Epic Road Trip Planner Daily Campground Info Cleanup

February 11, 2025 by Tim Johns

As a founder, I wear a lot of different hats, one of which is "campground info reviewer." Every morning I personally scan through our analytics data to look for at least one popular campground that hasn't been manually reviewed and updated in our system in a while -- or at all. I always find a TON of them that I'd really LIKE to update, but I usually have to prioritize one or two of the most popular.

Why It's Important

I believe folks rely on correct, up-to-date information to make their road trips epic in a good way, rather than epic in a "certainly memorable but not something I'd EVER want to repeat" way. I heard this repeatedly even before I started working on Epic Road Trip Planner, and I've certainly lived it firsthand. Although I do have to admit some of my own epic road trips didn't go even remotely as planned, and those make for great stories, there's plenty of opportunity for that kind of serendipity beyond "do we have somewhere reasonable to stay tonight?" When it comes to campgrounds, specifically, uncertainty around issues such as seasonal closures, recent wildfire and hurricane impacts, availabilty of amenities such as hookups, power, water, and restrooms, as well as fees and changing rules and regulations all have an impact on how stressful planning a road trip can be. And that's JUST campgrounds!

For folks planning a road trip, resolving this particular uncertainty often results in visting three or more separate apps and web sites, and in the end, STILL making an educated guess. We'd REALLY like to streamline and improve that experience. Reducing the uncertainty and associated stress of road trip planning is quite literally the whole point. It's why I created Epic Road Trip Planner.

The Process

Overview

Cleaning up campground information is an ongoing, never-ending process, and, frankly, WAY more than I can ever handle by myself if I tried to review all of them in a given day. Or week. Or month(!). To wrangle it into something managable, I find it absolutely critical for the process to have:

  • Regular, consistent applied effort, so this doesn't become a giant mental furball of a "project" that can be deferred idefinitely and prioritized against other very big aspirational projects, efforts, and great ideas. For ensuring regular, consistent applied effort, I block out a couple of periodic daily meeting times on my calendar.
  • Ruthless prioritization, so that the time that I AM able to dedicate to this can have the biggest impact. I generally use my metrics and analytics, with any available direct customer feedback taking priority.
  • Structure, so that folks viewing campgrounds consistently get the most relevant information, AND so that I'm maximally efficient AND effective with my time and energy.

My calendar has "Daily Metrics Checks" and "Daily Campground Cleanup" meetings, among others. During the "Daily Metrics Checks", I review a comprehensive business-wide report that is updated automatically every morning, one page of which is "Top Campgrounds." The "Top Campgrounds" Page contains two tables. One table lists all campgrounds returned (but not necessarily displayed) to all users. These are the campgrounds that we display as icons on the map along the road trip routes. It's my theory that these are the campgrounds most likely to be visited (or at least driven past!) on road trips taken by Epic Road Trip Planner users - so we want good data for the most frequent campgrounds that show up there. The other table lists those campgrounds for which a name and thumbnail actually displayed. For most road trips of any significant length, we can't display all, so we list a few "above the fold", and it's my theory those are the ones most likely to be NOTICED by a someone using Epic Road Trip Planner - so we want good data for the most frequent campgrounds that show up there, as well.

As a side note, there's currently no sophisicated algorithm making the determination of which returned campgrounds to display above the fold -- as of this moment, we just display them in the order they're returned from our database. We DO have some of our own ideas in the works, but what I'd really love is your feedback on how we can recommend campgrounds relevant to you and your specific road trips. Please let me know!

In any case, during the "Daily Metrics Checks", I'll usually just note one, or maybe a couple, and I have set aside a bigger block of time to actually update them during the "Daily Campground Cleanup."

Basic Steps

A lot of these (ESPECIALLY the research projects!) turn out to be a bit "vibe-based", but there are a few criticial basic steps that apply fairly universally.

  1. During the Daily Metrics check, open the "Top Campgrounds" Page in Looker Studio
  2. Ensure Campgrounds Returned table is sorted by count, which indicates which are most popular
  3. Start scanning down the list until such time as we find one with no "Last Reviewed By" date, or we notice one that hasn't been reviewed this season
  4. Click thru on the campground in question, which will open a "Campgrounds" tab in our Admin console, with the campground to be reviewed pre-populated.
  5. Click "Look Up Campground"

  6. Review - Is this actually a campground?

    Most of the data sources we use provide information on many additional facilities that aren't actually campgrounds in the sense that you'd plan an overnight stop at one on a road trip. For instance, we don't want a day use only site or a reservable classroom facility to show up in the list of campgrounds along your route. If that's the case, we'll override the category so it doesn't automatically show up in the "Campgrounds Along Your Route" display in Epic Road Trip Planner by default.

  7. Review - Does the name make sense?

    It's actually pretty rare that the name needs editing, but sometimes they do, and since the name is often the very first thing folks see, it's important. I'll sometimes edit the name to something more precise or concise, or just fix any minor spelling or punctuation errors.

  8. Review - Does the description make sense?

    This is the big one. There are too many detailed steps to list out here, and we're revising them daily, but for starters, we get the initial short descriptions primarily from Campflare, or alternatively Recreation.gov, both of whom provide a public API (Application Programming Interface) that we can use to get description information. The various sources of good descriptions get sparse and disparate after that. We get data from Washington State Parks, for example, and a few other data sources, but the vast majority of them do not provide a description we can use, so a lot of these empty description updates end up turning into what I call "research projects." These "Research projects" are crucial, valuable, and, to be honest: really, really fun, but unfortunately, quite time consuming. I'll generally schedule a significant block of time on my calendar for any research projects - at a minimum, several hours.

  9. Review - Is there a thumbnail photo?

    This is important, too, since it really sets the tone for the campground, and puts the text description in context. Obviously a lot of us plan and take road trips with the aesthetics top of mind, and a relevant photo provides some instant ground truth where the description might otherwise leave a lot to the imagination. If there's not a photo that we have the rights to use, we'll need to find one - OR, much more fun but time consuming, I'll start planning a road trip to go TAKE some photos.

What's Next?

We recently added an Admin-only "Edit" button that shows up for all Epic Road Trip Planner admins (currently, that's just me) on each campground, anywhere on the site. I can use those to edit a campground directly, in the moment, outside of the process above. Typically, I use the edit button while I'm either planning or actually taking my own road trip and happen to be viewing the campground for some other purpose. This button has proven to be incredibly handy, since I have to admit I'll almost ALWAYS notice SOMETHING I'd like to add or edit whenever I'm actually physically IN the campground or digging into the detailed planning. This has already proven so useful, that I'm planning to add a "Suggest an Edit" button just as soon as I can prioritize it, so that anyone can contribute in this same fashion.

Please let me know what you think, and if you haven't already, check out Epic Road Trip Planner!

-Tim