The folks at Isle Royale National Park sure could use some lessons on effective pricing strategies. I took my mother to America’s least used national park as a belated birthday present recently and was flabbergasted not only by how overpriced our visit was but by how many hidden surprise fees popped up around every corner as well. Granted, I understand that a visit to any national park is going to be an exercise in financial indulgence. Tourists are captive audiences at these places and the national parks do a great job of exploiting that fact. However, is the constant need to shell out cash hand over fist (much to the detriment of your vacation experience) really providing good customer service that will result in repeat business? I think not.

The trip out to Isle Royale from Copper Harbor, Michigan is in itself no, ahem, walk in the park. It starts and ends with a three and a half hour boat ride that cost $392.00 for three of us. And though my mother is indeed quite spry for her age, I didn’t think that sleeping in a tent on the ground after a full day of hiking was really in her best interest, so I opted for a night in one of the island’s single-room housekeeping cabins, which set me back another $300.00. So before we even left for our overnight Isle Royale experience, I was down nearly $700.00.

The credit card was charged long before the trip started, but the nickel-and-diming began the second we stepped into the ferry office. At check-in we were informed that a “fuel surcharge” of $5.00 per passenger was due prior to departure. Once we were safely in the middle of the lake, the captain announced that each passenger would be charged a “user fee” of $4.00 per day while at the park and would we mind please paying said fee at the snack bar. After the line died down, they wasted no time announcing the names of those who were too lazy to hightail it to the snack bar and pay their fee.

And so it went. Outrageous meal pricing for mediocre food notwithstanding (I’ll get to that in a bit), it seemed that around every corner we were constantly greeted by park employees who shared the news of some sort of utility tax or registration fee for the food we wanted to eat, the activities we wanted to engage in, or the place we wanted to sleep. Each time this happened the little subliminal cash register in my head went cha-ching as the service fees mounted up. To the National Park Service’s credit, they did give us a half-day canoe rental as part of our lodging fee, though whether or not that made up for the fact that our cabin’s sheets came ‘pre-used’ is up for debate.

The final straw came when we decided to hike through the lunch hour, opting to forego another overpriced sit-down dining room meal for what we figured would be a much more cost-effective sack lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Once again we wore the silly tourist dunce caps when the woman at the register asked for sixty-seven dollars plus change for our three simple bag lunches. Yes, you read that right. Sixty-seven plus dollars for three PB&J sack lunches. Just let that sink in for a minute.

The look on my mother’s face was priceless. “I beg your pardon?” she asked with an obvious tone of incredulous disbelief.

“They’re the same price as our regular lunches,” Register Woman said in a heavy Texan drawl, shrugging her shoulders as though sticker-shocked customers were merely a regular, unfortunate annoyance of daily life at Isle Royale National Park.

Being the foolish, cornered tourists that we were, surrounded on all sides by hundreds of miles of pristine northern woodlands at the ass-end of nowhere, we dutifully (but begrudgingly) paid for our lunches and grumbled to no end upon discovering that our PB&J’s were DIY sandwich kits with single-servings of disposable Smuckers packets. Of course after a two-mile hike and several miles of canoeing, they tasted as good as any four-star lunch ever could. But that’s beside the point.

When all was said and done an overnight trip to The Island for three people cost over a thousand dollars, not including tourist chotchkes like t-shirts and maps. Mom’s certainly worth it and sadly, I’m sure I’ve spent more on a single evening of revelry at some time in my life, but the money’s not really the point. The bitter aftertaste the entire experience left me with is. If you don’t leave your customers with a warm, fuzzy feeling once all is said and done, does it really matter how much your products or services cost?

At Mightybytes, our clients ask us for line-item ‘smorgasbord’ pricing all the time. The key difference, however, is that those line items are meant to help clients understand up front the specifics of what they are paying for. Admittedly, additional charges are sometimes just unavoidable. Scope creep, unexpected expenses, software licensing fees, the list of things that can push a project over budget is a long one. But we strive to keep those unavoidable charges the exception rather than the rule. If we nickeled-and-dimed our clients the way Isle Royale did, I fully expect that Mightybytes would be out of business within six months. It’s a psychological difference in approaches, I guess, but one that has worked for us, so I’m sticking to it.

As an aside, I might add that our commute to the Isle Royale ferry from my house was a mere eight miles. If you are considering a visit, you should definitely tack on additional costs and travel time for getting to an Isle Royale ferry from wherever you are. Ferries leave from Houghton and Copper Harbor, Michigan as well as Grand Portage, Minnesota.

In this age of high gas prices and questionable economic times I really wonder at the efficacy of Isle Royale’s pricing structure. Certainly I’m not the only one who has exited the ferry after a trip there and felt, quite literally, taken for a ride. With a pricing track record like Isle Royale has, is it really any wonder that this getaway destination boasts the moniker of ‘least used national park’?