The Letter From an Attorney You've Never Heard Of, About a Client Who Has Never Visited Your Campground, Asking for $50,000

There's a multi-million-dollar legal machine pointed directly at your campground right now. You can't see it. Your insurance probably won't cover it. And by the time you find out it exists, the demand letter is already sitting in your inbox: $50,000, signed by an attorney you've never heard of, on behalf of a "client" who has never visited your park and never will.

This is the ADA website lawsuit racket. According to UsableNet's annual lawsuit tracking and Seyfarth Shaw's yearly ADA Title III report, roughly 4,000 to 4,500 federal ADA Title III website lawsuits get filed every year, with state-court filings (mostly California Unruh Act cases) bringing the total well past 8,000. Most targets settle for between $10,000 and $75,000 because going to trial costs significantly more. Almost none of those settlements involve any actual disabled person ever using the defendant's website.

Let me show you exactly how it works.

The mechanic of the racket, step by step

Step 1. A small plaintiff's firm hires a "tester" with a documented disability. The Supreme Court briefly examined the tester-plaintiff model in Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer (No. 22-429, 2023). The case was dismissed as moot when the plaintiff voluntarily withdrew, leaving the underlying business model intact and active in lower courts nationwide.

Step 2. Their staff runs automated accessibility scanners (the same free tools you can use yourself: WAVE, Lighthouse, axe) against thousands of websites at once. The scanner flags missing alt text, low color contrast, keyboard-trap navigation, no form labels, the usual list of WCAG 2.1 Level AA violations.

Step 3. They generate a boilerplate complaint. Same legal language for every defendant. Just swap in the business name and the URL. Filed in a court the plaintiff's bar has organized infrastructure in (often the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of New York, or California state courts).

Step 4. The demand letter shows up at your park. Settle for $X (usually $15K-$75K) plus our attorneys' fees plus you commit to remediating the site within Y days. Or we proceed to trial, where defending will cost you $150K-$300K minimum.

Step 5. You settle. Because the math is brutal. Even if you would have won at trial, you're out six figures in legal fees the ADA's fee-shifting provision generally won't reimburse to a defendant.

Why campgrounds are perfect targets

Three reasons.

First, the law clearly covers you. ADA Title III applies to "places of public accommodation," which has been read broadly to include the websites of physical businesses where the public buys goods or services. The 9th Circuit's Robles v. Domino's Pizza (2019) ruling, which the Supreme Court declined to review, settled this question for restaurants. The same logic walks straight into the campground space: people book stays online, so the booking site is part of the goods and services of the physical park.

Second, most campground websites are years out of date. In the audits we've run on independent park sites, the vast majority have no semantic structure, no alt text on key images, no proper form labels, broken keyboard navigation, and color-contrast ratios well below WCAG 2.1 AA's required 4.5:1 for normal text. The automated scanners these firms use will light up like a Christmas tree.

Third, you usually don't have corporate legal cover. A national retailer can absorb a $50K settlement and has in-house counsel to negotiate it down to a fraction. Independent park owners often don't. The plaintiff's bar knows this and prices the demand accordingly. The settlement is calibrated to be just below what a real legal defense costs, so settling becomes the rational economic choice. Which is the whole point of the business model.

What we've seen first-hand: Park owners getting demand letters out of nowhere, settling for $25K-$50K, then being required as part of the settlement to hire third-party remediation vendors at additional cost. The cycle repeats one to two years later when a different tester scans the same park and finds the next round of violations. It's not a one-time tax. It's a recurring one if nothing structural changes.

The real case law (so you don't have to take my word for it)

The pattern across all of them: businesses that lost or settled had no proactive accessibility work in place. Businesses that won (or got cases dismissed early) had documented WCAG compliance, a published accessibility statement, and a real process for handling complaints before they became lawsuits.

Why an accessibility widget alone is not a silver bullet

I'll be straight with you. No widget on the front of your site will "make you 100% ADA compliant." There is no such certification. Anyone selling you that is misleading you, and some of the largest overlay-widget vendors have themselves been hit with class-action settlements in the past two years for making exactly those claims.

What a real accessibility widget actually does:

• Gives users with visual, cognitive, or motion needs immediate control over font size, contrast, link visibility, animations, and font legibility.
• Demonstrates good-faith proactive effort, which courts and plaintiff's firms both weigh heavily during early case evaluation.
• Pairs with a published accessibility statement, semantic HTML, and a contact path for reporting issues to form a credible, defensible compliance posture.

What it doesn't do: rewrite your underlying HTML, add alt text to your images, or fix color contrast in your stylesheets. That work has to happen in the code itself.

What we do about it at Campground Management

Every single website we deploy ships with the ADA accessibility widget pre-installed and pre-configured. Every site is built on semantic HTML with proper heading hierarchy, form labels, keyboard navigation, color contrast meeting WCAG 2.1 AA, and alt text on functional images. Every site links to a public accessibility statement with a clearly posted contact path for reporting issues.

This is not compliance theater. It's because doing it right at build time takes about 4% more effort than doing it wrong, and it materially reduces the surface area a plaintiff's scanner will flag. Combined with the accessibility statement and the user-control widget, our parks land in the "not worth pursuing, move on to the next target" category for the plaintiff's bar.

The bottom line

In the campground sites we've audited, roughly 95% have zero accessibility infrastructure. No widget. No statement. No alt text. No contrast compliance. Each of those sites is a sitting duck for the next scanner pass.

You have two paths. You can wait until the demand letter shows up and then spend $25K-$75K settling it, plus required remediation costs, plus the recurring follow-up suits in 18 months. Or you can spend a fraction of that proactively right now. The math here is not subtle.

Nothing in this article is legal advice. If you've already received a demand letter or want to assess your specific legal exposure, talk to a qualified attorney in your state.

Sean Hakes, Founder of Campground Management and RVParks.us

25 years in digital marketing and advertising. 14 years in the RV industry. Builds park websites and booking software with accessibility baked in from the foundation. More on Sean's story · [email protected]