KOA | RV, Cabin & Tent Camping 4+

I can’t say enough about the ease of making reservations or even cancellations (COVID restrictions). I was spending days/weeks trying to book reservations for a 5 week tour around the Great Lakes areas last year until I hit into the KOA website and I joined! Now we couldn’t find KOA campgrounds for all of our stays but the ones I found were, one website, search and done! All of them were great! This year we are doing the same! Today I made reservations for four weeks of our vacation! I really like the deluxe sites with the grills, patio and furniture. Now if you want to camp in a tent, go for it, but we are RVers and KOA is the way to go!

The good: You can book sites online. That’s about it. The not so good: It’s slow. Annoyingly so. The fact that the loading bar exists at all indicates they expect a poor user experience, otherwise it should be architected to avoid this. The older app didn’t do this and was much faster in general. The app doesn’t remember your selected preferences profile, meaning every time you check availability/make reservations, you have to wait for the page to load (red loading indicator and all), select your profile from the dropdown, wait again while the loading indicator makes you want say bad words, and then see it loaded. Want to change dates? Go through it all again. Want to check another campground nearby? Same. It’s just painfully slow to use this app. Oh and the random logouts are awesome. Start looking for a site, after waiting, only to realize the preferences option isn’t there because you were logged out of the app without notice. Navigate the app to where you can log in, log in, manually get back to the campground and spot where you were checking availability, and then wait numerous times while you select the profile, etc. etc. I know first hand that it’s hard to make good software, but this app is not fun to use at all, ever, under any circumstances. Please focus on improving the speed and usability of this app. Speed matters. It’s death by 1000 cuts trying to use this app.

This KOA campground is situated in a place surrounded by cows and other animals. What the owner Helmet calls “country”. Needless to say you can’t stay outside your RV without being swarmed by flies and the fragrance of cow manure. Extremely unsanitary. It has a great mountain view but unfortunately the mountain is made of manure several hundred feet away. Its so a rough dirt road getting into the campground and the roads within the grounds are dirt with a sprinkling of gravel. Few obey the speed limit and the dust is endless. The owner Helmet is well aware of these conditions but he thinks simply calling “country” explains why this isn’t mentioned on his website. I find this very deceitful. I wish I had checked the reviews first because there are several others that mentioned this. When we ask for a refund for the next three nights as we were leaving Helmet said it was KOA‘s policy no refunds without a 48 hour notice he therefore only refunded one night I contacted KOA headquarters they said it was up to the owner to issue a refund. Who’s lying?? Not finished with this yet more to come.