Where web experience meets campground know-how
My name is Rowan, my husband Dan and I own and run The Good Life Camping, a private campground in the Orara Valley NSW.
For more than 25 years, I’ve designed, built and managed websites for Australian businesses. Then, while creating and operating my own campground, I experienced the other side of the process: promoting campsites, managing availability, taking bookings, collecting payments, communicating with guests and trying to make all the moving parts work together.
The Booking Shed brings those two worlds together.
It combines decades of website experience with the practical knowledge that comes from building and running a real campground.
When I built The Good Life Camping website, I found that most accommodation website systems were designed for hotels, holiday homes or large tourism businesses.
Small independent campgrounds needed something different: a website that could showcase individual campsites, explain how the property works, manage bookings and payments, communicate clearly with guests and remain simple enough to operate.
The Booking Shed grew from a very simple idea: property owners should be able to build a professional online presence and take direct bookings without spending a small fortune to do it.
A custom website offering the same features could easily cost between $15,000 and $25,000 or more through a traditional web design company.
For most property owners, that kind of money is far more useful elsewhere. There is always fencing to repair, machinery to maintain, tracks to improve and another job waiting around the corner.
The Booking Shed provides an affordable, effective way for property owners to promote their campsites and accommodation, accept direct bookings and build something of their own, without the enormous cost of commissioning a custom booking website from scratch.
The Booking Shed is not based on theories about how a campground might operate.
Its systems have been developed through the running of our own campsites, The Good Life Camping, and include:
▶ Individual campsite listings
▶ Availability and direct bookings
▶ Syncs with Hipcamp so there are no double bookings
▶ Easy messaging with guests
▶ Multi booking cart - your guests can make more than one booking in a transaction
▶ Guest payments via Eway or Stripe
▶ Booking confirmations and automated emails including followup emails
▶ Arrival information and guest forms
▶ Campground rules and policies
▶ Mobile-friendly booking journeys
▶ The everyday realities of managing campers
The Booking Shed system has been created through lived experience of what is needed by private property owners to manage their campsites, bookings, communication and guest experience.
