Campers are booking later and deciding later. The Dyrt's 2026 Camping Report found no-show behavior actually improving — but short-notice cancellations rose 22% in 2025, and most parks see the biggest wave of cancellations land 10 to 14 days before check-in, right when vacation plans get real. Booking windows keep shrinking too, which we've written about before.
Your cancellation policy says what happens when plans change. Your deposit policy decides whether that policy has teeth. A cancellation fee you have to chase after the fact is a suggestion. A deposit you already hold is a policy.
Here's how to set one that protects your revenue without turning away the good guests who make up most of your bookings.
What a deposit is actually for
A deposit is not early revenue. It's a commitment device with three jobs:
- It makes the guest pause before booking. Someone entering a card number for real money has thought about the trip. Someone reserving with nothing down is holding an option.
- It funds the cost of a late cancellation. When a Friday–Sunday reservation evaporates on Thursday, the deposit is the difference between eating the whole weekend and eating part of it.
- It filters speculative bookings. Guests who grab three weekends "to decide later" mostly stop doing that when each hold costs something.
If you think of the deposit as revenue, you'll set it too high and fight guests over it. If you think of it as a commitment device, the right size becomes obvious: enough to make cancelling feel like a decision, not so much that booking feels like a risk.
The three models small parks actually use
First night's rate. The guest pays one night at booking, the balance at check-in or a few days before. This is the default for a reason: it scales naturally with your pricing (a $95 waterfront site carries a bigger deposit than a $40 tent site), it's easy to explain, and if the guest no-shows, you've covered the night you were least likely to resell. For most small parks, start here.
A percentage of the stay — usually 25–50%. This works better for parks with lots of long stays, where one night is a trivial share of a two-week reservation. The downside is math at the checkout and math at the refund. Every conversation about "35% of the remaining balance" is a conversation you didn't need to have.
Full prepayment. Simple and airtight, and increasingly common for one- and two-night peak weekends where a cancellation is genuinely hard to backfill. For longer stays it front-loads a lot of friction, and it raises the stakes of every refund conversation. Use it surgically — holiday weekends, special events — not as a blanket rule.
What we'd skip: token deposits ($10–20 flat). They add checkout friction without doing any of the three jobs. A deposit that doesn't sting a little on cancellation is just a slower way to take a free reservation.
Line the deposit up with your cancellation window
A deposit policy and a cancellation policy are two halves of the same promise, and they fall apart when they're written separately. The clean structure looks like this:
- Outside your cancellation window (say, 14+ days out): full refund of the deposit, minus nothing or minus a small processing amount if you disclose it. You have time to resell the site, so the guest gets their money back.
- Inside the window: the deposit is forfeited — or, gentler, converted to a credit toward a future stay. Credits keep the revenue and keep the relationship, and for a small park that runs on repeat guests, that's usually the better trade.
- No-show: deposit forfeited, remaining nights released the next morning. If no-shows are a recurring problem, deposits are the single most effective fix — we covered the rest of the toolkit in how to cut no-shows without punishing good guests.
Set the window where your real resale odds change. If cancellations inside 14 days rarely get rebooked at your park but 21-day notice almost always does, your window is somewhere between those numbers — not whatever the big resort down the highway uses.
The trade-off nobody puts in the brochure
A stricter deposit policy costs you bookings at the margin. Not many — but some. The family comparing two parks at 9pm will sometimes pick the one that asks for less up front. The spontaneous Tuesday booking for Friday might not happen if Friday costs $85 right now.
You are choosing where to sit on a line: at one end, zero deposit and maximum bookings, some of which were never real; at the other, full prepayment and fewer, firmer bookings. There is no setting that gets you all the bookings and none of the losses. First night's rate with a 14-day window is popular because it's the sensible middle of that line, not because it's magic.
The other cost is administrative — and this is the one that actually breaks deposit policies at small parks. Collecting deposits by phone, logging them in a notebook, and mailing refund checks is enough work that owners quietly stop enforcing their own rules. A policy you don't enforce is worse than no policy: guests learn the rules are soft, and the ones who push hardest get the best deal.
Make the deposit collect itself
This is where taking bookings online earns its keep. When the deposit is charged automatically at checkout — card on file, policy shown before the guest confirms — enforcement stops being a series of awkward conversations and becomes a default. The guest sees the policy, agrees to it by booking, and the money is already in hand if plans change.
Bunkpost handles this the way a small park needs it handled: the deposit is collected at booking, payments run through Stripe Connect with daily payouts to your bank account, and refunds are a click, not a check run. The rest of what it does is on the features page, but the deposit piece alone is the difference between a policy on paper and a policy that works. And because Bunkpost is free for the park — the only charge is a flat $3 booking fee the guest pays at checkout — the deposit math above doesn't need to make room for software costs.
The takeaway
Size your deposit to the cost of a late cancellation, not to a habit. For most small parks that means the first night's rate, refundable outside a window set by your actual resale odds, forfeited or converted to credit inside it. Write it in the same breath as your cancellation policy, show it before the guest confirms, and let the software enforce it so you don't have to.
If you're still collecting deposits over the phone, how it works shows what the online version looks like — most parks are set up in an afternoon, and there's a free 20-minute call if you'd rather have us do it with you.