Frequently asked questions

What is Easy Vibe Outdoors?

A booking platform for independent camper owners. You list your own camper(s), set your own policies, and get your own branded booking page — we handle the calendar, checkout, payments, deposits, and paperwork.

Is this for me if I don't already have renters?

Easy Vibe Outdoors is not a marketplace. We don't list your camper in a directory renters browse, and we don't send you leads. So honestly, it depends. This is built for owners who already get inquiries — through Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, repeat renters, or word of mouth — and are tired of a marketplace taking a cut of bookings they'd have gotten anyway. Marketplace apps are genuinely better at one thing: putting your camper in front of people actively searching who've never heard of you. Starting from zero with no renters of your own yet, that reach is worth something. Switching once you have your own following is easy any time.

Do I need a new website?

No. Every camper you publish gets its own booking page and link on your Easy Vibe storefront — copy it from your dashboard and paste it into a "Book Now" button on your existing website, Instagram bio, or Facebook listing. Keep whatever site or following you already have; you just need somewhere to send the click. Rather keep people on your own site? Embed the booking widget directly in one of your pages instead — see a live example.

Can my spouse or an employee have their own login?

Yes. Invite as many people as you need from Team in your dashboard, and it costs nothing extra: the subscription is priced on published campers, not on seats. Each person gets their own email and password rather than sharing yours, and you can remove any of them in one click.

A staff login can do everything in the dashboard except three things: billing, your Stripe payout setup, and the Team page itself. So the person helping you run bookings can take a reservation, message a guest, block dates, edit a listing and price it, but they cannot change your subscription, move where your money lands, or add another login. Only you can.

You invite someone by typing their email. They get a link to set their own password, and nothing of yours is shared with them. If they ever stop helping you, remove them and your own login is untouched.

Can I keep my Outdoorsy or RVshare listing and use this too?

Yes, and for most owners that is the right setup rather than a compromise. Keep the marketplaces for strangers who find you by browsing, and use Easy Vibe Outdoors for repeat guests, referrals, and anyone who came from your own Instagram, Facebook or word of mouth. Those are the bookings you were going to get anyway, and they are the ones a commission costs you most on.

The calendars stay in step through iCal, in both directions. Paste your Outdoorsy or RVshare calendar link into your dashboard and we re-check it about every 15 minutes, blocking those dates on your own booking page. We also give you a calendar link for each camper to paste into their side, so a booking taken here blocks the dates there.

Here are the honest limits, because iCal is a file each side fetches on a schedule, not a live connection. There is a lag at both ends. Ours is about 15 minutes. The other platform decides how often it re-reads your link, which is often an hour or more, and that part is not ours to control. Inside that window the same nights genuinely can be sold in two places, and no calendar sync anywhere can close that gap completely.

So we watch for it instead of pretending it cannot happen. When a connected calendar shows dates that are already booked here, we email you the exact dates and tell you plainly that one of the two needs cancelling, because the guest you cancel today has far more options than they will the week of the trip. If a feed stops loading at all, you hear about that too after a day, since a stale feed quietly stops blocking anything while still looking fine. Your own bookings can never collide with each other, which is enforced in the database rather than by a sync; it is only the gap between two separate platforms that iCal cannot close.

How much does it cost?

Your first 30 days are free, no credit card required to start. After that it's a flat monthly subscription: $19/mo for one camper, plus $6/mo for each additional camper, capped at $59/mo no matter how many you list. Should your trial end without a card on file, your account simply pauses — nothing is charged, and everything you've set up is waiting whenever you add one.

Do you take a cut of my rental income?

No. We charge the flat subscription only — never a booking commission. You keep 100% of what renters pay. Here's what that means in practice: rent your camper 10 nights a month at $120/night ($1,200) and a marketplace charging a typical 20–25% commission would keep $240–300 of that. We charge a flat $19–59/mo no matter how much you book — the more you rent, the bigger the difference.

One fee does still come out, and it isn't ours: Stripe's card processing fee, normally 2.9% plus 30¢ per payment, which they take before the money reaches your bank. That is the only thing deducted from a booking on top of your flat subscription, and we add nothing to it. Your rate is between you and Stripe, since you are the merchant on your own account, so yours may differ.

How do I get paid?

Rental payments are deposited directly into your own bank account — the money goes straight to you, it never passes through our hands. Setup takes about 2 minutes from your dashboard: tell us where to send your rental income, and you're ready to accept bookings. It's all powered securely by Stripe, one of the world's largest payment processors.

Is my banking information safe?

Yes. Payouts run on Stripe, the same payment technology trusted by millions of businesses — we never see or store your bank account or card numbers ourselves. We never hold your rental income either; it's deposited straight to you.

Can I set my own policies?

Yes — pickup and return windows, minimum and maximum stay length, how far ahead bookings open, and a cancellation policy (Flexible, Moderate, or Strict) are all yours to set, and each camper can be marked pet friendly or no-pets. Pricing too: a nightly rate, an optional weekend rate for Friday and Saturday nights, and seasonal rules — summer rates, holiday-weekend premiums, minimum stays for peak dates — per camper, from your dashboard.

Two limits worth knowing before you plan around them. The cancellation policy is one of those three presets and not a free-text one: you can't set your own refund percentages or windows, because those tiers are what we actually process as real refunds, automatically, when a guest cancels. If you need terms beyond them, the place for that is your rental agreement, which is yours to write. And seasonal rates, weekend rates and length-of-stay discounts are set per camper rather than once across the fleet, so a three unit fleet means entering a summer rule three times. Add-ons, delivery pricing and discount codes work the other way, as one catalog shared across all your campers.

Can I use my own rental agreement?

Yes — the contract your renters sign is your document, not ours. We ship a plain-language default written for camper rentals, and you can edit any part of it, reorder it, or delete the whole thing and paste in the agreement you already use. Placeholders like {{deposit}} and {{end_date}} fill in each booking's real details, so you never hardcode an amount that changes later. One piece stays tied to your settings: the cancellation wording comes from the policy you picked (Flexible, Moderate, or Strict), because those refund amounts are what we actually process.

You can also flag individual clauses — damage liability, insurance, anything you'd hate to hear "I didn't see that" about — so the renter has to tick that clause on its own, right next to the text, on top of signing the whole agreement.

Editing it later never changes a contract someone already signed. Every signature stores the exact wording it was signed against, word for word, along with the signer's typed name, the time, and their IP address — so what you can produce in a dispute is the document that renter actually agreed to, not whatever your agreement says today.

What about cleaning time between rentals?

Built in, two ways. Your return and pickup times (say, return by noon, pickup after 3 PM) give you same-day turnaround hours on back-to-back bookings. If you need more, set a turnaround buffer in your booking settings — 1 or 2 days kept clear around every booking, shown to renters simply as unavailable — and waive it on any individual booking when same-day works.

Can I offer delivery?

Yes, optionally. Set the ZIP you deliver from and your own price tiers by distance ("up to 25 miles = $50, up to 100 = $200" — as many tiers as you like). Renters see the fee before they pay, priced by straight-line distance to their campsite ZIP, and anyone beyond your last tier is told to contact you instead of being auto-priced. Don't deliver? Leave it off — renters pick up at your address like normal.

The distance is straight-line between ZIP code centers, not road miles, and real driving runs roughly 1.2x that. We say so on the settings page because it matters when you set your tiers: a spot 40 miles away as the crow flies can be a 55 mile tow. When the math doesn't fit a place you actually go, override it. Name the spot, a trailhead or an OHV area or a campground, and give it a flat price, and that price is what shows and what gets charged no matter what the mileage says. A named spot with a set price works even past your last tier, which is what makes the far places bookable at all.

On pickup, each camper has its own pickup address, so a fleet kept in different places is fine and each listing reveals its own address after booking. What there isn't is a menu of pickup points for one camper: a given camper has one. If you want to offer a renter a choice of meeting spots, the way to do it today is named delivery destinations, priced however you like, including free.

How does the security deposit work?

You set the deposit amount per camper, and we automate the rest. The renter's card is saved at checkout — they consent to it in the rental agreement they sign — and the day before pickup we place a hold on it. A hold is an authorization, not a charge: the amount is set aside on their card but never actually moves, and it never passes through us. Longer rentals get an automatic re-authorization along the way, since card networks expire holds after about a week.

Three days after the rental ends, any hold you haven't acted on releases automatically — nobody should be waiting on an inspection that already went fine. You can also release it yourself the moment you've looked the camper over.

On longer trips the hold gets replaced partway through, without you doing anything. Card networks expire an authorization after about seven days, so on any rental longer than six nights we place a fresh hold before the old one lapses. A two week trip is covered start to finish; you just see one hold at a time.

Credit and debit both work, and they do not feel the same to your renter. On a credit card a hold only reduces their available credit. On a debit card the bank usually sets the money aside out of the balance they actually have, so a $300 hold is $300 they cannot spend until it's released, and some debit cards refuse a hold that size outright. Nothing here blocks a debit card and most go through fine, but if a hold is declined on a renter who clearly has the money, a debit card is the first thing to check.

What if the deposit hold is declined the day before pickup?

You find out that day, not at handover. We email you as soon as the attempt fails, and the booking page shows the deposit as failed with a Retry button. The rental payment itself is untouched, so the trip is still paid for; it's only the damage hold that didn't land.

Retry is worth one click, since plenty of declines are temporary. Nothing retries on its own, and that's deliberate: a card hit with repeated automatic attempts is a card the bank starts blocking outright, which turns a bad day into a dead card.

If it keeps failing, be aware there is no button that lets your renter swap in a different card for the deposit, so the fix isn't inside the app. What you can do from the booking page is message them directly, and from there it's your call: take the deposit outside the app, cancel and have them rebook on a card that works, or hold the keys until something clears. We'd rather tell you that plainly than let you find it out in the driveway. Handing over a camper with no hold behind it should be a decision you made, not something you discover afterwards.

What if I need to claim part of the deposit for damage?

Capture it from the booking page. Enter any amount up to the deposit and the remainder is released back to the renter, or capture the whole thing. Do it before the three-day auto-release window closes — once a hold is released, it's gone.

Your evidence lives on the booking. Pickup and return inspections let you record condition notes and up to 20 photos each, and they stay attached to that reservation alongside the signed rental agreement and the renter's details.

Two limits worth knowing up front. A hold can be declined like any card transaction — an expired card, a closed account, not enough available credit. When that happens we email you, and your booking page shows the deposit as failed with a Retry button. The rental payment itself is unaffected. And damage costing more than the deposit isn't something you can charge from your dashboard today; that's a conversation you'd have with the renter directly.

What if a renter disputes a payment or files a chargeback?

That's a different thing from a deposit claim, and the difference matters. A deposit claim is you capturing money you already hold an authorization for. A chargeback is the renter asking their bank to reverse a payment, and the bank decides the outcome, not you and not us.

Because rental payments go straight to your own Stripe account, you are the merchant of record: a dispute goes to you, and you respond to it in Stripe with your own evidence. Your inspection photos and the signed rental agreement are exactly the kind of thing that belongs in that response. We don't manage or decide disputes, and they don't currently appear in your Easy Vibe Outdoors dashboard — you'd hear about it from Stripe first.

How does tax work?

You enter one rate, from 0 to 20%, and we apply it for you. It goes on the rental subtotal plus any delivery fee, never on the refundable security deposit, since a deposit isn't a sale. The renter sees it as its own line at checkout, it's included in the total they're charged, and it's frozen on each booking so changing your rate later never rewrites what someone already paid.

What we don't do is work out what your rate should be, or file anything. Short-term camper and RV rentals are taxed differently state by state and often county by county, sometimes under a lodging tax that's separate from sales tax and doesn't consistently cover trailers at all. We're not going to guess at that on your behalf and quietly get it wrong. The rate you enter is the one you're registered to collect, you remit it the same way you would any other registration you hold, and the amount collected is in your revenue export when you need the figure.

What about insurance?

We don't provide, sell, or arrange insurance of any kind, and we're not going to pretend a security deposit is insurance either. That part is genuinely on you.

What owners renting direct generally look at: a commercial or rental endorsement on your own policy, since most personal RV and trailer policies exclude renting the unit out and you'd rather learn that before a claim than during one; or a standalone policy from an insurer that covers RV rental specifically. Worth asking your own insurer directly whether a renter towing your camper is covered, and whether their auto policy or yours is primary, and worth getting that answer in writing. A marketplace that bundled coverage was doing something real, and it's the honest thing you give up by going direct, so sort it out before your first booking rather than after.

Can I use my own domain name?

Not a custom domain of your own, no. Your storefront lives at your-business.easyvibeoutdoors.com, which you get the moment you sign up and which is yours to share.

If you already have a website on your own domain, the better answer is usually the embeddable widget: paste a couple of lines into one of your existing pages and the whole booking flow, calendar, quote and checkout runs inside your own site, on your own domain, with your own navigation around it. See a live example. If a custom domain is a requirement for you rather than a preference, this isn't the right software for you today, and I'd rather say that now than after you've moved your listings over.

How do I talk to guests, and can I bring my existing ones over?

Every booking and every quote has its own message thread, and your Messages page lists them all with the newest first, so a conversation has one place to live instead of being scattered through your texts. The guest gets your replies by email and answers from their own booking page. No app for them to install, no phone number of yours handed out.

Be clear on what it is not: it's not an inbox for strangers. There's no form on your page that opens a chat with someone who hasn't booked, so a cold Instagram DM is still a DM. What you do with that lead is send them a quote, which is a real link with your dates and price on it that they can pay, and the thread starts there.

On bringing your history over, two different answers. Dates come over properly: import your campers and your existing commitments from a spreadsheet, or connect the other platform's calendar feed, and those dates stop your page from double-booking. Past guests don't. There's no way to bulk import a customer list, and deliberately so: a recreated booking with no real payment, signed agreement or license behind it would look exactly like a real one to everything downstream, including the automated emails that would then go to people who never gave you their details through us. Your customer list builds from bookings taken here, and it's exportable to CSV from day one.

Can I list more than one camper?

Yes, as many as you'd like — each gets its own listing, amenities, photos, and calendar on your booking page, and the subscription price scales automatically as you publish more.

How do I cancel, and how do I get help?

Cancel yourself, in your own dashboard, under Settings then Billing. No email to send and nobody to talk out of it. It stops at the end of the period you've already paid for rather than cutting off that day, and if you change your mind before then there's an undo button right where you cancelled. Nothing is deleted, and you can export your campers, bookings and guest contacts to CSV whenever you like, before or after.

For anything else, get in touch. It's me who answers, usually the same day.