Pineland Camping Park — Hotel in Town of Big Flats

Arriving to the campground, I entered the office and there were 2 ladies working. They were very nice and gave me a map to show me where to get to where I was staying (B6). Got to B6, and it was very clean and bigger than I anticipated. I thought the place was great until the next morning when we went to make coffee. Took about 10 minutes to get it working, and about shocked ourselves countless times by all the sparks that would fly out of the plug in. Toaster would not work either. I am assuming electrical problems. I was sleeping and woke up to the smell of smoke. My sister had made a breakfast bake for that morn. They started pre-heating the oven and it just started smoking to high heaven! The smoke and the smell - ugh, we thought "what the hell?!" Opened the oven and someone had sprayed the whole oven with oven cleaner....and get this...NEVER CLEANED IT OUT! So that morning here we sit...cleaning the damn oven. *Picture available for you :) The night we arrived - the Badgers were playing. Of course (we should have known) Tv just couldn't pick up the signal to get the channel - only infomercials! :D We called up the clubhouse to see if there was anyone able to fix the Dish so we could get the channel. All he said was no - "But we do have the game on in the clubhouse!" ....I'm sure you do buddy, I'm sure you do... My mom & my sister's bf headed to the bar on Sat. for lunch and a drink. We crossed paths as they were headed back and we were headed to the bar. I asked how the food was (he got a chicken sandwich) He said the sandwich was okay, the bun was covered in flour and the chicken was pretty dry. I was so hungry I didn't even care. So we headed to the bar for some drinks and food. Bar was smaller than I expected, but we did find a table to sit at. I went up to the bar, stood there for a solid 10 minutes, not ONE time was I even acknowledged. People coming up to the bar after me were ordered and gone, and there I stood. If you cannot wait on your customers, get some more help! I should add in there...my mom who had previously ordered the sandwich ordered from the guy behind the bar - not rude, but super unfriendly. If you are working with customers - you need to at least be able to socialize, fake being nice if you have to! Played BINGO on Sunday. That was fun. My husband would go into the bar to get us drinks between games. I ended up playing his cards because once again, he would stand in line for about 10-15 minutes just to get 1 beer. He said 1 lady was helped before him...she left and came back about 5 minutes later and bartender went to wait on her again...she had to tell the bartender that he was there first! Un-fricken-believable! Get your heads out of your ass, or hire new people! Not much to do there otherwise for adults (I would say go to the bar, but you wouldn't get waited on! Insert laugh here)...would not pay for the pass to do the water slide, etc. I felt almost like it was robbery charging that much money for an inflatable slide that was run by 2, 12 year old boys. Yeah, that's safe! It was a very quiet campground. This is my 3rd year camping at a campground and never have they been this quiet & boring. The bathrooms were amazingly clean, I was super impressed! There were 2 young girls cleaning them when I used them once and I made sure they knew they were doing a fantastic job. My 4 year old loved playing in the arcade. It was small, but big enough for him. By day 2 we went back and over half of the games were out of order lol. Sorry, I just have to laugh... At check out time, I did not get any sort of "thank you" or anything. I feel like if people are paying this much to stay at your campground, the least you could do is say thanks for staying with us, etc. Overall I gave 2 stars due to staff unfriendliness, and overall atmosphere. I think a staff meeting should be in order to light a fire under their ass to better serve the customers. I might not be a "regular" but that does NOT mean that I should get the shaft when it comes to...

Pros: The bathroom facilities are, generally speaking from my experience, up to date and kept immaculate given the circumstances. They can get wet and sandy but you have to understand that they are near a pool and this area is a very sandy area in general. We did not use the showers. The pool was nice last year when we went and kept at a nice temperature. We were unable to use the pool this year due to time restraints and weather, but heard that the pool is now rarely cleaned. This came from a couple of seasonal campers that we talked to about how the campground has changed sense the change in ownership. That being said....

Cons: New owners are not very accommodating and have poor people skills. We made reservations before they bought the campground.

We contacted the campground several months prior to our stay. I can't tell you who we talked to but we made reservations, under the prior ownership, to have three campers on two sites. We explained that one of the campers was a small pull behind and they said it would be fine. They did say that there would be a fee for the extra camper, which is reasonable.

The new owners confronted us on the second day and said we had to pay an extra $96 for the second camper for the weekend. When we compromised, to get him off our back, and said we would pay for the one night as they didn't seem to have an issue with it the day prior, the owners wife told us to leave and threatened to call the cops. When all was said and done we agreed to pay for the second night. We have stayed here before and never had issues under the PRIOR management. Unfortunately, we will not be returning. Not because the enforcement of policy changed but because of how they handled the situation in an aggressive and threatening manor. We would have had no problem paying for a third site if they would have said something at check in, when we checked in with 3 campers for two sites as reserved. You don't have to take my word for it though. Check out their reviews on Trip Advisor, if they haven't threatened the author of that post to take it down yet. We stayed there the last weekend in August and there are reviews explaining the owners same harassing and confrontational demeanor on August 1st. Remember they have only owned this Campground for 3 months at the time of this review and already have two strikingly similar reviews of poor treatment towards campers. Not to mention the amount of reviews they may have strong-armed people to remove as they tried doing to me while making false statements about our actions. He told me that he "will not remove the false information unless you delete your review."

The owner may respond to this again (as he did to the first review I made) with defamatory remarks about myself and the individuals that were with me, as well as the volunteer fire and EMS agencies we work for, even though we never represented ourselves as members of said departments during his interactions with us. He went so far as to make up lies that we flooded a laundry room at his facility and left a ROARING fire in the fire pit on site 33 were I was staying. I, at no time during our stay, had a fire in our pit on site 33. The only way I was able to catch him in the lie about flooding the room with no way out was calling him and asking if he was able to review the surveillance footage. He thought I was somebody else and gave me a long elaborate story of how and why he was unable to review the footage before I could tell him that I wasn't the person he thought I was.

I would urge you to check out my other reviews and you can see that I do not go around making bad reviews of businesses to be a jerk. I generally have great experiences at camp grounds, and other businesses, around this area and would recommend you...

DO NOT CAMP HERE!!! We returned for our 2nd year based off a fairly decent previous experience and a 40% off savings. When we arrived, we were told that we needed to park our trailer with ATVs in a designated area (even though I had previously called, paid to keep the trailer and the ATVs on our site and was told nothing about it needing to be elsewhere). Eric, the security guard, rudely told us about this rule, along with a LONG list of other ridiculous rules. Then when we shared with him that we were told differently, he had the owner come to confront us at our site. The owner, Chris, was very intense and abrupt when he arrived and said he would not talk to us until our dog was on a leash (our dog is a very good listener and we NEVER keep her on a leash on any campsite because she stays right with us and doesn't run off, chocolate lab). We promptly put her on a leash and began discussing some of the petty rules and regulations. In the end, Chris allowed us to keep the trailer/ATVs on the site. One hour later, we saw Chris stumbling drunk around the campground and witnessed this throughout the evening. My husband went into the bar to get change for the shower (because you have to pay to shower), and the owner drunkenly slapped him on the arm on his way passed. The next day, the security guard (Eric) drove by and saw our children using sparklers with us by the firepit. He turned around and said there are no fireworks allowed, made the kids put out their sparklers and yelled at us again for not having our dog on a leash while she was on our site and sitting next to us by the fire. He proceeded to drive past our site over and over again for the remainder of the evening. It made us feel very unwelcome. The next day, my son rode his bike to the pool and set it down on the grassy area next to the pool. The owner promptly moved his bike to bike rack on the opposite site of the pool and decided to make enough of an issue about it, that we heard him from the opposite side of the pool telling other guests that he needed to move the bike. We have never experienced mosquitoes like this before (and I know it's been a very rainy season - we expected there to be mosquitoes). A staff member told us that they should be fogging the campground, although we never saw this happening during our four day stay. Another issue was that the site was terribly unlevel and difficult to get a camper in and out of. One of the staff members, who seemed friendly, tried to guide us out and told my husband to drive the wrong way down a one-way. My husband was naturally nervous about this as there are so many rules that make no sense and the owner/security guard had been so aggressive with us. Due to feeling unwelcome here, we decided to leave a day early and will...