Hospitality Across America was built on the back of a hundred campgrounds. After more than thirty years in hospitality, most of it in hotels and closing out that chapter with a real estate investment trust, Wendy Heineke sold everything, left Maryland, and went full time RVing. The plan was three years on the road with no plan at all. More than fifty thousand miles and over a hundred campgrounds later, the break had stopped being a break.
The firm that came out of it works the operating side of outdoor hospitality: revenue and reporting foundations, reservation system setup and booking workflows, budgets that match the actual operation, pricing and pace strategy by site type, unit type, and season, SOPs and onboarding manuals, work camper programs, guest service standards, staffing plans, pre-opening frameworks, and KPI reporting an owner can read in five minutes. New developments and operating properties that need a reset, both.
What separates the approach is that the work gets built rather than recommended. Hospitality Across America stays long enough to train the team, then goes back to find out whether the standard held. The perspective behind it comes from both sides of the desk, thirty years of hotel discipline around rate and reporting on one, a hundred campgrounds as a paying guest on the other.
Key Highlights
- Operations and revenue consultancy for campgrounds, RV resorts, and glamping destinations, covering pre-opening frameworks through in-season revenue management
- More than 30 years of hospitality experience, most of it in hotels, closing with a real estate investment trust
- Three years of full time RVing across more than 50,000 miles and 100 campgrounds, which informs the guest side of every recommendation
- Rate strategy built by site type, unit type, season, and demand, paired with reporting that lets an owner see pace week to week instead of reviewing the season after it ends
- Written guest service standards, SOPs, onboarding manuals, and staffing plans designed to run without the consultant on property
- Discovery audit of the digital storefront, covering the website and the full booking path
- Work spans independent owners, multi property portfolios, and private equity owner side oversight
- Serves as Sage’s operating expert partner, providing reality checks on staffing, expenses, and what an operation can realistically produce
Q&A with Wendy Heineke, Founder at Hospitality Across America
Background
Tell us a bit about your company’s history?
The short version is that I spent more than thirty years in hospitality, most of it in hotels, and closed out that chapter with a real estate investment trust. Then we sold everything, left Maryland, and went full time RVing.
That was supposed to be a break. Three years, no plan, just the road. We put on more than fifty thousand miles and stayed at over a hundred campgrounds. Somewhere in there the break stopped being a break, because I could not stop noticing things. The brand new campground with no reservation process. The team doing their honest best to guess because nobody had ever written anything down. The park charging the same rate in February that it charged on the Fourth of July. I would check in, look around, and start rebuilding the operation in my head before we finished leveling the rig.
By the time we stopped moving I knew this was where I wanted to work. Hospitality Across America came out of those hundred campgrounds. Today we work with campgrounds, RV resorts, and glamping destinations on the things that actually move the number: revenue and reporting foundations, how the reservation system is built and how bookings actually flow through it, budgets that match the operation, SOPs and onboarding, work camper programs, and guest service standards a team can run without me standing there. New developments and operating properties that need a reset, both.
More than thirty years of hospitality plus a hundred campgrounds worth of field notes. Field tested, not theory.
What inspired you to work in outdoor hospitality?
The energy, first. Outdoor hospitality right now feels like the hotel industry did years ago, before every process was standardized and every decision ran up through a corporate playbook. There is still room to build something here. You can walk into a park, change how it takes reservations and how it prices its sites, and see it in the numbers inside one season. That kind of speed does not exist in a mature segment anymore.
The guest is the other piece. In a hotel someone stays two nights and leaves. In a campground they stay a week or a season, they bring the family and the dog, and they park thirty feet from a neighbor who is doing the same. The community is real, and the operator’s job is much bigger than a clean room and a hot breakfast. That was new to me and I loved it.
And the segment is growing up in real time. Capital is coming in, expectations are rising, and guests who used to book resorts are booking sites and safari tents and expecting the same standard of service. Most of the properties I walk into already have the product. What they need is the discipline behind it. That gap is the whole reason I do this.
Services and Expertise
What services do you offer, and what sets your approach apart?
We help campgrounds, RV resorts, and glamping destinations grow revenue, tighten operations, and run with better financial clarity. In practice that means the revenue and reporting foundation, reservation system setup and booking workflows, budgets that match the actual operation, pricing and pace strategy by site and unit type and by season, SOPs and onboarding manuals, work camper programs, guest service standards, staffing plans, pre-opening frameworks, and KPI reporting an owner can read in five minutes. We also run a discovery audit on the digital storefront, the website and the booking path, because a property can do everything right on the ground and still lose the booking three clicks earlier on its own website.
What sets the approach apart is that we are on your side of the table and we do the work. I am not going to hand you a deck of recommendations and wish you luck. We build the thing, we train your team to run it, and we stay long enough to find out whether it held.
The other difference is where the experience comes from. More than thirty years in hospitality gives me the discipline, because hotels are ruthless about rate and reporting. A hundred campgrounds as a paying guest gives me the other half, which is what your guest actually experiences from the moment they hit your website to the moment they pull out. I have not met many advisors carrying both, and the combination is what makes the recommendations land.
How do you address current trends in the industry?
Two trends drive most of my work right now, and they are connected.
The first is revenue management. Occupancy at a lot of these properties is fine, but the math underneath it got harder. Insurance, payroll, utilities, and debt service have all climbed. Rates have moved too, but not intelligently. What I see is one number with maybe a weekend bump, no real difference between a premium pull through in October and a back row site in February, and a glamping unit priced the same on a quiet Tuesday in shoulder season as it is on a holiday weekend. That is money left on the table in the high season and empty inventory in the low. So we build a rate strategy by site type, by unit type, by season, and by demand, get the reporting in place so the owner can actually see pace, and teach the team to manage it week to week instead of reacting after the season is over. Revenue management is not a software purchase. It is a habit.
The second is guest service, and it is the one people underestimate. The camper’s expectations moved. They are used to hotels and resorts, they researched you before they booked, and they are paying resort money for a site. They expect the check in to be smooth, the site to be right, the answer at the desk to be correct, and somebody to fix it quickly when it is not. Meanwhile a lot of parks have invested heavily in the product, the pool, the pickleball, the pavilion, and not at all in the service standard around it. You cannot amenity your way out of a bad arrival.
So we write the standard down. What check in sounds like. What happens when a site or a unit is not ready. How a complaint gets handled and by whom. Then we train to it, and we go back and check whether it stuck, because a standard nobody measures is only a suggestion.
The two connect, and that is the part I want owners to hear. Rate integrity depends on service. You cannot charge a premium for an experience you do not consistently deliver. Get the service right and the pricing conversation gets much easier.
Projects and Achievements
What’s a standout project your team has worked on?
The work I am proudest of is not the biggest project. It is the independent owners.
Nobody notices a small park or a 15 unit glamping property getting better. There is no press release. But an independent owner is playing a genuinely hard game, competing against portfolios with revenue managers, marketing departments, and a corporate reporting stack, and doing it while fixing a water line personally. There is no bench. There is the owner, a couple of associates, and whatever the last busy season left in the bank account.
Those are the projects where the work shows up fastest. Give an owner like that a rate strategy instead of one flat number, a reservation workflow that stops leaking, a budget they can actually manage against, and written procedures so the team is not guessing, and the difference shows up for the guest and for the owner.
We have done the multi property portfolio work and the private equity owner side oversight, and I like that work too. But watching an independent owner stop reacting and start operating is the one I would put in a frame.
What outcomes do your clients achieve with your help?
Clarity first, because almost everything else follows from it. Most owners come to us knowing something is off but unable to point at it. So we build the reporting foundation and get the numbers out of the reservation system in a form a human can read. The conversation changes from how do you think the season went to here is what happened, here is why, and here is what we do about it.
From there it is usually the same short list. A rate strategy that reflects season, site and unit type, and demand instead of one number that never moves. A reservations process that stops giving away inventory and stops losing bookings on the website. A budget that matches how the property actually operates, so the variance means something. A team that can hold the standard without the owner standing over them.
The outcome I care most about is whether it holds after we leave. Anybody can lift a number for a quarter by pushing hard. The real test is whether the operation still runs the same way next season when nobody is watching. That is what we build for.
Sage x Hospitality Across America Partnership
How has your partnership with Sage Outdoor Advisory impacted your work?
It puts both halves of the picture in front of the same client, which is rarer in this industry than it should be.
Sage does the market and feasibility work, plus appraisals and valuations. The numbers underneath a project. Whether a site makes sense, what the market supports, what the comp set is really doing. I do the operating side, what it takes to run the thing once it exists. Those two conversations usually happen in separate rooms with separate people, and that is how you end up with a beautiful pro forma nobody on property can deliver.
The relationship runs both directions. Sage brings me in when a client needs the operations layer behind the study, and I recommend Sage often, because when an owner tells me they are thinking about adding fifty sites or a a brand new glamping property, the honest answer is that they need a real feasibility study before they need me. I also serve as their operating expert partner, so when a study needs a reality check on staffing, expenses, or what an operation can realistically produce, I am the call.
For my own work, it keeps me honest. Being close to that volume of market data, and by their own count they have completed more than 350 appraisals and feasibility studies, means I am not guessing at what a market will support. And it puts me in front of projects while the decisions are still cheap to change.
What do you enjoy most about collaborating with us?
They tell clients the truth.
That matters more than it sounds. When the numbers do not support a project, Sage says so. An owner may not enjoy hearing it, but they are far better off knowing before the money goes in the ground than after. I work the same way, which is why the collaboration is easy.
I also appreciate that they respect the operating side. Plenty of people who live in numbers treat operations as the easy part, as though you build it and it runs. Sage understands that a pro forma is a promise somebody on property has to keep. That makes it a conversation instead of a handoff.
And selfishly, they are good to work with. Responsive, no ego, straight answers. In a business where everything moves fast and everyone is stretched thin, that matters more than people admit.
Looking Ahead
What exciting projects are on the horizon?
Honestly, I never know, and that is the part I have come to love.
Three years on the road cured me of planning too far ahead. The best things that have happened in this business arrived as a phone call from someone who got my name from someone else. A property that needs help now. An owner who just closed on something and realized they have no idea what they bought. I have stopped trying to script the next twelve months.
What I can tell you is what I am hoping walks through the door. A new development from the dirt, RV or glamping, where I get to build the operating side before a single bad habit forms. That is the most fun version of this work by a mile, because everything downstream, the reservation rules, the rate structure, the standards, the hires, gets built right the first time instead of unwound two years later.
Revenue management is the other thing pulling at me. It comes up on nearly every call. Owners sense their rates are not right, they do not have anyone whose job it is to fix that, and they do not need a full time hire to get it fixed. I am giving real thought to how to offer that on its own.
Beyond that, ask me in six months. Something good will have shown up. It always does.
How do you see your role (or your company) in shaping the future of outdoor hospitality?
I want this industry to grow up without losing what makes it good.
Those two pull against each other. Capital came in, expectations went up, and the segment now needs real reporting, real rate discipline, real standards, the things hotels sorted out decades ago. Helping bring that discipline in is a good part of what I do. But hotels also lost something on the way to becoming professional. They standardized until every stay felt the same. Nobody drives four hundred miles to feel nothing.
So the way I see my role is making operators more disciplined without making them generic. Put the systems underneath the property so the owner is not guessing, then get out of the way of whatever makes that place itself. The pond, the potluck, the ridge line the tents were built to face, the person at the desk who knows everybody’s dog. You cannot template that and you should not try.
The other piece is capability. I am not trying to be necessary. Every SOP, dashboard, and training we leave behind is built to work after we are gone. If this industry is going to hold the standard it is reaching for, it has to be held by the people on property, not by consultants flying in. That is what I am building toward.