RV Park Subscription Service
Finding it pretty disturbing what RV park directory sites were charging for basically a link, some photos and a phone number, I thought there must be room for a little competition. Some services did step up and provide a link to Yahoo maps with a marker of the location, but nothing extraordinary. So I decided to launch a subscription service for RV Park and Campground owner/operators. I went with a service at a price point that matched what other services were charging on a yearly basis (divided by twelve mind you!). This gives a small business owner the option of cancelling without much out of pocket expense if they aren't happy with services on my site. They can also choose two different rates so they have a good option for downgrading for out of season when they runnig low on marketing capital.
My solution is by no means exotic, but I did want to leverage a few api's I'd found useful in other location based products. Primarily, it's the extensive use of google maps. Seems pretty simple, but you can really get a good sense of the surrounding area with the google map. On the RV Park details page, I use a GMapSearchControl that will let guests check for local products and services, find out where local propane or recreation rentals can be found and driving directions to and from the RV Park being considered. I decided to go with PayPal as a payment processor since I didn't want to try to write one from scratch. Since the site is new, it also provides some level of legitimacy. Finding their buttons pretty easily integratable, however I must say that their sandbox testing environment has a little bit to be desired. I spent a couple of hours on the phone to find that their software (currently) doesn't support free trial periods, even though though it's advertised as doing so (must be a "bad build"). So now I am forced to have a registration fee, hopefully that doesn't scare off too many would-be clients.
After initially putting up the site, I was actually kind of impressed with the way it came out but I knew that ongoing development will be required. So this is when I decided that a subscription model would be the best route, it would give some motivation to do add-ons and updates. For example, I'd like to integrate some sort of online booking system and also provide users the option of updating their own park information. So I put together a two tiered subscription model so that interested parties could have a basic listing which is still pretty generous considering the competition. They could also bump up to a full listing which includes adding pictures, a few sentences about their location and a listing on OregonCampgrounds.com. I've also been thinking of making full subscribers more prevalent listings on the city level results pages, but I am still undecided about how that might work out.
Well that's it, if you want to see details about registering and all the benefits, please go over to the Oregon RV parks registration page.