© 2006-2008 Tom Donaldson.
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On the website server, ContinuousTraveler.com uses data licensed from ZipCodeWorld.com for data validation and several other functions.
RV park information comes from a variety of sources.
Kay and I fulltimed for about three and a half years. In that time we visited something on the order of 300 RV parks. Kay's nephew travelled with us one summer, and found and entered around 300 parks. Many other parks are ones that we considered but did not visit, or I just found and entered as an "idle time" hobby, similar to playing Solitaire.
We generally found parks online via Google, Google Maps. We sometimes tried other search methods, but overall, Google gave the best results and continues to improve.
Google Map results often get RV park names, addresses, phone numbers, web sites, and sometimes location. The search results make a fairly descent starting point, but we generally must do quite a bit of additional work after finding parks this way.
For example, a Google Maps search for RV parks near Morgantown, WV, finds a few parks in neighboring Pennsylvania, but misses Sand Springs RV Park which actually is near Morgantown. Compare the Google Map results with this search on ContinuousTraveler.com.
A fair amount of additional searching and cross checking is required to get a good listing for an RV park. After adding literally thousands of parks, I am averaging about nine minutes per park (down from about fifteen minutes when I started this). I have taken as long as forty-five minutes for one park (I can be a little obsessive-compulsive!). I have also taken as little as two minutes for a park with a great web site. See "GPS Coordinates" on this site for more information.
Thus: credit for RV listings mostly goes to the labor of our family, and mostly my labor. Since late 2008 I have doggedly spent ninety minutes/day, seven days/week, adding to and updating the RV park database. Plus some additional time to update old listings that I discover have problems.
This process does not end. Once I have picked all the "low hanging fruit" from the Web in terms of finding new parks, I must continually go back through old entries and check them. RV parks get bought and sold; join franchises and leave them; go out of business; become members-only; aerial imagery improves so I can more accurately place parks; etc.
I am currently spending as much time rechecking and updating RV parks I previously added as I am adding new ones.
A very few parks have been added by users. However, because the process of getting a good RV park listing can be complicated and tedious, and because the process is completely undocumented, I have disabled general user editing of RV park information. If you want to become and editor, send me email and we will discuss it.
Or just email me and let me know what park you want added: info@ContinuousTraveler.com
From time to time someone suggests buying this or that list of businesses that includes RV parks, and other RV related businesses. I have looked at sample data from a couple of these sources. These lists do not seem to add any value over what I can find online via search engines.
I did find one commercial list that provided GPS coordinates. However, after using the coordinates in the sample data to locate a couple of known RV parks, I concluded that the coordinates were "machine generated" and had all of the geo-coding problems that led me to start this project in the first place.
So: even if I licensed such a list/database, I would STILL have to spend the same amount of time crosschecking and validating that I do for RV parks I find on the web. Not a good use of resources.
The CT RVParks iPhone application does NOT contain any third party data (e.g., does NOT include ZipcodeWorld.com data). The database in the iPhone application is a compact extract of the RV park information on the ContinuousTraveler.com website, that is, data generated by ContinuousTraveler.com.
The CT RVParks on-phone database is licensed under the same Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License as the website.