If you are selling a product on eBay, you are required to clearly define your return policy, and if your website is involved in any type of e-commerce or online payments, payment gateway service providers such as Authorize.net will require that your site defines its refund policies. Your policy may simply be “no returns and no refunds under any circumstances”, but that policy needs to be clearly defined – both for your protection and for the protection of your customers. Misunderstandings can lead to disagreements and the need for mediation.

One of my company’s clients e-mailed me late last week, after one of her campers contacted her on Friday, asking for a refund – minus her stipulated $25.00 processing fee – for a last-minute cancellation of his weekend reservation, due to a less than perfect weather forecast. The client balked at allowing the refund, even though her website did not clearly define the terms for cancellations and refunds. Under the circumstances, this first-time guest at her park was making a totally reasonable request. With this instance in mind, it may be time to take a closer look at your own park’s cancellation and refund policies, confirming that they are covering the full range of potential circumstances.

As I explained to the client last week, most of our campground clients who are booking either real-time reservations or online reservation requests have policies that are much more clearly defined than what she had instructed us to post to her site. Typically, they might say that a full refund, less a $25.00 administrative fee, will be issued if the cancellation is made 14 days or more prior to the intended date of arrival; a credit for a stay at another date will be issued if the cancellation is made between 7 and 14 days prior to the intended date of arrival; and no refunds will be issued for cancellations made less than 7 days prior to the intended date of arrival. Each park is likely to have its own timeline for cancellations, its own administrative fee (if any), its own expiration date for any credits that it may issue, and probably separate schedules for campsites and rental units. The important thing is for all of those details to be clearly defined.

Many of our more savvy campground clients (typically, campground owners who have decades of experience in dealing with people who will try to find loopholes that they can use to their advantage, in this case capitalizing upon any vagueness in a cancellation and refund policy) will also specify the following:

• Deposit forfeited for non-arrival on scheduled arrival date.
• Holidays, special events, monthly and seasonal reservations are non-refundable.
• No refunds for early departure.
• No refunds due to inclement weather.
• No refunds for evictions due to violation of rules.

These policies should be clearly visible on your website, accompanying your rates and probably repeated on a page that lists your park’s rules and policies. You want your customers to see them, and you also want to be able to direct customers to the text should any misunderstandings arise. I also suggest that cancellation and refund policies be outlined, with a link to the full list, at the end of the reservation process, using a checkbox where the guest must indicate acceptance of those policies before the form will be processed.

I know that some people like to keep things simple, and others fear that they might scare away business by posting what might be perceived as stringent policies; however, a customer who is unwilling to accept reasonable cancellation and refund policies is probably not the ideal guest.

Despite having policies that are crystal-clear and etched in stone, you will probably still want to evaluate each instance individually, exercising a degree of discretion in resolving each request. The bottom line these days is that, if a customer demands a refund, it is a lot less expensive in the long run to keep that customer happy than to suffer the consequences of encouraging him to post negative reviews or to complain on the social media. Going out of your way to make an exception to the rule in order to accommodate a first-time guest might turn that new customer into a lifetime source of income for your park.

Remember that, at least in his or her own mind, the customer is always right. Try to make an effort to help reasonable people to understand – in advance – your business’s point of view when it comes to cancellations and refunds.

There were two e-mails over the last week that got me shaking my head in wonderment. The first was forwarded to me by one of my clients. She had recently left a well-known website hosting services provider in favor of an extensive list of more personalized hosting services that my company provides. After the other company threw down as many roadblocks as possible, as well as making several attempts at trying to scare the client into cancelling her plans to move, the migration was finalized. When my client formally cancelled her services with the other company, they could not accept the loss of the account without one last word.

The e-mail that she forwarded to me included a sentence that started with the words, “When you are ready to come back to us ….” Apparently the sender either thought that she had nothing to lose or preferred not to use the phrases “When you come to your senses”, “When you realize you made a mistake”, or “When you realize that you made a stupid decision”, but her words had the same effect in insulting my client and ensuring that she would never reverse her decision.

The second e-mail arrived this afternoon. It was sent to me by a highly presumptive young salesperson for a startup Internet company that is trying to capitalize upon the consolidation of online campground reservations. I had previously written about this and similar companies after another of my clients had related his nightmare stories about trying to get his campground de-listed from one of these sites. As I wrote at the time, “Campground reservations are accurately perceived as a multi-billion dollar business, and companies that would like a piece of the action are suddenly coming out of the woodwork. Funded with infusions of venture capital, the focus is on generating income from the collection of processing fees on those reservations, either in real-time (with campgrounds that get on board) or with the type of delayed booking that initially caught my client’s attention.”

These online reservation consolidators tend to compete with your own official website and your own chosen online reservation engine, a situation that can only serve to confuse consumers and dilute the effectiveness of how you run your business. In the instance this afternoon, one of our clients (with a new website that was less than a week old) was being asked to funnel traffic from his website to the startup company’s booking engine. The salesperson could not understand why I explained that it was not in my client’s interest to accept her offer and why we would not be installing her company’s “Book Now” button on the new website. Not only could she not understand why I would not matter-of-factly follow her instructions, she actually sent me two additional e-mails where she attempted to educate me in marketing basics.

What do these two e-mail stories have in common? They demonstrate the importance of never burning your bridges. As a campground owner, if a guest has a less than perfect experience and expresses his or her dissatisfaction on a review or social media website, take a deep breath before posting a thoughtful and empathetic response. There is no logical reason for the last word from you to be along the lines of “I hope that the door didn’t hit you on the way out!” or “Don’t even think of ever trying to come back here again!”

If you want your business to grow and prosper, every camper who enters your gate is your most important customer ever. To alienate only one represents not just the loss of any potential future business from that person and his family, it also likely means the exponential loss of business from every friend of that individual, as well as the friends of those friends. I am a frequent contributor to the TripAdvisor website, where statistics tell me that my reviews have influenced over 90,000 readers, many with recommendations of businesses but others with warnings to stay away. Since I have written 136 reviews, this means that my average review has been read by over 660 fellow travelers.

That is a demonstration of the power of exponential influence. Think about it the next time you might be too tired to thank a guest one more time for choosing to stay at your park … or the next time that a guest gets under your skin and you really want to serve him a piece of your mind. Always remember that bridges are for connecting, not for burning.

Even if you can no longer recall the days of school cafeterias or army mess halls, you probably can appreciate the concept of having a bit of variety to spice up your meals from day to day. How many people would want to have the same bowl of corn flakes for breakfast, a slice of pizza for lunch, and a hot dog for dinner … day after day after day? Beyond the lack of nutrition, you would probably be really turned off by somebody who offered you another hot dog.

In recent years, the menus in both academic and military settings have been tremendously improved, with food service operations subcontracted to companies that take pride in both food preparation and the nutritional value of the meals they serve. Gone are the days of cooks whose only formal training was how to prepare meals in large volumes, having been replaced by executive chefs with training in the culinary arts.

Yes, times have changed, but what about your website? Are you asking your prospective customers to get excited about a template-built site that looks just like thousands of others? Having the same menu from one fast-food restaurant to the next is desirable because those establishments are serving a clientele that is seeking consistency, not surprises. However, when planning a special occasion (like a week-long camping vacation, for example), most people are looking for something a little bit out of the ordinary. It becomes problematic when your website is conveying a message that says “boring” when your campers are looking for “spicy” or “savory” on the menu.

Just another WordPress site

I never know whether to laugh or moan when I see sites that seem to display an oh-so-distinctive templated look. I have even seen sites where the site title displays as “Just another WordPress site” because the webmaster did not take the minimal time and effort (or perhaps did not have the knowledge) to substitute an appropriate keyword-based title for the default template setting.

When somebody performs a basic search on Google, the words in the intuitive search term that they enter are either highlighted or made bold in the search results, and a user is more likely to click on search results that contain more of that highlighted or bold text in the site title, domain name, and site description. Nobody is going to search for the term “just another WordPress site”, so it should be clear that having that as your site’s title will put your park at a severe disadvantage. Sadly, there are hundreds of campground websites suffering this limitation. Click here to view the Google search results for campground websites with the “just another WordPress site” title. If your campground is on the list of search results, it just might be time to question the status quo and start searching for another webmaster (realizing, of course, that your existing webmaster may be that person in your mirror.)

Would You Like Arial or Times New Roman with Your Meal?

Even something as seemingly insignificant as font usage is ultimately very important. Once your site shows up in a search, if the person performing the search clicks or taps the link, is that person going to stay on your site … or does something like an overused font send them the message that you are offering the same old menu of hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and a side of fries?

In the old days of the Internet, webmasters usually chose “safe” fonts because the correct fonts would only display if they were installed on the end user’s computer (otherwise defaulting to the dreaded Courier font.) Today, there is a nearly endless selection of fonts available through the Google Fonts API, allowing your webmaster to choose distinctive fonts that are consistent with the overall branding of your business and which will render properly in all current browsers. Using CSS, your webmaster can also specify font styles and can even specify eye-catching font effects like drop shadows and outlines, all of which are supported in Chrome and Safari, and many of which are supported in other browsers.

Once again, if your website is not presenting its visitors with this type of very basic content customization, how can you expect your occupancy levels to be anything but blandly boring?