America’s Camping Report Card

No star ratings — real reviews. We read hundreds of thousands of written camper reviews and used AI to tag what each person praised or complained about, across 14 topics (scenery, crowds, bugs, value, and more).

Each topic is praise minus complaints. A topic’s score is the share of campers who praised it minus the share who complained.

Grades are relative. Every grade compares this place to all the others on that topic — an A means among the best, a C about average. We grade this way because campers rave about scenery but only mention bugs when bitten, so one fixed scale couldn’t be fair across topics.

Two fairness rules. A topic campers liked never grades below a C− — something people enjoyed can’t “fail.” And an F is reserved for the rare topic campers clearly complained about and that’s a real outlier.

The headline grade is a destination grade. It blends what the typical campground here is like with how good the region’s best are — because you choose a region for its best camping, then pick a site. We show both, plus the standout campgrounds.

Enough data to be fair. We only grade places with enough reviews; thinner ones show “limited data” instead of a letter, and every topic carries a confidence range from its sample size. The Belonging topic is graded by our Green Book community score — how welcoming campers describe the staff and community, with discrimination and hostility as hard penalties — not sentiment alone.

We check the AI. An independent model (from a different maker) audits a sample of the tags. It found the complaint labels ran over-eager (passing mentions scored as gripes), so we re-judged all 499,009 of them and removed the quarter that were really about another topic or weren’t complaints, keeping the real-but-mild ones. Then a human rater, blind to our labels, agreed with 87% of them (89% of complaints) across 420 labels.

Read the full study: why the view won’t make your trip →