As someone who loves to camp in Wisconsin, I think the Department of Natural Resources is barking up the wrong tree when it comes to camping fees.
The DNR is taking comments and will hold a couple public input sessions about a proposed rate increase from $10 to $12 per night in most of the States public campgrounds.
Personally, I’m OK with paying a few more bucks a night to camp. It’s a good value in my opinion and the quality time you get with family and friends can’t be beat.
When it comes to “fees” though, I think the DNR should be focused on the outrageous fee that you have to pay to “Reserve America” just for the “reservation fee” on every site you book. Two nights in Buckhorn State Park might cost you $30 to camp, but you have to pay another $10 to book the camp site itself. For every additional camp site, even if you’re reserving them at the same time, it’s another $10!
That’s a 30% fee just to reserve the spot! The kicker is you can’t get around paying that fee, which by all indications, goes right to the pocket of some outsourced website vendor (from Canada no less) who makes a killing off providing nothing more than an online reservation system.
It would seem to me that the DNR could bring it’s reservation system “in house” and provide a better camping experience for residents, while lowering costs and bringing more revenue into the State coffers.
I live in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI with my wife Jen, our daughter Emerson, and sons Carter and Colton.
I had some friends who worked at Reserve America in Madison some years back and they all commented on how they weren’t exactly proud of doing the bidding of a “ridiculously obvious middleman”.
Dan – I was working at a state park when they changed from the reservation system to the new “middle man” approach and at that time I wrote a letter to Sue Black warning her about this approach. (I was actually asked to stay and implement the system for several state park, but I declined and instead took an internship where I met the smartest computer geek I’ve ever known — what was his name??!)
Anyway … I hated this idea then and I hate it now.
The WDNR actually did have an in house system, but moved away to this model. I wonder how they truly believe it is working?
I think his name was “Mike” :)
Well played! LOL.
If you run the numbers, you’ll quickly realize they are hardly making a killing. I don’t know how a business like that can even be profitable. Just to cover one employee at $65k plus another $20k for benefits, that’s 8,500 reservations. It’s annoying that it’s a bit of a “hidden fee” that you don’t see until the last minute, but surely you’d be paying more than $10 per reservation if WI built and maintained their own reservation system. I think you are ignoring the benefits from the economies of scale that outsourcing gets you in this case. You only need to build the system once, rather than once for every state.
That assumes the DNR is their only customer. If they have a generic system that just needs to have some initial set up done for new customers then the overhead can be small per customer.
$10 per transaction is pretty high.
It does not assume that DNR is their only customer. In fact, I know it is not their only customer. I am only saying that they have to have a huge volume of transactions just to break even on 1 employee. It is not a cash cow.
Matt, actually the reservations were done by staff already on hand. During the vacation months of May-Sept, reservations were taken by summer help. We would work the front desk checking people in, selling vehicle passes, etc. and taking reservations via phone and mail in less frequent cases.
Also, at the time I worked there, reservations were sent in at the beginning of the year, not the rolling 11 month window like today, so January 1st saw a lot of mail for reservations. The summer help would come back from college to help enter those reservations alongside full-time staff that was on-hand already.
There was no person staffed for taking reservations above the people that were already on the dole.
If they wanted to pay for the summer/college help, they could have put a $1 reservation fee, which would have more than paid for the help that was making $5/hr, without benefits to enter those orders.
According to their website, they handle the same thing for many other states as well as the Federal Gov. They claim to have processed over 4 million transactions last year, and while I don’t know if they charge $10 for every one, I can imagine they’re making a pretty hefty sum.
And again, $10 for something which is basically a pass through transaction requiring no work on their end is pretty hefty.
Dan, the question is what it would cost WI to build and maintain their own system for this, or do it by hand on paper. I find it unlikely that WI could build, maintain, staff, and handle end-user and park staff support calls for a system that costs less than $10 per transaction. This doesn’t mean that each transaction would cost WI $10 — that is just the pricing model. But total up the annual reservations and multiply by 10, and I doubt WI could do it on that budget.
While it seems logical that a public agency could hire staff, build a system and use the generated revenue to support the system, this ignore the long-term aspects of using staff versus contracted services.
A contracted service is set for a specific period of time. When the service is complete, the cost ends. For staff, the agency still has the long-term cost liabilities of pensions and other costs.
That may be the case for services which have a finite start and stop date, but it’s not the case here.
The DNR isn’t going to stop providing camp ground reservations, hence the need for the service (and those who provide it) is long term.
Contracted solutions are usually best left to projects or services which have that absolute start/stop date in my opinion.
3rd party contracting, especially if it is not in your company’s core competency, is typically cheaper. It also allows your company more time to concentrate on what it does best. The DNR, regardless if the state has an IT Dept (all companies do), should concentrate their efforts on protecting our Natural Resources. Worrying about booking software is, and should be, on the bottom of their list of management needs.
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