50% off camping

[olly72]

Hi all. have been looking at the advertisements for camp club usa/goodsam and passport america. we like to know if anyone has any experience with these discount clubs. are they worth it and are all the campgrounds really on their lists. are the campgrounds very good and so on.
thanks russ

[olly72]

Hi all. have been looking at the advertisements for camp club usa/goodsam and passport america. we like to know if anyone has any experience with these discount clubs. are they worth it and are all the campgrounds really on their lists. are the campgrounds very good and so on.
thanks russ

[AFChap]

Campclub usa is fairly new, so don't know that they have that many campgrounds as yet. I think that was Camping WOrld/Affinity Group's effort to distance themselves from Happy Camper (another discount program) that they used to sell.

We use Passport America ...subtracting cost of membership, we saved apx $250 last year with PA. We always tell the campground when we call to see if they have vacancies that we are PA members. Some allow the discount for a few nights, some even allow it for weekly rates! They are normal campgrounds as far as we are concerned -- we do not stay in places considered to be resorts. Only once did we believe we were being jacked around by a campground -- it appeared they adjusted their "normal" rate depending on what membership you told them you had.

We used to belong to Good Sam, but dropped it. We get the same 10% discount through FMCA and/or other groups (normally good for only a night or two), and got very tired of the excessive amount of junk mail from Good Sam that we have to pay to have forwarded to us. They say you can turn it off, but multiple on-line and telephone requests didn't turn it off for us, so we left.

[C&C R]

We use Passport America on every trip. Pays for itself in no time.
Camp Club has the same campgrounds. I joined that this year but won't renew.
AAA, AARP both are accepted at most campgrounds and give you 10%.

[Hikerdogs]

We recently joined Passport America and the jury's still out for us. The first time we went to a campground that honored it we forgot to present it at the time of registration. When I went back to the office to see if they would honor it they said it may be difficult to use it after the initial registration was complete.

That aside when you join the company sends out a directory of all the campgrounds that honor it. The book is about an inch thick and has participants in just about every state. Most offer 1/2 off up to a weeks stay.

Be aware when you use it that most campgrounds publish a daily rate but offer slightly lower rates when staying a week or more. So when you stay a week or more the actual savings is likely to be less than 1/2 the daily rate.

If you spend a lot of time on the road going from one location to the next it's probably a worthwhile investment. If you stay in the same place for extended periods it's probably not for you. At a cost of about $45.00 annually it would only take a week at a single location or 2 to 3 nights at multiple locations to recover the initial investment. The key would be to frequent enough participating campgrounds within a year to make membership worth while.

[wagonmaster2]

We use PA and feel we get our money's worth but there can be problems. Some campground only allow 1-3 nights using PA and not during holidays or special events. Also we're finding a lot of them are giving 1/2 off but then adding $2.50-$4.00 a night extra for utilities with no 1/2 off that amount. If you have any special places you like to stay, you can call PA before you join and ask if your favorites are members of PA. If it wasn't for one particular favorite of ours, it wouldn't pay for us to be members of PA.
Wagonmaster2