Today I’m filing a blog entry in the ol’ complaint box. Early campground checkout times are one of my chief annoyances with the camping industry.
Kristy and I typically do our driving in the afternoon, and arrive at campgrounds in the evening. There have been a couple of occasions when we checked into a campground for an overnight stay at 10PM. The next morning, some guy in a golf cart was rapping on our door to boot us off our site by 11AM. At times we’ve even encountered nasty confrontational attitudes! In a tip of the hat to Seinfeld, we’ll dub these overzealous characters Campground Nazis.
We’re talking about a campground, not a hotel. There’s no team of maids coming through to clean the campsite. In most cases, there’s no shortage of available campsites for new arrivals. Why shouldn’t campers be able to stay until 2PM?
For those of us who are “location independent professionals,” mornings are often important times to work. And there’s the process of hitching and breaking down camp; having a little extra time to do these chores is quite helpful. Three hours may not sound like much, but sometimes it’s the difference between a pleasant enjoyable morning and a stressful one.
Yes, campground owners are free to set 11AM checkout times if they wish. But RV’ers are free to “camp” at Walmart or other such places where there are no early checkout hassles. Sure, we’d all rather stay in a REAL park, but it sucks away the fun when some “Campground Nazi” is barking orders for no good reason.
If I owned and operated a campground, I’d want my guests to have as enjoyable an experience as possible. I’d want repeat business. I’d have a 2PM (or later) checkout time.
That’s what I think. What do YOU think?
Couldn’t agree more!!!!! My husband works from the road and these early check-out times are really challenging. This has been my biggest complaint for the past 2 months. Three hours makes a huge difference! On a positive note, we stayed at an RV park in Prospect, Oregon and the owner didn’t believe in checkout times. As long as you notified him of what time you preferred to leave and if no one else had that site reserved, he was perfectly fine with folks staying a little longer during the day. It was great!!! Makes for a much more pleasant experience.
Lani, we need to start a 2PM checkout time movement! Three hours really does make a huge difference. I like to spend my mornings doing my work on the Internet & sipping coffee, not fending off Campground Nazis. There have been times on the road when we’ve chosen to overnight park at Walmart because we knew we wouldn’t be rushed the next morning.
Sadly, I can remember the “bad apple campgrounds” in this category all too well. There have been a couple of occasions when I’ve spoken out against these policies. (Yes, I’m thinking of YOU, Malibu RV Park Campground Nazi… ;)) It really makes for a sour start to the day when you’re debating with some guy about the campsite for which you just paid $40 (or in the case of Malibu, $100!).
Yes, it makes me appreciative of the campgrounds that have a more understanding checkout policy.
Yup. Was camping at a resort campground in Foxboro MA (name withheld to protect the guilty) a few weeks back.Check out at 11. We were running a little late, was finishing hitching when the ‘ranger’ came by and see if we were leaving. They had another person showing up for our space. Yeah, it’s a costly resort, but the minute (literally) we pulled out, they had another camper in our spot (we were out of the spot at 11:05). Now today is the first day back from a weekend of camping at Victoria Campground (COE) on Lake Allatoona, GA. Our check out time was 3 PM! Funny thing is, this COE campground had the exact same ammenities(W/E) of that other campground in Foxboro, at 1/4 th the price. Added benefit for Victoria was it was right on the lake. But the one in Foxboro did have a lot of family type stuff, 4 swimming pools, etc etc.
So why is it that Federal/State parks can get away with having later check out times? It’s not like they have to do laundry, vacuum the rugs, etc. Are we missing something here?
Maybe as we think this thing through, we will arrive at an “ideal” campground policy. 3PM checkout times rock! I am also happy with 2PM. Noon (although it seems to be widely accepted) is slightly annoying, and 11AM is just plain ridiculous.
The hotel comparison is spot on…. I mean, there’s no reason that a campground checkout time should be like a hotel. Campgrounds typically don’t do much if anything to the site. There’s no room to be cleaned, vacuumed, etc. (Only exception I’ve seen is Disney’s Ft. Wilderness, where they do manually clean every site after a camper departs!)
I can understand a busy campground with few or no available sites wanting guests to make a timely departure. I just think that the timely departure should be at 2PM or later (with a 3PM or later check in time). And there have been times when we’ve been hassled by the Campground Nazis in half-empty campgrounds.
From our standpoint, those early checkout times cost those campgrounds our business. When we’ve been traveling around the country, at times we’ve stopped at Walmart instead of private campgrounds simply because we wanted to escape the early checkout time.
Noon is too early IMHO. Put me down for one more vote for 2PM earliest. That way you have time for a light lunch before breaking camp.
You all are looking at it from the point of view .. your already their and why should you leave…
Think a min about the guys who are inbound and show up at noon and want to get all set up so they can go play… 3Pm. Is a little late in the afternoon expecally if it gets dark at 430.
Doesn’t give them much time to go get supplies, return and still make the nightly ranger rick show at 6 or 7pm.
When we are on the road, we check in at the heat of the day 4 or so. When we leave its usually to get a good days work on the road so when the sun comes up we are too and gone by 5 or 6AM.
Not getting soft now are you ….
@4Galvs, I agree that noon is too early. With a noon checkout I still feel rushed out the door. For those of us who work from our RV, an extra 2-3 hours is gold. And like you say, enjoying a pleasant lunch at the RV makes for a nice conclusion to the camping stay.
@GMAs…. GMAs! You’re alive! I thought maybe you had gone to Alaska and forgotten the way home. 😀
My friend, it’s early risers like you who are causing trouble for the rest of us…. But seriously, my observation is that many RVers are indeed early risers and early departers — the upshot being that there are usually PLENTY of empty sites by mid-morning.
So I think we can meet in the middle on this one. Let’s say you show up early for a 3PM check in time. Well, in most cases, there will be available sites anyway, so you could go ahead and do an early check in. The only time this would pose a problem would be the rare occasion when the campground is at 100% full capacity; in that case, “sorry buddy, but you need to come back after lunch.” 🙂
3PM… nope… thats not the middle thats the end of the day so to speak…
heee heee.. well we had a camp ground reserved… for staying after the shoot… the movie was about cops and robbers… anyway… the site manager came back and said that “lazy squatters were still in the spots and refused to leave until after noon:” The real cops ask if they should go roust ’em out… and we said.. no we are going to relocate and shoot over their… They ask if they should go let ’em know that a movie is going to be made… NO.. I said I want real reactions so lets not disturb ’em ‘n lets have some fun… so…we quietly set some cameras up on location in the park. We take one of the sets… old explosive trailer and tow car… and quietly park it in a empty spot… ….and then q’d the actors and extras… with remote control the radio starts playing a little loud in the trailer… some internal tape voices of “they will never find us here:” .
Now how do you think the people in the trailers/mh ‘s took this… without notice…
.Quiet in the park.. suddenly 6 stunt police cars enter with lights and PA a blasting about the… area is covered.. civilans stay in your RV’s… John you have no escape… we have got you John the abductor… hand over the little girl hostage … and if you don’t come out in 2 min we will start in after you. DEAD OR ALIVE… (now people in the RVs are all at the windows eyes as big as saucers… looking at all the actor cops (they didn’t know that) which have guns drawn and pointed towards the set trailer and car… along with the news media vans (our cameras) ya …suppose at this point they are still sleepy.. I don’t think soooo…)
but… we only wait for about 5 seconds then the pryo guys start shooting smoke and blow up a few squibs… heavy flash bangs and things exploding… then we blow the car and then the trailer… and the actors use auto gunfire to assult the trailer… its a war zone ….
and …its enought to wake the dead… and you can bet all eyes from the RV’s are on the trailer that is being assulted… (sort of like the words.. look out.. and everyone wants to see what it is… vs Fire.. and everyone runs)
Now while all this is going on… other real RV people suddenly start poping out… yelling something about… better get the *%$#@ out of hear… lighten up their RV’s and head out the driveway… some of the trailers are not even hooked all the way up and drug…awnings still flapping in the breeze… I mean it clears the park out pronto… the one guy .. was so confused that he and his came out and assumed the position on the ground… ( later the real cops arrested him for warrants that he had outstanding… to say the least he confessed and when they walked him to the real police car… he walked kinda funny… ).. all on film… and to think we didn’t even have to pay for the people as extras… (the park manager was just waving at ’em as they left… while the real cops directed traffic… grin)
then as fast as it happend… its over… and over the bull horn we said.. thats a wrap… and the fire dept comes in and hoses down the blown stuf… Good take and used the footage on one of the shows… only two trailers remained .. that was because the owners were not home at the time…
Now where are you staying again???… after all you do want to be in the movies don’t you……. we have this great big piece of equipment that makes the ground shake like a earthquake… we need to test out… 🙂 what about lunch 😉 😉
We also had the WORST experience at the Malibu RV park. I’m pretty sure I referred to that guy as a Nazi as well (and probably got close to some words with him).
Totally agree on the checkout time thing. A campground is not a hotel and it doesn’t seem like anyone ever ends up checking *in* very early, so it’s not like there are people waiting to get into spots that are full.
Yeah, we were disappointed in the Malibu campground. The campsite location and view were fine (albeit expensive), but the prevailing attitude of the staff was unbelievable. A rude, snobby campground? After the checkout time incident I wished I’d been rolling my video camera…it would’ve been fun to capture it on video.
In the future we may try negotiating checkout times over the phone in advance. If they want the business, everything’s negotiable…
We started in Georgia in August (still going strong) and made it all the way to the west coast before we got our first bad taste of road life and it was all courtesy of Malibu RV park.
The parking was scary (we got a small spot at the very top) and it was slanting down towards the cliffs. *No* way to get to the beach without getting hit by a car crossing the PCH. Walking into the RV and seeing more ants than I’ve seen in my life.
To top it off, we get back from a nice dinner in LA with a friend (with us to see the RV) to find out that we “aren’t allowed guests” with us after 10pm. Then we get an earful for leaving our dogs in our air-conditioned trailer while we were gone (he almost called animal control, etc etc). One good thing about RV living – you can always just pack up and check out the next spot. Haven’t hit another bad campground yet! 🙂
Mike
toddvsroad.blogspot.com
Mike, I feel sort of vindicated to learn that it wasn’t just us who had issues with the Malibu RV Park. We later browsed a bunch of online reviews of the place and learned that other people had similar experiences there.
The next time we went through Los Angeles we stayed at a different park (a place in Van Nuys called Birmingham RV Park). It wasn’t as scenic but it was more centrally located, less expensive, and the people were a lot more friendly. And there were no ants!
We also stayed at a place in Anaheim (right outside Disneyland) that was fine.
It’s a shame about Malibu… Next time we stay in that part of LA we’ll probably look at the state parks instead.
Cheers,
Sean