Let’s Camp: The First Central Place for Booking a Campsite Online in Canada
In 2007, Mike Yasieniuk founded YasTech Developments to create customized websites and apps for clients. As they were building a reservation system for a campground, Yasieniuk realized that many campgrounds could use the technology. The team of nine changed their approach and asked the client if they could build it, sell it to many groups and license it to them. When the client agreed, the “Let’s Camp” software was created and now services thirty-five campgrounds in Saskatchewan and eighty across Canada.
“I’m a big camper. In the past, if I wanted to camp I would google a campsite, try to call to make a reservation and oftentimes I would have to call several times to connect with someone in the off-season. It was common for me to miss really great campsites because I didn’t know they existed,” shares Yasieniuk.
“With Let’s Camp, people can go online, look at a map, look at photos of each site, book the space and then pay,” he continues. “The campgrounds are also seeing a benefit as this system is easy to use and increases their bookings. We had a campground in Ontario email us this fall to say that they were loving Let’s Camp and had an increase of 400% of bookings this season due to the software.”
The tech was originally intended to be used by individual campgrounds, but the team is now expanding the platform to one central location where people can browse camping experiences all in one place, rather than having to find individual websites.
“Let’s Camp is evolving into more. A couple of years ago, we realized that individual websites were only solving half of the problem. People still had to know the campsite existed, find their website and then book their reservation. Now we are building a central website for all campgrounds so that a camper can go to one spot, browse all the campgrounds at once and then book,” smiles Yasieniuk. “It’s like Trivago for camping.”
The YasTech team recently won the “New Direction” award from the NSBA and is in the Co.Launch cohort of the Co.Labs accelerator. They intend to grow their user-base from their company headquarters in Saskatoon. “We have so many lakes and campgrounds in this province, we have a great testbed for this type of software. As we grow the company, we have awesome access to good tech talent in the area.”
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