3 Ways to Expand Your Hipcamp Business

When you created your Hipcamp listings you carefully filled out, tweaked and adjusted over 200 settings to make sure we can help the right Hipcampers find you—thanks for all that work! But life is full—you’re on the go, you’re managing your land, your businesses, and your Hipcamp. Very few of those settings need regular adjustment, which is why we developed your Host Dashboard Homepage. Our goal is to make running and growing your Hipcamp business as smooth and as seamless as possible.

Log in to Hipcamp and go to your Host Dashboard. It’s the starting point for everything you need to know at a glance: statistics on how you’re doing, upcoming bookings and actions you might want to take on them, and at the bottom, top tips personalized for you.

Let’s jump into a few ways to start expanding and managing your Hipcamp business today:

1. Access specific tips on getting more bookings

In your Host Dashboard, you’ll find at least 3 specific tips on how to drive more bookings to your unique camps. These tips are based on how your camps are doing, how you have them set up, and what tweaks or adjustments could help get you more bookings. For example, improving your acceptance rate helps you appear higher in Hipcamp searches, which could drive more bookings to your camp in the future.

Take a look at some of the tips you might find below:

• Improve your Acceptance Rate by syncing a calendar.
• Get professional photos of your listing. [Limited to certain regions.]
• Improve your Acceptance Rate by setting up “advance notice.”
• Opt-in to SMS alerts so you never miss a booking request.
• Expiring requests can hurt your Acceptance Rate.
• Your listing might be overpriced for your area.
• Add more photos so Hipcampers can see how unique your land is.
• Switch to Instant Book to get more eyes on your listing.
• Sharing your listing on social can get you a booking faster.
• Your weekend availability is a little low. Open up weekends for Hipcampers to book.
• Drive bookings to your listing by adding a toilet.
• You might appear in more searches if you allow pets.
• Reduce your minimum night requirement to get your first booking faster.

2. Monitor your camp’s health

At the top of your Host Dashboard, you’ll find stats to empower and help you keep track of the “health” of your camp. For example, if you make a change to your camp (like switching from a 1 night minimum to a 2 night minimum) and the number of views you receive in 30 days stays the same but the number of bookings you receive goes down, you may want to re-evaluate that change (in our example case, this might mean switching back to a 1-night minimum.)

Acceptance rate is used as a guide to understand what percentage of requests to book you have approved. Accepting a request counts towards your acceptance rate, while expiring (not responding) or declining a request counts against it. Messaging the Hipcamper does not count as responding.

Read more on how acceptance rate is calculated here but remember, this only applies to you if your camps are set up as ‘Request to Book’.

Your response time lets Hipcampers know how quickly they should expect a response from you, on a scale of 0 to 24 hours. Requests expire after 24 hours. Again, this statistic only applies to you if your camps are set up as ‘Request to Book.’

3. Use new tools to manage and expand your business

We’re excited to have released a suite of tools to help you better manage your Hipcamp, including ability to edit your calendar in bulk (if you need to close for the season, for example), ability to charge campers for extra firewood or tours, ability to flesh out kitchen details at your camp, and an improved insurance policy to support more activities on your land.

Here are a few more features we released for Hosts this year:

• Ability to give campers refunds
• New receipts and an improved payout page
• Ability to collect Transient Occupancy Taxes
• Fire ban feature (see below, available at the top of your Listings page.)

We’ve also released several features to Hipcampers that will help drive bookings to your camp, including saving recent searches, popular camp badges, featuring Points of Interest, and our new App.

We hope this guide and these new additions to our system help your hosting experience. Our mission will always be to help people get outside—and you, our Hosts, are the greatest gift to help us do so. Thank you.