The Guest Experience by HoneyTrek: Delightful Dining

In many ways, dining defines a guest's glamping experience and the flow of their stay. Where are your glampers spending their three meals a day... a restaurant in town, the camp cafe, cooking in an outdoor kitchen, grilling over a fire, or eating cold sandwiches on their lap? A full-blown restaurant isn't a necessity, but helping guests meet their needs and have some fun in the process is key.

Snacks Do Wonders

Before we get into creative dining ideas, your baseline goal is to keep guests from getting hangry. How to do this? Anticipate. Assume that when guests arrive and wake up, they are going to need a snack at minimum. Welcome them with a local treat and leave a few in their room so low blood sugar isn't keeping the group from their happy place.

Level up your offerings with an all-day beverage station in the common area. Mendocino Grove in California kept out pretty jars of gourmet teas, coffee, cocoa, cookies and a hot water kettle for whenever guests needed a pick-me-up. Not only did this thoughtful gesture re-energize guests, it brought them together and elevated their experience.

Embrace Local

Whether you're serving snacks or a multi-course meal, local is the name of the game. Showcase the flavours, traditions and purveyors of your region. Guests are coming from around the country, maybe even across the world, to enjoy your destination. Think about what that means from a culinary standpoint and how these flavours could be a differentiator from other camps.

Welcome glampers with a goodie from a neighbourhood bakery, source produce from local farms, and use recipes that speak to the region (or you personally) to give your guests a sense of place. Grow a veggie patch, and even if you can only harvest enough to garnish a cocktail, using freshly-picked produce gives the feeling of farm-to-table cuisine. We'll never gorget dining in a greenhouse in the Cayman Islands and our server inviting us to pick herbs for our upcoming meal.

Make Dining an Adventure

Even if you have a fabulous dining area, the ambiance can lose its lustre after their eighth meal in a row. At Kinondo Kwetu in Diani Beach, Kenya, meals were often served in a surprise locale. One dinner they transformed the water tower into a sky-high table for two and the next day a washed-up boat became a whimsical dining room decorated with a sun-shade and bunting. Meals at The Ranch at Rock Creek in Montana might mean riding a covered wagon to a dutch-oven cookout or snowshoeing to a pop-up coffee bar in the woods. For a low-overhead yet high-impact dining option, provision picnics. Pack guests a gourmet lunch, bottle of wine, blanket, and a map leading them to your property’s most scenic spot.

Kinondo Kwetu

HoneyTrek

Interactive Dining

If cooking for guests doesn’t sound fun to you, make it a good time for them. At Cozy Peach in Arizona, we could do everything from harvest vegetables for an outdoor cooking class to order tin-foil bundles of pre-seasoned ingredients for a firepit cookout. Quebec’s Canopée Lit embraced their French roots by offering a raclette machine and the ingredients to garnish cheeses and melt them to perfection for a meal that was as delightful for guests as it was easy for the hosts. At your “camp store” (more on that below) offer meal-kits with the tools to prepare them, like artisanal sausages with roasting sticks or veggies with a grill basket.

Canopeé Lit

HoneyTrek

Cooking Facilities

Between picky eaters, budget-conscious travelers, and people who just enjoy cooking, many guests appreciate the option to prepare their own meals. Plus, cooking outdoors is a form of entertainment and can be a joy with your help. To inspire a grill-out, place propane BBQs and farmhouse tables at scenic spots around your property, or turn a tent-side firepit into a grill by adding a grate on top. We loved that Ontario’s Fronterra Farm had outdoor kitchens (with adorable vintage stoves and accessories) at each of their tents… and that Willow-Witt Ranch designed a top-notch cookhouse with enough equipment for four families to be cooking and making new friends.

Willow Witt Ranch at Rock Creek

Comfortably Wild

A Bare Bones (or Better) Breakfast

At traditional hotels, complimentary breakfast is almost expected. So in the woods, where you can’t exactly walk to the corner deli, an on-site breakfast has even greater value. We’ve seen many glamping camps without a kitchen pull off fabulous continental breakfasts, enhanced by a crackling fire or scenic view. Even a few nice granola bars in the room is appreciated because it solves a need and buys guests a little more time in the morning. If you really want to dazzle and help them enjoy the beautiful glamp-site you’ve created, deliver breakfast to their door. Perhaps our most unforgettable room service was when a vintage lunch pail of pastries, yogurt, and hot coffee arrived to our snowy stilted cabin by Skidoo!

Create a Camp Store

Camp stores are a great opportunity to provide for your guests and earn a little extra money. Stock high-end packaged goods, like steel-cut oatmeal, canned organic soups, instant espresso, frozen grass-fed burgers, s’mores fixins, and other shelf-stable items that make for easy meals and keep your guests from darting into town. Better yet, offer kits for a pasta night, grill-out, or a wine and cheese tasting. While it might sound like a lot to manage, you can streamline the process with technology like Impulsify’s PopShop or the belief in humanity with an old-fashioned honor store. At Sou’wester Lodge and Vintage Travel Trailer Resort, they had an incredible shop of artful souvenirs and food for quick meals; payment was as simple as guests writing down their items and settling up at the end of their stay. With the right messaging about trust and community building, they’ve had very few incidents of theft and lots of impulse buys.

When it comes to crafting a dining plan for your property, start by covering the basics, then you can level up your offerings with unique dining spaces, creative meals, and experiences to make food fun.

About Mike & Anne Howard

Traveling for the last 10 years across 63 countries, Mike & Anne are travel experts with a glamping speciality. They launched HoneyTrek.com to chronicle their journey, and have since written National Geographic’s bestselling book Ultimate Journeys for Two and the first guide to glamping in North America, Comfortably Wild. Earning a Lowell Thomas Journalism Award for their book and a seat on the American Glamping Association Board of Advisors, they are committed to the success of the glamping industry. Businesses from budding glampgrounds to established tent manufacturers have partnered with the Howards for their skills as photographers, writers, influencers, and consultants to improve their guest experience and share it with the world.

Visit HoneyTrek.com/GlampingExperts

Mike and Anne Howard