You build the add-on from a product you already sell, set its price mode, inventory and gating, and turn on the surfaces you want it to appear on. Late checkout sells best from a consent-gated text on arrival morning that links the guest into their stay pass. The performance report then shows what sold at checkout, during the stay, and by text.
Every park has a version of this conversation at 10:40 in the morning. A guest at the desk asks whether they can stay a couple of extra hours, somebody checks the arrivals board, and the answer is yes, and often it's free because charging for it in that moment feels awkward.
Late checkout is worth money. So is firewood bought before they arrive, a golf cart for the weekend, and a fire ring bundle waiting at the site. Add-ons are how those get sold without anyone having to be a salesperson at the front desk.
What is a campground add-on?
An add-on is a product you already have, turned on for more surfaces. You're not building a second catalog. Each one carries:
- A price mode. Flat, per night, per guest, or per unit. Firewood is per unit. A resort fee is per night. A guided paddle is per guest.
- Taxability, and a minimum and maximum quantity, so nobody buys eleven late checkouts.
- A fulfillment type. Delivered to the site, picked up, scheduled, or nothing to fulfill at all, which is what late checkout is.
- A refund policy, so the rules are set before someone asks.
- Inventory by date. Six golf carts on Saturday is six, and the sixth sale takes the last one. It's a hard stop, not a suggestion.
Who gets offered what?
Gating is where an add-on catalog stops being a junk drawer. Each add-on can be limited to certain site types, to a date range, to particular days of the week, and to a lead time relative to arrival, all evaluated in your park's time.
So the golf cart offer shows up only for the sites where a cart makes sense. Late checkout is offered on Sunday and not on Saturday, because Saturday's arrival board is full. The Thanksgiving dinner add-on appears for that week and disappears afterward without anyone remembering to turn it off.
Where do add-ons get sold?
The surfaces
At checkout, add-ons price server side and post as their own lines with their own tax line, and the booking and the add-ons are written together. If an add-on fails, for instance the last golf cart went while the guest was typing their card number, the whole thing rolls back rather than confirming a booking with a cart it can't deliver.
How is the check-in day text controlled?
The arrival day text is the one that makes operators nervous, and it should. Here's what governs it.
It's off unless you turn it on. It goes only to guests who gave marketing consent, one offer per stay, never during quiet hours. You write the wording yourself, so it sounds like your park. One product per park can hold the arrival text, which forces the useful question: if you could send your arriving guests exactly one offer, what is it? For most parks the answer is late checkout, because it costs nothing to deliver and the guest is already thinking about their Sunday.
An offer you can't turn off in ten seconds is an offer your guests will remember for the wrong reason.
How do you fulfill what sold?
Anything with something to hand over lands on a fulfillment list. Staff move each item through its steps, every transition is recorded, and the guest sees it move. Late checkout has nothing to fulfill, so it never clutters that list. A fire ring bundle for site 30 does, and it shows up on the morning the guest arrives.
Refunds run per line. Refunding a golf cart reverses the charge, posts a credit on the folio, and releases the cart back into that Saturday's inventory, which is the part that matters. Inventory that doesn't come back after a refund is inventory you'll spend the season underselling.
How do you know which placement paid?
At month end the add-on report breaks revenue out by where the sale came from: checkout, in stay, and the text. Gross, refunded, net, your top items, and the conversion funnel on the text offer, from sent to opened to bought.
That last number is the one to watch over a season. Say a park of that size sends the text to 212 arriving guests in a month and 38 of them buy late checkout at $30. That's a little over a thousand dollars from a message that took an afternoon to write, on a product with no cost of goods and no fulfillment. Your park's number will be its own number, which is exactly why the funnel is in the report instead of in a marketing claim.
How many add-ons should you start with?
The temptation with an add-on catalog is to build twenty of them in one sitting. Build two: one thing you already sell constantly, and late checkout. Run them for a month, read the report by source, then add the third. A short list that sells beats a long list that makes the checkout page feel like an airline.