Established in 2016, AccessParks has been growing rapidly as a Wi-Fi provider to the outdoor hospitality industry. That was recently made evident by the announcement that it had raised private equity funding through M/C Partners, a private equity firm focused on digital infrastructure and the technology services sectors.
Company founder Tim Rout will now be working alongside new CEO Alan Rosenberg, who brings deep experience leading internet operators through exponential expansion, most recently as CEO of Upstream Network and before that as CEO of Business Only Broadband.
Rout recently told Woodall’s Campground Magazine (WCM) that the funding will help the company scale more quickly as it faces huge demand for the service it provides.
“We’ve got a huge backlog still of parks that are signed but not installed, and we’re just working through that at the moment,” he noted. “Now we have funds and we’re hiring more project managers, more field people…etc. So, it is exciting to finally realize the vision.
“The reason we started the company six years ago was that Wi-Fi was awful in parks, and then there was a huge demographic change in usage where, over the last four or five years, everybody started expecting the same performance that they get at home or work, but inside their RV,” Rout added. “We wanted to bring guaranteed transparency and minimum speeds over Wi-Fi in parks.”
Rout called the company “the Starbucks of Wi-Fi” because the goal is to have campers see the AccessParks badge on a park’s website and know that they are going to get a guaranteed minimum speed.
“We know from our customer experience that it’s driving revenue by 10% to 20% in these parks,” he explained.
Rout admits that the company hasn’t been great at marketing its services but told WCM that the new funding will allow it to spend more time on that part of the equation.
“When we first entered the industry, we wanted to perfect the system,” he said. “The engineering, the equipment and secure regional construction partners who we could trust to put these systems in, so we are not relying on local electricians necessarily. We wanted all of that to be reliable and we wanted to prove that we could offer this kind of service.
“Now we are working on the transparency and marketing pieces,” Rout added. “This all started because I wanted to be able to travel the country in my RV and see proof of the performance of the Wi-Fi.”
AccessParks can deliver that reliability, Rout told WCM, because its equipment can determine the signal level in the back of an RV at plus or minus 5%.
“We’ve been able to do that in the last six months because of the custom design processes we came up with where we take nationwide geographic data, GIS data, and we have 15-centimeter accuracy on tree cover,” he explained. “We can tell exactly what the propagation of the Wi-Fi is going to be through trees and hills into the RVs.”
Rout said that larger development groups have traditionally been a large source of business for the company, but notes that its marketing push, and word-of-mouth, is allowing it to expand more into existing parks as well.
“We do demos for parks, and they can see the performance that we offer,” he noted. “Then we also include speed test graphs that they can place on their websites for campers to see updated Wi-Fi speeds on, and the speeds are tested every 40 minutes. Those are driving extra revenue.”
While Rout will admit that Access Parks isn’t the cheapest option, he said that the company’s focus on hiring top engineers, utilizing quality equipment and providing 24/7 service, staffed by engineers, is something park owners are willing to pay for.
“We knew that if we invested in fiber to every property and enterprise-grade systems throughout the property and then offer the right support, it’s going to be more expensive, but that people would be willing to pay,” he said. “More importantly, parks will see the return on investment (ROI) when they invest in our systems.
“People are now willing to pay, let’s say $1 a pad per night with no upfront money,” Rout added. “That’s a $1 a pad per night and the rate increase they have to put in place for a transient guest, it’s about a $1.50. We’re more expensive, but that’s not a big lift, a $1.50 rate increase every night for broadband, and that includes all the equipment financing, support…etc. If anything breaks, we fix it.”
Looking ahead, besides a marketing and hiring push, Rout said that the company is focused on deploying 5G to parks.
Part of the vision is to also sell campers a $40-a-month plan where they can go to any park in the country and have connectivity, according to Rout.
“If it’s our system, they get guaranteed broadband speeds, they get unlimited data, but if they’re outside of our system, they can use AT&T, T-Mobile or Dish or one of the other networks and be able to sell that as a separate service,” he noted. “That is another thing that is coming down the pipeline later this year.”
