Campingninja has been created by Rhian Evans and Geoff Vaughan. We are both keen campers and really want to make camping accessible to as many people as possible. We understand the frustrations campers have with trying to find campsites with availability. We know how hard it is for campers to find the right campsites from the directories and guides books out there.
In this day and age you should be able to search for multiple things like (
Family friendly, hot showers, near a beach, allows campfires, re-cycling on site and that allows dogs) You should be able to search for all of these things at once. Likewise you should be able to search for things you don't want. People should be able to search for availability straight away rather than being asked "to choose a county". Maybe we don't know which county we want to camp in!
All of these frustrations came to a head in the summer of 2009. We decided to look properly at how we could solve such a problem. It soon became clear that this project would need substantial investment. One of the main reasons this model had never been attempted before in the camping industry.
We entered
'The Big Idea' competition run by the Travel Trade Gazette and Dubai Tourism and after a written pitch was accepted we made it through to the final 6. We pitched to our Dragons and 3 weeks later in September 2009 we were told we had won and Campingninja was born! To read the whole story take a look
hereOur aim as a business and the reason this website has been created the way it has been, is to get the right people into the right campsites. We have an incredible variety of amazing places to camp and campsites should have a proper platform to market what they have to offer people. Their campsites shouldn't be tucked away in endless lists with the odd picture and icons here and there. They should be coming up when people are searching for sites like theirs.
By not charging our campsite owners to be on our site and building a simple to use management area for campsite owners we want to create a real community for campers. We wanted to create a website where a campsite was in control of what they could sell and how they sold it. We wanted campsites to benefit from having a proper on-line presence and one which would work well with whatever booking methods they previously had.
We hope you like our site. It's been a great journey for us all at Campingninja so far and we can't wait to start sending people under canvas. Rain or shine!!
Geoff Vaughan and Rhian Evans
Campingninja