If you run a campground or RV park, you already know the software you pick shapes almost everything: how fast your team checks guests in, how easy it is to fill sites during a slow week, and whether your evenings get eaten up fixing booking mix-ups.
I work at RMS, so I'll say upfront where I stand, but I've tried to keep this useful rather than purely self-serving. Here's how the five platforms US operators ask about most often actually compare.
1. RMS
RMS is built to be the system you stop thinking about, because it just works. Guests can check themselves in from their phone, pick their exact site on an interactive map, and pay without your front desk lifting a finger. The award-winning booking engine lets guests pick the site that's right for their RV, so no more mismatches between RV length and site size.
What most PMS overlook, RMS gets right: the ability to setup the site-specific details that give guests certainty that their RV will fit their site.
Patrick McDonough, Director of Products, Cove Communities
Your team gets one clean view of every property, so nobody's re-entering the same booking twice or hunting through spreadsheets during a busy weekend.
Support is real people, US-based, with coverage any time of day or night, not just a ticket queue you hope someone checks on Monday.
Some of the RMS North America team at Hitec in June 2025
And because RMS isn't secretly running its own booking marketplace on the side, your park is the one getting the attention, not a competitor's listing sitting next to yours. You also get to keep all the fees you collect, rather than handing some over to your tech vendor.
With 250+ integrated partners, including outdoor specialists like Wild Energy, Vutility, AppMyCommunity and Spot2Nite, you can plug in to your existing ecosystem, without having to switch your whole tech stack.
Parks like Riverbend on the Frio, Texas, and RVC Outdoor Destinations, Tennessee, switched to RMS and now point to smoother reporting, easier scaling across multiple properties, and instant guest notifications (handy when a storm rolls in) as the difference it made. If you want software that feels like it was actually built for outdoor hospitality, this is where I'd start.
2. Newbook (now part of Storable)
Newbook got its start serving Australian holiday parks and is now owned by a self-storage company, which shows in a few places: things that feel basic elsewhere, like getting help when something breaks or having room to store your documents and photos, come with limits and extra hoops. Users also point to the high costs of running on Newbook, so worth doing your maths before you get in touch with them.
It doesn't offer the kind of modern, self-serve booking or contactless check-in experience today's campers expect. To connect with Airbnb and other booking channels, it leans on a handful of outside tools rather than handling it natively. Switching over typically takes about three weeks. People who've used it say it keeps improving, and the support team is genuinely good, but also describe it as a lot to learn, with a system that can feel clunky day-to-day.
Choose Newbook if.. I work for RMS, I cannot decently tell you to ever choose Newbook :-)
3. Campspot
Here's the thing to know about Campspot before anything else: it's not just a reservation management software; it's also its own booking marketplace. For any campground owner, that means three things
-
Your listing can end up sitting right next to a competing park
-
Campspot ultimately owns that guest data rather than handing it fully to you, thereby limiting your ability to remarket to guests and building loyalty.
-
You will need to pay Campspot a comission for every booking you get. Typically these fees are around the 3% mark, which is a significant bite out of your revenue.
Support only comes by email on weekday business hours, so nights and weekends you're on your own. Guests need to download a separate app to manage their stay, and your staff can't easily text a group of guests at once if you need to get the word out fast. Uptime has been hit-and-miss with campsites reporting long outages. It does connect with a few well-known booking sites and payment terminals, and people generally find it easy to use. But reviewers say it gets pricey and unwieldy once a park grows past a certain size, and the reports it generates aren't easy to tailor to how you actually run your business.
Choose Campspot if you need the OTA marketplace to fill your campground and are ok with commission-based pricing.
4. Firefly Reservations
Firefly is owned by the same company behind ReserveAmerica, and it shows: bookings flow naturally to that channel, plus a couple of others like Airbnb. It's genuinely quick to get going; you can be live within an hour of loading your rates, but that speed comes at a cost: there's no real training or hand-holding to get your team comfortable; you're just switched on.
After-hours arrivals lean on a self-service kiosk instead of a proper mobile experience, and texting guests runs through a bolted-on third-party tool rather than anything built-in. People who've used it call it easy to pick up, with decent customer service, but also mention it can feel glitchy and short on the integrations a growing park eventually needs.
Choose Firefly if your campground is fairly small (less than 50 sites) and if you want to get going quickly.
5. ResNexus
ResNexus handles the essentials fine: booking, channel connections, a guest portal. It reaches a good spread of booking sites, including a few built specifically for outdoor stays. Where it falls short is support: despite what the marketing says, you can't actually reach someone by phone around the clock, and if a problem hits on a weekend, you'll likely be waiting. Real training beyond the basics requires paying for a separate course. Its check-in relies on a phone app, so you're at the mercy of Apple and Google's update schedules.
Users say the support team is genuinely helpful when you do reach them and appreciate the e-signature tools, but plenty have been caught out by that "24/7 support" claim not holding up when they needed it most.
Choose Resnexus if you need a light system to get you going quickly.
The bottom line
Every one of these platforms can technically take a booking. The real difference shows up at 9pm on a Saturday when something goes wrong, or when you're trying to grow from one park to five without your admin workload tripling.
If you want a system built for outdoor hospitality from the ground up, with support that actually answers and a team that's rooting for your park rather than competing with it, RMS is the one I'd put in front of you first.
We started looking for a new system when our previous one kept getting more expensive and features that were once included suddenly became paid add-ons. RMS stood out because it’s flexible, easy to customise, and the team has been genuinely helpful from day one.
Shannon Cover, Property Manager at Riverbend on the Frio, Tx
