What Tentrr's ready-pitched tents teach about growing too fast

Success stories usually end happily. Tentrr's didn't. We still put it among our success stories, because within a few years Tentrr opened hundreds of campsites in the north-eastern US, raised investment and signed deals with state parks. Then the bill for fast growth arrived. Both halves are instructive for anyone running their own campsite.

The idea: the tent arrives ready, not the guest

Tentrr was founded in New York in 2015 by Michael D'Agostino, a former investment banker. The idea went like this: plenty of people in the US want to go camping, but most lack the gear, the know-how or the patience. At the same time, plenty of people own empty land but don't know how to host campers.

In bringing the two sides together, Tentrr went one step further. It didn't just tell landowners to "create a listing". It set up a standard camping kit on their land: a large canvas safari tent on a raised wooden platform, with a bed and basic equipment inside. Guests didn't wrestle with tent poles. They arrived at a tent that was already up.

The company called its landowners "CampKeepers". In an example quoted in a 2018 Associated Press report, one landowner paid Tentrr 1,500 dollars to have the kit installed and kept 80 per cent of booking revenue. Nightly prices at the time were over 100 dollars.

A quick rise

The numbers grew fast:

The Maine deal was interesting. Standard state park pitches at the time cost 15-45 dollars a night, while Tentrr tents sold for 100 dollars. A tent on a platform with a wood stove inside had become a completely different product in the same park. The press at the time called Tentrr "the Airbnb of campsites".

The stumble

On 2 January 2023 the company filed for bankruptcy protection (Chapter 11) in Delaware. In the filing, it said it had expanded rapidly during the pandemic but demand had not kept up with that expansion, leaving it with cash flow problems. In December 2023 the case was converted to liquidation (Chapter 7).

According to a round-up by the industry newsletter Outdoor Hospitality Weekly, some landowners complained during this period that they weren't being paid and that service quality had dropped. These complaints are based on individual posts, so it would be wrong to generalise. But the picture is clear: as the ready-pitched model grew, so did the burden of equipment, maintenance and payments.

What Tentrr got right

• It removed the guest's biggest obstacle. Pitching a tent, buying gear, finding a spot. Tentrr took all of that away. For a beginner, it turned "should I go?" into "let's go".
• It sold a standard product. Every Tentrr site had roughly the same kit. Guests could guess what they'd find without even looking at the photos.
• It made the landowner's job simple. Set-up, listing and payment sat with the company. The landowner kept the site clean and welcomed guests.

Where it struggled

• Equipment landed on the balance sheet. Every new site meant a platform, a tent and kit. The renegotiation of an equipment leasing agreement was also among the reasons given in the filing.
• Demand was assumed to be permanent. Pandemic-era camping demand may have been a peak, not a floor. Growing without making that distinction added to the load.
• Trust rode on payments. In a marketplace, landowners' trust stands on being paid on time. Once payments start running late, the network itself weakens.

None of this means the model was bad. The ready-pitched tent is still at the heart of many glamping businesses today. The problem was less the idea itself and more that growth outran infrastructure, and trust outran the payment system. This is exactly where a small business has the advantage: it can take each step with its eyes open, from its own pocket and at its own pace.

What a campsite in Türkiye can take from this

Tentrr's story looks like that of a big start-up, but several of its lessons carry straight over to a small campsite:

1. Ready-pitched tents really do sell. For city guests with no gear of their own, a tent that's already up, or a tent on a platform, is easier to sell than an empty pitch. Starting with two or three ready-pitched tents can bring a new kind of guest to a site that's mostly pitches.
2. Grow your equipment in small steps. Every new tent is an investment with its own maintenance, storage and winter. Going from five tents to ten without a season's occupancy data is a small version of what Tentrr did.
3. Don't mistake a good season for the new normal. If one summer was very busy, find out why. Did a bayram (Turkish public holiday) fall at the right time, did a road open, did a social media post take off? Separating the lasting from the temporary leads to the right investment decision.
4. Consistency is what guests trust. The same bed, the same lighting and the same cleaning routine in every tent. That closes the gap between the photos and reality and cuts complaints. Our post on guest experience covers this too.
5. Ask about payment terms when you work with a platform. How often they pay, what happens with cancellations, whether your booking data stays with you if the platform closes. Knowing this from the start protects you on a bad day.
6. Work out the real cost of a ready-pitched tent. The purchase price is only the beginning. Platform or ground preparation, bed and textiles, washing and repairs every season, taking it down and storing it in winter, a new canvas every few years. Put these in a table, work out the annual cost per tent, then see how many occupied nights cover it. The fact that an equipment leasing agreement came up in Tentrr's bankruptcy filing shows how heavy this sum can get at scale.

For a steadier example of people turning their land into campsites, see our Hipcamp post. The two companies worked in the same market in the same years, but one left the equipment to the landowner and the other took it on itself.

teknovan.io is a management tool we're designing so that campsites running their own tents and pitches can see their occupancy data and keep track of bookings and payments in one place.

Sources

• Tentrr is turning private land into glampgrounds, with the help of VCs, TechCrunch
• Rent a tent: Startup matches landowners with campers, Houston Chronicle (AP)
• New York company brings glamping to Maine state parks, Bangor Daily News
• Tentrr, Wikipedia
• 4 Lessons Learned from the Rise and Fall of Tentrr, Outdoor Hospitality Weekly

Image credits

Photos illustrate the region; they are not photos of the campsites themselves.

• Ören, Burhaniye: Aziz Akbiyik, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons