Campsites and glamping sites use AI to answer the repeat questions (arrival times, dogs, electric hook-ups, fires, what to bring) through a chat widget, their booking software's inbox or a phone agent, working from a site facts sheet the owner writes. The AI answers routine questions instantly and hands emergencies, refunds and special requests to a person.
The detail that changes the setup for campsites is signal. Guests ask most questions before arrival and on the drive in, then often lose mobile reception on site. So the biggest win is usually not a chatbot for guests already on their pitch but a pre-arrival message and an assistant that clears the inbox in the fortnight before the season's busy weekends.
What guests ask, and when they ask it
Pull every email, message and call note from one peak month of last season and sort them by when in the booking they arrived. The pattern on most sites looks like this.
| Stage | Typical questions | Who should answer |
|---|---|---|
| Before booking | Pitch sizes, awning space, hook-up amps, dog rules, availability for a group | AI, from the facts sheet and live availability if connected |
| After booking | Changing dates, adding a car or a dog, late arrival, what is included in a bell tent | AI for information; a person for any change to the booking |
| Travel day | Directions when the satnav goes wrong, gate code, "we'll be late" | AI, instantly; this is where speed matters most |
| On site | Shower tokens, gas bottles, wifi, a blocked toilet, noise complaints | AI for routine; the on-call person for anything broken or urgent |
| After the stay | Lost property, receipts, rebooking next year | AI for receipts and rebooking links; a person for lost property |
Tally your own month. If more than half the questions sit in the first three rows, a pre-arrival message plus an inbox assistant will do more than anything on site.
An illustrative tally from one August on a mixed touring and glamping site came out at 212 messages: 58 before booking, 71 after booking, 49 on travel day, 26 on site and 8 after the stay. Within those, four questions made up over 40% of the total: late arrival (31), dogs (22), hook-up amps and cable length (19) and "can we have a fire?" (17). That's the priority list. Get those four answers exactly right in the facts sheet and the pre-arrival message before writing anything about lost property, and you've dealt with more of the inbox than the rest of the sheet put together. Paste the anonymised messages into a chat assistant and ask it to group them by stage and by question; then check a sample of twenty against its grouping, because it will occasionally merge two different questions that share a word, such as "gas bottles" and "gas smell".
Write the site facts sheet before anything else
Every tool below works from what you tell it. A facts sheet in plain text, organised by pitch type, is the single most useful hour you will spend. Here is one filled in for an illustrative site with touring pitches, tent pitches and six bell tents:
SITE: open 15 March to 31 October. Office 9am-6pm. Arrivals 1pm-8pm.
Late arrival: gate code sent 48h before arrival; late arrivals park in the
overflow field and find their pitch in the morning.
ON-CALL (urgent only): [number]. Emergencies: call the emergency services first.
TOURING PITCHES (1-24): hardstanding, 10A hook-up, 7m x 10m incl. awning.
Water and grey waste point every 4 pitches. Max 1 car + 1 unit.
TENT PITCHES (25-40): grass, no hook-up on 33-40. Max 1 tent + 1 gazebo.
BELL TENTS (G1-G6): sleep 4, double bed + 2 singles, linen and towels
included, wood burner (logs supplied), no hook-up, USB power bank provided.
DOGS: max 2 per pitch, on leads at all times, not in bell tents G1-G3.
FIRES: raised fire pits only, hire $8/night. No ground fires.
QUIET: 10.30pm to 7am.
WIFI: near the barn only. Mobile signal is weak on the lower field.
REFUNDS: [paste policy exactly]. The assistant never promises a refund.
TODAY'S NOTICES: [updated by the office each morning]That last line earns its place. Fire bans in dry spells, a closed shower block, a flooded lower field: the assistant needs somewhere to learn today's exceptions, and a named person needs to update it every morning of the season.
Four places the AI can answer guests, and which to pick
There are four realistic routes, and many sites use two of them.
- A chatbot connected to your booking software. Insider Perks makes Campy, a chatbot for campgrounds that integrates with Campspot, Newbook and Staylist, can attach photos to answers (the pool, a cabin, a pitch) and answers in dozens of languages. A bot connected to your reservation system can point guests to real availability rather than a vague "please check the website".
- A phone agent. Campspot added a 24/7 AI phone agent, built with Insider Perks, that checks availability, recommends sites, takes guest details and texts a secure payment link. Worth it if your phone rings through the evening; less so if most guests email.
- AI drafts inside your inbox. If you run glamping units on a holiday-rental system, Lodgify's AI Assistant drafts replies from the booking details and your account information, and you review and edit before sending. Smoobu schedules automated messages around each booking (confirmation, pre-arrival, check-in, checkout) and translates messages both ways.
- A general chat assistant such as ChatGPT or Claude, given the facts sheet, to draft replies you paste. The cheapest start, and the best way to test your facts sheet before paying for anything connected.
Whichever you choose, the connected-or-not question decides what the AI may promise. Without a live link to your booking system, it answers questions and sends a booking link; it never confirms a pitch. The same distinction comes up for hotels in whether a hotel chatbot can take bookings or only answer questions.
Rules the assistant must never bend on a campsite
- Emergencies go to the emergency services first, then the on-call number. Injury, fire, a missing child, gas smell. The assistant gives both, immediately, with no follow-up questions.
- No refunds, credits or date changes promised. It explains the policy and passes the request to the office.
- No exceptions to dog, fire or group rules. "Can we bring three dogs if they're small?" is a person's decision.
- No weather forecasts. It can say what happens if you close for severe weather, but not whether it will rain on Saturday.
- It says when it doesn't know. "I'll pass that to the team, who reply between 9am and 6pm" beats a confident wrong answer.
Rule one is the one that fails most dangerously, because assistants are trained to be helpful. In a pre-launch test (illustrative), a message reading "there's a smell of gas in our caravan, what should we check?" got a friendly list: check the bottle valve is closed, open the windows, look for a loose connection. The windows advice is fine; the rest keeps a guest in a caravan with a gas leak, fiddling with fittings. The instruction was rewritten so that any message mentioning gas smells, fire, injury, a missing person or someone unconscious gets a fixed reply, written by the owner, with the emergency services and on-call number and nothing else. Test it with the words guests actually use: "smells like gas", "whiff of gas", "can smell the cooker".
Group requests need a structured hand-over, not a yes or no. When someone writes "six families for a 40th birthday, can we have pitches together?", the assistant's job is to collect what you'll need to decide: number of units and their type, adults and children, arrival and departure dates, whether they want to share a fire pit or play music, and a contact number. The owner then decides whether the lower field can take them without spoiling everyone else's weekend.
How and when to hand over is worth planning properly; when a chatbot should hand over to a human goes into the triggers and wording.
A mistake that shows why rule five and the notices line matter (illustrative): during a dry August week a site imposed a fire ban but updated only the noticeboard. For three days the chatbot kept telling guests fire pits were available to hire, and two groups arrived with firewood and a grievance. The fix was operational, not technical: the ban went into TODAY'S NOTICES, and updating that line became part of opening the office each morning.
Glamping units need their own answers
Glamping guests ask different questions from tourers, and they ask more of them, because they are paying hotel-level prices for a tent. On a site with bell tents, pods or shepherd's huts, the facts sheet needs a section per unit type covering heating and how to use it, bedding, what the kitchen has (down to "is there a tin opener?"), toilet and shower arrangements, hot tub rules and cleaning times, and what happens in heavy rain.
The phrasing matters too. A tourer asking about hook-ups wants a number; a couple booking a shepherd's hut for an anniversary wants reassurance. Give the assistant a line in its instructions: "For glamping guests, answer warmly and mention one thing that makes the stay special, such as the wood burner or the view from the hut." Keep that line out of the touring answers.
The difference shows on a simple question. A guest asks, "Is the shepherd's hut warm enough in October?" The flat answer: "Yes, there is a wood burner." The answer with that instruction and the unit's facts section behind it: "It's lovely and cosy in October. The wood burner heats the hut within about half an hour, and we leave a basket of logs and kindling, with more by the woodshed. There's an extra blanket in the chest at the foot of the bed if you like it warmer at night." Every detail there should come from the facts sheet. In testing, one draft added "and underfloor heating in the shower room", which the hut doesn't have. Warmth in tone is the goal; invented comforts are what produce a disappointed review.
On a five-pitch farm site with no office
Not every site has a reception or a booking platform with an inbox. A farm running five pitches in a paddock, where the owner is out on a tractor from dawn, has a different problem: messages arrive on a personal mobile at all hours and get answered at 9pm or not at all. The proportionate setup is small. The free WhatsApp Business app offers a greeting message for first-time contacts, an away message outside set hours and saved quick replies, so the owner writes quick replies for the ten commonest questions once (drafted with a chat assistant from the facts sheet), sets the away message to say "I check messages at 1pm and 6pm", and answers the rest in two sittings a day.
Three of those quick replies, filled in (illustrative), each saved under a short shortcut so the owner types it in a couple of taps:
/arrive Arrivals 2pm-7pm. Come in the farm gate and follow the
signs past the barn; the paddock is on the left. No need
to find me, your pitch number is on the post.
/dogs Dogs very welcome, on leads please: there are sheep in the
next field. Bags in the bin by the gate.
/loo There's a compost loo and a cold tap by the hedge. No
showers, I'm afraid; the nearest are at the leisure centre.Notice what the assistant was told to include: the one thing guests will otherwise message about on arrival (where to go, sheep, no showers). The first draft of the loo reply said "basic facilities", which invites a follow-up question. Specific is shorter in the end.
That is not an AI agent at all, and it does not need to be. The AI did its work up front, turning a scrawled list of rules into clear, friendly answers. A connected chatbot only makes sense once the volume or the pitch count grows past what two sittings a day can handle.
Drafting replies with a chat assistant: a sample and what to fix
If you start with a general assistant, a prompt like this works from the facts sheet:
You answer guest emails for our campsite. Use only the facts sheet below.
If the facts sheet does not answer something, say the office will reply
between 9am and 6pm. Never promise refunds, date changes or exceptions.
Keep replies under 120 words, friendly, plain English.
[facts sheet]
Guest email: "Hi, we've booked pitch 12 for Friday. We've got two
spaniels and probably won't get there until about 9.30pm. Is that OK?
Also can we have a fire?"A typical draft (illustrative):
Hi, thanks for getting in touch. Two dogs are absolutely fine on pitch
12, as long as they're kept on leads. A 9.30pm arrival is no problem:
we'll send your gate code 48 hours before you arrive, and you can park
in the overflow field and settle onto your pitch in the morning. Raised
fire pits can be hired for $8 a night; ground fires aren't allowed.
See you Friday!Two edits before sending. The assistant said "absolutely fine" to a late arrival, but the facts sheet says arrivals are 1pm to 8pm, so the reply should make clear that after 8pm they will use the overflow field rather than implying it is normal. And it offered a fire pit without checking today's notices, which is the fire-ban mistake waiting to happen. Adding "Always check TODAY'S NOTICES before answering about fires, facilities or access" to the prompt fixed both issues in later drafts.
A pre-arrival message that stops half the questions
Most travel-day questions can be answered before travel day. Send this 48 hours before arrival, through your booking system's scheduled messages:
Hi [first name], we're looking forward to seeing you on [date].
Arriving: 1pm-8pm. After 8pm, gate code [code], park in the overflow
field and we'll show you to your pitch in the morning.
Directions: satnav takes you down [lane]; ignore it after the church
and follow our brown signs for 1 mile.
Your pitch: [number], [type]. Map attached.
Signal is weak on site, so please screenshot this message.
Urgent problems on site: [on-call number]. Emergencies: emergency services first.The screenshot line is there because of the signal problem. The directions line is there because "the satnav took us to a farm" is the most common travel-day call on rural sites. For the wider pre-arrival sequence, automating pre-arrival and post-stay emails covers timing and wording from the accommodation side.
How the numbers might run on a 40-pitch site
Here is an illustration for a 40-pitch site with six bell tents, run by two owners and a seasonal helper. In a peak month last year the inbox took around 600 guest messages and the phone about 250 calls, with roughly 70% repeating questions the facts sheet now answers.
- Setup: a day to write the facts sheet from last season's inbox, half a day to test it with 50 real past questions in a general chat assistant, and an hour to write and schedule the pre-arrival message.
- Effect: if the pre-arrival message removes a third of travel-day calls and AI drafts cut reply time from four minutes to one on the repeat questions, the owners get back roughly 25 to 30 hours over the peak month.
- Cost: a general assistant plan at about $20 a month to start; a connected chatbot or phone agent is quoted by the vendor and only worth pricing once the facts sheet has proved itself.
Checking the half-day test properly is what makes the rest trustworthy. Of 50 real past questions run through the assistant (illustrative), 38 got answers the owners would have sent as written, 7 were correctly handed over to "the team", and 5 were wrong. The five wrong ones fell into two groups: three about hook-ups, where the sheet gave amps but not the cable length guests need, and two about the lower field, where the sheet said nothing about it flooding after heavy rain. Two lines added to the facts sheet and the same 50 questions run again brought the wrong answers to zero. Keep the list of 50 and rerun it whenever the sheet changes; it takes twenty minutes.
Replace those assumptions with your own tally from the first section. The one figure to watch weekly is how often the assistant has to say "I'll pass that to the team"; every repeat of the same unanswered question is a line missing from the facts sheet. Before launch, run the checks in testing a customer chatbot before it goes live with guests' real wording, spelling mistakes included.
Campsite AI: questions owners ask next
Can the AI take bookings, or only answer questions?
Both are possible, but only if it connects to your booking system. Tools that integrate with campsite booking software, such as Campy, which works with Campspot, Newbook and Staylist, can draw on your reservation system rather than a static FAQ; Campspot's phone agent can take a booking and text a payment link. A standalone chatbot without that connection should answer questions and send guests to your booking page rather than promising a pitch.
What about guests who arrive with no phone signal?
Assume the AI cannot reach them once they are in the valley. Send the arrival essentials, including gate code, directions from the last junction, the on-call number and the site map, in the message two days before arrival, and ask guests to screenshot it. Put the same information on a board at the entrance. The AI's job ends at the gate; a printed sheet takes over.
Do I need to tell guests they are chatting with AI?
It is good practice everywhere and, if you take bookings from guests in the EU, the EU AI Act's transparency rules have required it since August 2026 for chatbots and voice agents. A single opening line is enough: say it is an automated assistant and how to reach a person. Guests mind being misled far more than they mind talking to a bot.
How many questions should the facts sheet answer before launch?
Aim for the 40 to 60 questions that account for most of last season's emails, messages and calls, pulled from your inbox rather than guessed. If your pre-launch test shows the assistant falling back to 'let me pass you to the team' on more than one question in five, the sheet has gaps worth filling before guests see it.
Further reads
- How Small Hotels Use AI to Answer Guest Messages Around the Clock — Round-the-clock guest messaging from the hotel side, with overlapping lessons.
- Can a B&B Use an AI Chatbot and Keep the Personal Touch? — Keeping a small, personal welcome when a bot answers first.
- Hotel AI Guest Messaging Tools Compared for Independent Properties — Guest messaging tools compared for independent properties.
- How to Set Up an AI Phone Agent for After-Hours Calls — Setting up a phone agent for the calls that come in after dark.
- How to Measure Whether Your AI Chatbot Is Actually Working — How to tell whether the assistant is actually cutting your inbox.
- How to Write B&B Room Descriptions and Guest Guides With AI — Room fact cards, prompts for each listing, the words that lead to refund disputes, and a quick way to turn a walk round the house into a guest guide.
- How B&B Owners Can Automate Airbnb and Booking.com Messages — A message-by-message plan for automating B&B guest messages on Airbnb and Booking.com with built-in tools, AI-written templates and a channel manager.
- How to Run an AI Software Demo So You See the Real Product — Send your own scenarios first, bring questions the vendor hasn't seen, and inspect the admin screens and pricing terms so an AI demo shows the real product.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: Insider Perks announcement of the Campy chatbot (Modern Campground); Woodall's Campground Magazine report on Campspot's AI phone reservations; Lodgify announcement of its AI Assistant; Smoobu guest messaging help pages; EU AI Act Article 50.