking lot is not a store, and a beautiful store with no way to take payment is a hobby.

Campspot and RoverPass are the register. A website is the store. That's the entire answer, and everything below is working out which one you're short on and what each one costs you.

What a booking platform actually does

A reservation system holds your inventory. RoverPass puts it plainly on its own product page: guests see real-time availability, pick their site, and pay without calling anyone, and the booking portal is live around the clock. Site 42 is taken from the eighteenth to the twenty-second, and the next person who wants it is told no before you ever hear about it. At the end of the month the reporting side shows occupancy, revenue by site type and booking source. Campspot's product page promises dashboards and reports for the same job.

How each product handles deposits, cancellations and taxes is not spelled out on the public pages I read, so that is a question for the demo, not for me.

That is a genuinely hard piece of software and it is worth paying for if you need it.

One honest caution. The booking page a platform gives you is a checkout counter with your logo on it. It cannot tell somebody what the drive in is like, why the back loop is worth the extra ten dollars, or whether the bathhouse was renovated last spring.

What the fee costs, in the vendors' own figures

RoverPass publishes its prices. Small parks pay a $99 per month minimum, and the $3.50 per-reservation fee is credited toward it, so you pay the greater of the two and never both. Medium parks pay $3.50 per reservation with the monthly fee waived, and large parks are quoted from $1.50. The page does not say where small ends and medium begins, so ask; the arithmetic says the minimum stops mattering past 28 reservations a month, because 28 times $3.50 is $98. You choose whether your park absorbs the fee or the camper pays it at checkout.

Campspot's pricing page says less. There is a guest-paid booking fee for online reservations only, no software setup fees, no long-term contracts, no charge per site, and monthly billing. The amount of the guest-paid fee is not on the page, so ask them for it in writing.

Take a park that books 30 reservations a month online across a five-month season. That is 150 reservations at $3.50, or $525 for the year on the park's side, and $0 on the park's side if the camper pays it at checkout instead. To see the fee as a share of revenue, divide $3.50 by your own average booking: on a $150 two-night stay it is a little over two percent. Either way the arithmetic shows the shape: the platform's cost rises with bookings and stops when they stop. A website is paid for once, plus hosting, and works on everyone who visits whether they book or not. The two are not competing for the same dollar.

What a website actually does

The website is everything that happens before somebody is ready to give you money, and everything that happens after they've decided to come.

Before: what kind of park is this, is it my kind of place, do you have a site my rig fits in, what's the price range, what's nearby, are dogs allowed, is there shade, what does the bathhouse look like. A stranger answers all of those on your website, then goes to book. If the answers aren't there, the stranger has no reason to phone and ask. The next park is one tab over.

After: directions that account for the fact that the highway sign is easy to miss, check-in times, gate codes, quiet hours, firewood rules, the propane place in town. This half never shows up on an occupancy report, and it's the half a guest remembers.

RoverPass's pricing page says free website design is included with the product. Before you take it, ask two questions: whose name is the domain registered in, and do the pages come with you if you leave. If the answers are "yours" and "yes", that is a real website and you may not need me. If not, it's a store built on land the register company owns.

Four situations, four answers

You have neither. Start with the website. It's cheaper, it works immediately, and an inquiry form plus a phone number is enough to open the doors. Add a reservation system when the phone becomes the bottleneck, which you'll know because you'll be losing bookings to voicemail.

You have a website and no booking platform. Ask one question: how many bookings a week are you handling by hand, and how many are you losing because somebody wanted to book at eleven at night? Put your own monthly number into the fee table above. If the fee comes out smaller than what your evenings on the phone are worth to you, the platform pays for itself in your own hours.

You have a booking platform and no website. This is the expensive one. You are asking a checkout counter to do the selling, and it can't. Every question the platform page doesn't answer is a booking that goes somewhere else, and you're paying per booking for the ones that do come through. This is the situation a Starter build at $2,800 is designed for.

You have both. Good. The work left is the handoff between them: the booking button in the same place on every page, and the four pieces of information that have to read the same in both systems. The companion guide below lists those four and the order to change them in.

The mistake underneath all of this

Owners buy these as competing purchases because both get pitched as "the thing that fills your sites." One is a build you pay for once that works on everybody who visits. The other is a running per-booking cost that only touches people who have already decided.

If money is tight, the fixed thing that helps a stranger decide comes first. That is not me talking my own book. It's the same order you'd buy in for any business: you put up the sign and open the doors before you upgrade the till.

What I build, said plainly

I build the website: the pages, the photos, the structure, the inquiry form, and a clean connection to whatever reservation software you use. I do not build reservation engines, and if you need one I'll tell you so and stay out of the way while you pick.

The companion piece walks the split page by page, so you can see exactly which information belongs on your site and which belongs in the platform: what actually belongs on a campground website versus a booking platform.

If your question is really about getting found in search rather than what to build, that's the sister practice: CampgroundSEO.com.

Start with a description of your park

Tell me how many sites you have, whether they're transient or seasonal, and how bookings reach you today. I'll tell you honestly which of the two you're actually missing, even when the answer isn't the thing I sell.

Email hello@campgroundwebdesigner.com.

Common questions

Checked against Campspot and RoverPass pricing and product pages on 2026-09-21: Campspot Pricing, Campground Reservation Software | Campspot, RoverPass Pricing, Plans & Per-Reservation Fees, Campground Reservation Software and Park Management | RoverPass

Canadian? The same three sizes in Canadian dollars are on the CAD pricing page.