Campground Views, founded in 2012 by longtime RVtravel.com friend Mark Koep, is reshaping how RVers plan camping trips. On Tuesday, Koep was featured by Forbes in an article titled “The Founder Behind the Mission to Transform Outdoor Travel.”
We have written about Koep many times through the years, never wavering from our opinion that his service is unlike any other. For campers interested in visiting a particular area, photos and a sometimes-glowing description of a campground are not good enough, even misleading. Koep’s presentation shows you the scene as it is. If there are warts, you will see them.
How many of us have made a campground reservation based on photos, only to arrive to find it junky or otherwise undesirable?
Koep’s vision of Campground Views grew over 13 years, traveling full-time in an RV while running a digital-marketing business that allowed him to work from anywhere.
On the road, he repeatedly encountered other RVers who pulled into campgrounds only to find the online photos misleading: sites were too tight, roads too narrow, branches too low.
To address that, Koep created Campground Views with its own visual engine to offer 360-degree virtual tours. For website visitors, it was akin to the street view of Google Maps. They could drive through a campground or RV park, and stop where they wanted to look closely at a site just as they could if they were standing right there.
If they liked what they saw, they could (and still can) make a reservation right on the spot.
The website has grown to more than 3,500 campgrounds, RV parks, resorts, and public lands—plus a database detailing 25,000 additional points of interest.
This year, Campground Views rolled out a fully redesigned browser with a cleaner interface, faster load times and new planning tools that let users save favorite sites and create itineraries.
Learn more about Campground Views.
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I think it is called “transparency”, “honesty” and doing business “old school”. Also ” you show me yours and I’ll show you mine”- the green that is.
I’ve used this site to pick out campsites. It’s great.