Tap to Pay on iPhone is coming soon. Once it is turned on for a park, staff ring the sale in the Host app, the guest taps a card, phone, or watch against the back of the phone, and the payment lands under card in the day's totals like any counter reader sale.
Your maintenance lead is on the far loop when a guest flags him down wanting two bundles of firewood off the cart. The old answer is to send them to the office, which is a quarter mile away and closes in ten minutes, and about a third of the time that sale doesn't happen.
The new answer is that he takes the card on the phone in his pocket.
What is tap to pay at a campground?
Contactless card acceptance on the phone itself. The guest taps their card, phone, or watch against the back of your staff member's iPhone, and the sale is taken. There's no dongle, no sled, no reader to charge overnight and lose in a golf cart.
It runs on the same card present rails as the readers on your counter and posts the same way, so a phone tap and a counter tap end up as the same kind of sale in your books, with the same receipt to the guest and the same fee treatment.
What has to be true before it works?
This is the checklist worth running before you tell your staff about it, because the surprises all live here.
Readiness
Your payments screen walks the account side of that: an owner or manager requests in person acceptance, and the screen shows the status while it's reviewed and once it's live. The panel stays out of the way until your park is actually connected, because a settings screen full of things you can't use is its own kind of noise.
Does it replace your counter readers?
The counter readers keep working exactly as they do. Tap to pay is for the places a reader was never going to be: the marina dock, the far loop, the gate on a Friday check-in rush, the farmers market table the park runs on Saturdays.
Fees are the same as your other in person card sales, and the fee is figured on the sale itself, excluding tax and tip. The receipt is the same receipt. The payment shows in the day's totals under card, in the same tender line as the counter readers, so reporting doesn't sprout a new category because the hardware changed shape.
Where does the sale actually happen?
The staff member opens the register in the CampGuide Host app on their phone, rings the two bundles, and picks the card reader tender. The phone collects the tap. The amount is computed on the server from the order itself rather than typed in, so the number charged is the number on the order, and a repeated tap doesn't create a second charge.
At the marina, the same flow handles a custom amount at the dock, which is how fuel and pumpout usually go.
Which sale were you losing?
Most parks can't measure this one, because a sale that doesn't happen leaves no record anywhere. The guest who was told to walk to the office and decided they'd rather not is invisible in every report you have.
What you can measure, once it's running, is how many card sales get taken somewhere other than the counter. At most parks that number surprises people by the end of the first month.