The industry data coming into 2026 mostly agrees: camping demand is steady, not surging. Occupancy is roughly flat year over year, trips are getting shorter, and the post-2020 gold rush has settled into something more normal. For a small park, that means the easy growth — more bookings, more nights — is harder to find.
Which leaves the number almost nobody tracks: revenue per stay.
You can't add sites by Friday. You can't raise rates every season without testing your regulars' patience. But you can sell the guest who already booked a bundle of firewood, a bag of ice, and an extra two hours on checkout day. Done right, add-ons are a rate increase your guests choose. That's the whole idea, and it's worth doing carefully.
The math nobody runs
For a park that takes around 1,000 reservations a year, an average of $10 in add-ons attached to just 40% of those bookings is $4,000. That's not going to replace your nightly rate, and anyone who tells you add-ons will transform your P&L is selling something. But $4,000 with almost no new labor is real money at a small park — it covers a repair you've been putting off, or most of a season's insurance bump.
The margin profile is what makes it interesting. A rate increase fights gravity: guests compare your nightly price against every other park in the county. An add-on doesn't. Nobody cross-shops your firewood bundle. If it's convenient and fairly priced, they buy it; if not, they skip it and nothing is lost.
What actually sells, ranked by effort
Tier one: things you already stock. Firewood is the workhorse. Many states now tell campers not to haul firewood in — buy it where you burn it — so guests expect to get it from you, and margins on a bundle are healthy. Ice, propane exchanges, and a simple s'mores kit round out the tier. Low labor, low risk, no maintenance. If you do nothing else, do these.
Tier two: selling time. Early check-in and late checkout cost you almost nothing when the calendar allows them. The trick is when the calendar allows them — promising a 12 p.m. check-in on a Saturday changeover creates the exact turnover crunch you charge extra to avoid. Sell time off-peak, price it modestly ($10–20 is common), and let it be a nice surprise rather than a promise you scramble to keep. This is a cousin of the site lock fee: a small charge for something optional that costs you real flexibility, so charge for it deliberately or not at all.
Tier three: toys. Golf carts, kayaks, bike rentals. The revenue per unit is the biggest on this list — a golf cart can rent for more per day than a tent site — but so is everything else: purchase cost, maintenance, storage, and liability. Talk to your insurance agent before you buy the first cart, not after. For most small parks, tier three is a year-two decision, made only after tiers one and two are running themselves.
Sell it at booking, not just at the window
Here's where most small parks leave money on the table: the add-ons exist, but the only way to buy them is to walk into the store and ask. The guest who books at 9 p.m. from their couch is in spending mode right then. If your booking page can offer a firewood bundle and late checkout as line items at checkout — the way Bunkpost handles add-ons — attachment happens while the card is already out. Hoping they stop by the office later is a much weaker play.
The camp store still matters for the second sale: the forgotten ice, the rainy-day purchase, the kid who wants a s'mores kit on night two. If you're ringing those up in a cigar box, a simple point of sale tied to the reservation means the season-end numbers actually tell you what sold — which is how you decide what to stock more of next year.
The line between an add-on and a junk fee
Now the trade-off, because there is one, and it's reputational.
Guests in 2026 have been trained by airlines and resort fees to expect a trap. Regulators have turned on surprise pricing, and so have reviews — "the site was $45 but somehow I paid $70" is one of the most damaging sentences a guest can write about your park. Add-on revenue only works if you stay on the right side of a simple line:
- An add-on is optional. The guest can say no and still have a complete stay. Firewood: optional. A mandatory "facilities fee": junk.
- An add-on is priced before payment. Its own line, its own plain-English name, visible before the card number goes in. Anything revealed after booking is a trap, whatever you call it.
- An add-on delivers something. A bundle of wood shows up. "Processing fees" deliver nothing and guests know it.
This is a hill we're comfortable on, since it's how Bunkpost prices itself: free for the park, with a flat $3 guest booking fee shown as its own labeled line before payment — never a percentage, never buried. Guests don't resent fees they can see and understand. They resent surprises.
The honest cost of doing this well: restraint. Every add-on you list is one more decision at checkout, and a booking page with eleven upsells starts to feel like a budget airline. Three or four well-chosen add-ons will out-earn a dozen mediocre ones, and your booking flow stays clean.
What to skip
- High-labor, low-margin services. Firewood delivery to the site sounds premium but turns your evening staffer into a runner for $3 a trip. Sell the bundle; let them carry it.
- Anything mandatory. If everyone must pay it, it's not an add-on — it belongs in the nightly rate, where guests can compare it honestly.
- Toys before insurance. No cart rentals until your agent has signed off in writing.
Start with two
If this post becomes one action, make it this: pick two tier-one add-ons — firewood and one other — put them on your booking page as optional line items this week, and check the attachment rate at the end of the month. No inventory risk, no new labor, and you'll learn more from thirty days of real data than from any planning session.
If your current setup can't sell an add-on at checkout — or your "booking system" is a phone and a spiral notebook — that's a fixable problem. See how Bunkpost works: your own booking page, add-ons and a camp store built in, payments straight to your bank daily, and nothing for the park to pay. In a flat year, the parks that win won't be the ones with more sites. They'll be the ones earning a little more from every stay they already have.