Spotlight: Being part of a community with Jensen's
RV Park and Motel

By Brynne Adamson

"Your Summer Vacation Destination"

Jensen's RV Park and Motel owners Martin and Kendra Super rely on their local community and creative mindsets to overcome their challenges.

I spoke with Kendra Super via telephone.

About the RV park and motel:

Jensen's RV Park and Motel is a quaint camping and resting area nestled in the trees, right by Lake Michigan and downtown South Haven, Michigan. The property has 124 RV sites, with around 90 of them being seasonal, and 14 motel rooms.

Martin and Kendra Super took over the business from Martin's parents, who restored the property and ran the business for 30 years. Many of the Supers' current customers have been coming to the stay at Jensen's for 15 to 30 years. Additionally, actor Mark Lenard (famous for playing Spock's father Sarek in Star Trek), spent his childhood on the property in the 1920s.

The Supers have been slowly modernizing the campground while keeping it charming. When you stay at Jensen's RV Park and Motel, you'll step back in time. Enjoy a community of campers that is unlike any other, along with hot showers, fire pits, a great location, a quiet atmosphere and beautiful, open fields.

Jensen's RV Park and Motel joined ResNexus in 2019. Ever since then, the RV park and motel has had an increase of 36.49% of revenue per available room for May to Oct. Jensen's RV Park and Motel also had a 61.13% increase of occupancy for the same time frame.

Why did you get involved in the industry?

I have a degree in hospitality management. I always envisioned myself as a corporate event planner. I love people, and I love the idea of taking care of people everyday.

Originally, my husband, Martin, didn't want to run his family business. However, I noticed he was good at infrastructure and planning, and I was good at customer service and accounting.

I said, "If we don't buy this from your parents when they are ready to retire, this whole thing will be bulldozed and turned into condos." Letting that happen felt like a sin to me. Our property has hundreds of years of memories from people who look forward to coming here every year. So I convinced my husband that we should give owning this a shot.

We had to learn everything on the fly. Having children slows everything down, too.

Ever since then, we've grown the business incredibly. Now we're in this amazing groove and seeing the fruits of our labor. When we bought it, there were 83 RV sites and 14 motel rooms. Around 2.5 years ago, we added 41 more RV sites. Our property is like a living entity with needs you can't ignore (almost like a fourth child). We're too far into it to walk away.

I have a love-hate relationship with our RV park and motel, although it's mostly love. I can never let my kids have that traditional lazy summer because I'm working. Though, there's a tradeoff in everything.

Normally, when you have a good idea for a business, that goes to your employer for them to save money. However, when you own your own business, while owning it is a lot of work, your good ideas benefit you and your family.

What are some of the difficulties of running both a motel and an RV park?

For the motel, since our buildings are 70 years old, maintenance is incredibly difficult. The plumbing and electricity is old, the walls are neither plaster or drywall... You can try and upgrade the electrical system, but there's only so much you can do. Starting from scratch is much easier than renovating.

For our RV park, we encounter people who want more amenities without having to pay more for staying with us. RV resorts are becoming more popular because they're glamorous, with their concrete paths, beautiful club houses, playground equipment and pools. We purposefully don't do that. We have affordable rates because we don't offer all of those thrills.

We also don't have as many amenities as RV resorts because we're right by Lake Michigan. If you want to be close to the water, you have to give up the extra amenities.

You never know what your next challenge is going to be. My husband built 140 picnic tables because his parents didn't attend to them when they owned the park. Another example of this is when we wanted to add at least 40 new fire rings to our campsites, but we didn't realize there was a metal shortage. So we had to be creative about where we got our fire rings.

We found a man one hour north of us on Craigslist who bought huge propane tanks that weren't good anymore and cut them into slices. He was able to make the fire rings we needed, and he even drove them down to us for a cheap price.

How do you manage your time, especially with young children?

We tried workamping, where somebody camps in the park for free in exchange for working a certain number of hours per week. That didn't go well; the person only stayed for two months before quitting.

My husband is incredibly handy and mechanical, so he upkeeps the property. Though, you still have to find local people who are able to repair things like a water heater in the middle of the night. My husband and I had to learn how to work together, too, because when you're in business together, you need to learn to completely trust the other person.

Regarding who watches the kids while we work, we're incredibly fortunate to live close to our in-laws. My parents are snow birds who stay in Florida for six months and in Michigan for six months, so they stay in my backyard six months out of the year. If a room needs to be emergency cleaned, my mom jumps in to help me. You have to have people supporting you.

We would love to have our children run the family business, but if none of them want it, we'd have to sell.

How would your job be different if you didn't have the support of the local community?

Our community is really unique because it's made of people from all walks of life and all ages and stages. However, it's very much a neighborhood.

Because such a large percentage of our sites are seasonal, people who rent a spot for an entire summer, this is really like a second home for a lot of people. We have young families with children who look forward to playing with all the other kids in the park. We have older retired people who enjoy their time barbecuing and fishing together.

Our community is really just about unplugging and unwinding with your camping neighbors.

My customers make my job fairly easy. They love being here and want to see this place succeed almost as much as we do. Very few of our customers are high maintenance and all of them appreciate having an affordable place to stay so close to the lake.

How have you kept your online reviews positive?

Not everything can be happy all the time. If something happens, the number one thing guests can do is let us know how we can fix it. We don't try to sell ourselves as something we're not. We're not glamorous. When people ask us, we're forthright with all of that information. Honesty is the best policy.

I think having return guests for 15 to 30 years is huge. They tell all of their friends about our resort, providing us with free advertising.

How has COVID-19 impacted your business?

On March 13, 2020, school was cancelled for my kids with the plan of them reopening in three weeks, but our governor decided to have the rest of the school year cancelled. At the beginning of April, we started noticing seasonal customers saying they weren't planning on returning this year because they were afraid of being around other people. Our phone wasn't ringing like it used to.

We got into panic mode. We wondered what we were going to do, especially because our yearly revenue is made out of only seven months of the year.

Then restaurants in Michigan opened in June, which is when business exploded for us. People decided they couldn't go on lavish vacations via airplane or trains, so they bought campers and decided to go camping all summer. We were as busy on Tuesdays and Wednesdays as we are on Fridays and Saturdays. We had by far our greatest year ever, at least with our RV park.

How has ResNexus created value for you?

Before we used ResNexus' booking software, we would answer phones and handwrite reservations in a book. If we wanted to go out to dinner, we would put our book in the car in case someone called.

In 2019, my mother-in-law, who had owned the business, came with me and my children to a local museum during spring break. After a five hour period at the museum, I came back to see I had 20 missed customer phone calls.

My mother-in-law said, "You can't live like this."

I agreed, though we didn't want a one-size-fits-all reservation software. A lot of campground reservation software didn't fit our motel side well.

We had a campground newspaper come through the mail, and I saw ResNexus on there. So I put in my email. I got a phone call from Andrew, who is now my red carpet professional, and he just made it all so easy. We now have a streamlined approach on how to maintain guests' payments, electrical readings, etc.

A huge deterrent for us seemed to be the cost because we would be spending a lot of money per month on a program we didn't know. We realized in the first month that ResNexus was worth it. We used to spend on average five minutes per call, so now we're saving 10 to 20 hours per week because people can book online. I'm not getting random phone calls at 11:30 p.m. anymore.

Key Findings

Units: 124 RV sites, 14 motel rooms
ResNexus products used: RV Essentials Package
Joined ResNexus in 2019

The following statistics were recorded Dec. 17, 2020:

Average increase of Revenue per Available Room (RevPar) for May to Oct. since using ResNexus: 36.49%
Average increase of Occupancy from May to Oct. since using ResNexus: 61.13%

Super's most popular units are her seasonal pull through and back in RV sites, seen below, which were occupied 100% of nights from May 1, 2020 to Oct. 1, 2020.

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Spotlight: Being part of a community with Jensen's RV Park and Motel