Myrtle Beach area campgrounds take top industry awards

Some of the country’s highest-rated campgrounds in recent surveys call the Grand Strand home, filling an accommodations niche for visitors looking for a different kind of beachside place to stay.

Ocean Lakes Family Campground, Myrtle Beach Travel Park and Willow Tree Resort all won A ratings in the recent Guestrated.com survey done in conjunction with the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds. Ocean Lakes won Mega Park of the Year and Lakewood Camping Resort won the Plan It Green award from the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds. The awards were handed out earlier this month.

It’s unusual for so many parks in one area to win awards and get the high ratings - only 44 of the roughly 1,000 parks in the survey earned the A rating, said Paul Bambei, CEO of the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds.

“There seems to be a concentration of park owners in Myrtle Beach that are just extremely good at what they do,” he said. “There are 3,200 parks in the association. I’d like to say they are all very good but they’re not always concentrated geographically. That’s to Myrtle Beach’s credit.”

Campgrounds are an important part of tourism lodging and make up about 10 percent of all lodging available on the Grand Strand, according to Taylor Damonte of Coastal Carolina University’s Clay Brittain Jr. Center for Resort Tourism.

There are 13 campground companies that have a combined 10,800 campground sites along the Grand Strand, about 5,300 of which can be rented nightly, he said.

Not all of the other lodging inventory on the Grand Strand is rated No. 1 in the country, Damonte said, likening the recent accolades to a lot of hotels receiving five-star ratings.

The center doesn’t survey RV travelers or campers so he doesn’t have data on the influence of the awards, but he said that intuitively the recognition would be important to visitors that the parks target.

“It seems to me that if we didn’t have such wonderful venues for them they wouldn’t just go to another part of our lodging inventory, they would go somewhere else so we would potentially lose them to our area,” Damonte said.

All the campgrounds have differences that they say set them apart, but they also share certain characteristics, said Genie Chapman, the reservations manager for Myrtle Beach Travel Park off Kings Road, which has about 700 camping sites and 400 annual lease sites.

“We’ve got the perfect location here in Myrtle Beach with campgrounds that have been here for a long time. They’re very established. There’s not a lot of areas that have that perfect set up,” she said.

Campgrounds here are typically destination campgrounds, not just a stopping place on the way somewhere else, she said. Many of the parks’ visitors have been coming for generations and know that they will get a good family vacation for a good price, Chapman said.

Ocean Lakes has some campers whose families have been coming for five generations, and the oceanfront complex works to continue improving the guest experience, said marketing manager Barb Krumm.

The campground - which has 893 campsites, about 2,400 annually leased sites and about 300 rental properties - has been named campground of the year five times by the national association and this year also was named one of the Top 10 Favorite Parks in North America for 2011 in Woodall’s Vote for Your Favorite Campground Sweepstakes. Woodall’s specializes in RV and family camping information, operating a website and creating guides for park users.

The grade A rating and the Woodall’s award are especially significant because they are based on guest reviews, Krumm said.

“The only thing we can do to maintain that A rating is focus on customer service and park amenities and experience of the guest,” she said.

Ocean Lakes reads all guest reviews and regularly takes suggestions into account when deciding what programs to add or what improvements it will make, Krumm said.

The campground’s iCare program, which includes recycling, solar panel heated water and other environmentally-friendly offerings, came about after a camper’s suggestion and has expanded in response to other camper and staff recommendations, Krumm said. This past year, the campground installed a large town clock in response to several requests from campers who said they didn’t wear their watch on vacation but wanted to be able to know what time it was so they could meet family and friends, she said.

“We constantly reevaluate what we do. You cannot get too comfortable. We know we have to work even harder. The bar keeps rising and people expect more out of you,” Krumm said.

Myrtle Beach campgrounds have worked together through the Myrtle Beach Campground Owners Association for years to market the area as a camping destination, which makes the industry stronger and pushes the campground, she said.

There is a friendly competition between area campgrounds, said Robert Clinger, the general manager of Lakewood Camping Resort, which won the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds’ Mega Park of the Year award last year. Lakewood and Ocean Lakes are oceanfront in Horry County between Myrtle Beach and Surfside Beach.

The competition pushes Lakewood, which has about 1,100 campsites and about 800 permanent lots, to stay ahead of the curve with products and processes, he said.

“It’s a matter of...what can you do to be more competitive with your neighboring campgrounds,” Clinger said.

This year, Lakewood won the Plan It Green award from the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds, given to a park that “makes exemplary efforts to become environmentally friendly.”

Last fall the resort implemented a green initiative, which has included repaving its oceanfront parking pads this year using a recycled, eco-friendly material called Sitebase. It also started offering paper, plastics and aluminum recycling, reusable grocery bags and has organized groups to clean the beach.

“Basically from the environmental standpoint we just took a look at if we can do our part to try to cut down on landfill waste,” Clinger said, adding that visitors have taken to the program very well.

Willow Tree Resort, another grade A winner, is the only campground among the winners that is not on the ocean. The resort in Longs, which has 106 RV sites, is situated around a 36-acre lake and known for having private hot tubs at its premium lake front sites. The park is still close to the beach and attractions, but offers a more serene atmosphere, said general manager Tammy Watson.

“The staff, as well as the park itself, makes a very nice combination for people to come in and relax,” she said. “We focus on things that families can do together once they get here at no additional cost. We feel we have a lot to offer the family that wants to do things with the kids.”

The resort doesn’t have mega events but has shuffleboard, basketball, a swimming area in the summer, bike trails and paddle boats, Watson said.

Area campgrounds all have something different to offer campers, but they have something in common too, which makes them popular and leads to the high ratings, she said.

“I would have to give credit to some good old-fashioned southern hospitality,” Watson said.