Designing Rent Manager's integrated online booking portal for RV parks and campgrounds
What was broken, why it needs to be fixed & who benefits once we do
Property managers at RV parks and campgrounds booked every stay by phone, manually matching guest vehicles to available sites. With no self-service option, Rent Manager needed a public-facing portal guests could use to search, compare, and book in real time—without ever picking up the phone.
A white-label booking experience guests can complete on their own
Solution: A fully white-labeled booking experience that each property can brand as their own: search, filter, and book a site in minutes, no phone call required. Guests can find availability, match their rig to a compatible site, and pay online, while the reservation lands straight in Rent Manager with an automatic confirmation.
Reduced manual booking labor
Designed from end-to-end
Improved overall user experience
I was the sole designer for this net-new product, creating all of the UI and interactions from scratch.
With no template or pre-existing design, I worked closely with my developer, Angie, to ensure the project was built to spec.
How we identified the biggest sources of friction across users
0 → 1, Purpose-Built
Fundamentally different from long-term leasing, this required a brand-new design pattern.
Deep Legacy Integration
Every screen had to reconcile against existing Rent Manager constructs.
Configurable Booking Rules
The design had to accommodate existing configurations & policies
Insights that informed our design decisions
I audited existing RV and campground reservation platforms to see how the industry already handled short-term site search, equipment-based filtering, and checkout—then looked for what they were getting wrong. We used a mix of:
Competitive Analysis
Deferred multi-site booking
We intentionally limited the first release to one site per booking rather than introducing the complexity of multi-site reservations and confirmation handling.
Exploring iterations and tradeoffs to reach a user centric solution
Working in an early-stage design environment with no formal testing infrastructure in place, I designed the flow end-to-end in a single pass rather than through iterative rounds.
The original design shipped largely as designed and remains in production today—a strong signal that grounding the work in competitive research up front got the core flow right from the start.
How the business and its users benefitted after launch
I established Rent Manager's first white-label design and gave property managers their time back by removing them from the booking loop entirely
Moved availability, information collection, payment, and reservation creation from a phone-driven process to self-service online booking.
Designed the complete guest booking experience, from search and site selection through payment, confirmation, and edge cases.
Potential guests no longer had to call in to ask questions about site availability or amenities, leading to more bookings.
Hindsight is 20/20
This portal still felt disconnected from Express. I'd want to implement a link within Express to easily navigate to the booking portal.
