Prologue
"Campers who started camping with us 10 years ago are still using the app today. The users who were in their 30s back then are now in their 40s, still out there camping with their families." More than a campsite booking service, ThankYouCamping (땡큐캠핑) has grown alongside camping as a lifestyle in Korea. Here's the story of how this camping platform thinks about its advertising business, told by Moon Jae-hyung, Manager and Kim Young-jin, Head of Business.
10 years of trust: Korea's camping-specialized OTA
Can you introduce ThankYouCamping?
ThankYouCamping is a camping-specialized OTA (Online Travel Agency) platform. We started 10 years ago as a B2B business providing reservation systems to individual campground operators. As our partnerships grew, we naturally shifted into a B2C platform. Today we work directly with around 600 sites and integrate with another 10,000 or so via external connections. We cover five accommodation categories — auto-camping, glamping, caravans, pensions, and camping picnics (day trips) — and we also sell camping gear, so we genuinely cover the A to Z of camping.
Can you share some numbers?
In 2024, we recorded 720,000 annual reservations and KRW 81.3 billion in gross transaction volume. Cumulative app downloads are around 1.7 million. Notably, our average session length is 8 minutes 57 seconds — unusually long for a booking app. We think it's because camping itself starts with "so, what are we doing this weekend?" — lots of exploration. Our biggest strengths are being the longest-running player in the category and our loyal user base, with families in their 30s–40s at the core. That demographic became a key element we highlighted with AdControl when designing our ad products.
A platform loved by 30s–40s families — ThankYouCamping Ads
What characteristics do your users tend to share?
By age, 45–54 is the biggest cohort, followed by 55–64 and 35–44. People who started camping with us 10 years ago are still here. Users who were in their 30s back then are now in their 40s, still out there camping with their families. We think that's our most valuable asset.
Do you segment users further?
Yes — we used RFM analysis and K-Means clustering to build eight customer segments. For example, "explorers" who constantly hunt down new campsites, "hideout types" who revisit the same favorite spot, "researchers" who study every review before booking. One interesting thing about campsites is they feel completely different depending on the season — spring vs. autumn, Halloween, winter — the same site delivers a totally different vibe each time. So some users intentionally pick one or two spots and just enjoy the seasonal variation.
An ad strategy that protects user experience
How did you start the ad business?
Adrop reached out to us first. We were already running ads internally, but we agreed to do a major overhaul using AdControl and AdNote. We expected the platforms to help us distribute resources sensibly across the entire pipeline — from ad proposals to live campaign operations — so we decided to adopt AdControl.
What principles guided your ad product design?
The most important one was: don't hurt the user experience. We only place ads in spots that don't interrupt our core flow, which is the reservation flow. So ads go on places like the reservation-complete page or in the community section, after the booking is done. We also refuse ads that conflict with the value of our service, as a matter of policy. Ads are an important part of the user experience too, so we worked carefully to set those principles.
Toward the A to Z of the camping experience
Where is ThankYouCamping headed next?
We want to go deeper into the camping experience itself. Our big overhauls this year and next year — and the updates that follow — are all aimed at covering the A to Z of using a campsite, linearly, end-to-end.
Editor: Jensen
Published: 2025.11.04