How we rank camps

Our goal is that when you browse the directory, the camps you see look like places you'd want to send your kid.

Summer Camp Planner's default sort orders camps by a quality score we compute internally. The score is designed around a single question: would a careful, attentive parent think this camp looks great for their child? Everything below describes the ingredients we use to answer that question.

What goes into the ranking

We consider five categories of information. We don't publish the numeric weights we assign to each, but we do publish what's inside each category so you know what's influencing what you see.

1. What parents are saying. Ratings, review counts, and the substance of reviews across Google, Yelp, and other public sources. We read review content for signals like returning staff, how emergencies were handled, and whether families re-enrolled year after year — not just star averages.
2. Credentials and track record. Accreditation (such as the American Camp Association), state or provincial childcare licensure, years the camp has been operating, and institutional backing (schools, parks departments, YMCAs, synagogues, churches, universities, established nonprofits).
3. Program clarity. How well the camp explains what it does, who it's for, and how it keeps kids safe. A camp that clearly describes its program, names its leadership, and publishes safety or staff-ratio information is typically easier for a parent to evaluate.
4. Listing quality. Whether the camp's page has up-to-date contact information, pricing, and logistics. This is a small factor — we know many excellent long-running camps have old-school websites — but a listing with no phone, no price, and a broken URL is harder for a family to act on.
5. Activity. How recently the listing was verified and whether sessions are currently being offered.

What doesn't affect ranking

A few things that some directories use but we deliberately don't:

• Sponsorship. Sponsored placements on the site are always clearly labeled and appear in dedicated slots outside the regular camp listings. Advertisers cannot pay to rank higher in our default sort, at any price.
• Social media follower count. A camp with a big Instagram isn't necessarily a better camp; a 30-year-old neighborhood program with no social presence often is.
• Website polish. Our ranking rewards what a camp does, not how slick its marketing is. A plain but clear site from a longstanding program is not penalized versus a slick startup.

Camps with serious credibility issues

A small number of camps are hidden from default listings entirely. This applies when a camp has an active childcare-license revocation, a credible safety incident reported to us and confirmed, or a severely broken listing (dead website and no working contact method). These camps still appear if you search for them by name — we don't erase them — but we don't surface them to parents who are browsing.

How the ranking is produced

We gather the inputs above through a combination of automated research, public directories (ACA, state licensing databases), and human review. The ranking is recomputed periodically; it's not a one-time snapshot.

How we verify the facts on each camp listing

A small set of facts on each camp detail page — program type, ACA accreditation, years established, operator type, and whether the camp publishes a staff-to-camper ratio — are gathered through a structured research pass, not operator self-report. Here's where each comes from:

• Program type (day / overnight / hybrid) — read from the camp's own website content and logistics pages.
• ACA accreditation — looked up directly in the American Camp Association directory at acacamps.org/find-a-camp. We record "yes" only for camps listed there as currently accredited; "not verified" means we couldn't find a match, not that the camp isn't accredited.
• Years established — from a "since YYYY" or founding-year statement on the camp's own About page, preferred over domain-registration age (which can over-state tenure).
• Operator type (nonprofit, parks department, school, faith-based, university, for-profit) — classified from the camp's About page, ownership disclosures, and a brief public-records check.
• Staff-to-camper ratio — we only record a "published" state when the camp itself publishes a specific ratio on its site. We don't infer, and we don't guess based on ACA general guidance.

We re-verify these quarterly. Safety-floor signals (ACA status, state or provincial license) refresh monthly. If a fact on a listing is wrong, the feedback form is the fastest path to fix it — every report goes to a real person.

A missing value on the Facts & Credentials panel ("Not listed") means we couldn't find a published answer — not that the camp is hiding something. Many excellent programs don't disclose every field, and we'd rather be silent than guess.

If you run a camp and think your listing is wrong

Use the feedback form to let us know. The most common reasons we see: a camp is operating under a new name, contact details have changed, or a listing references an incident or complaint that's been resolved. We correct listings promptly when we can verify the update.

Changes to this page

We'll update this page whenever the inputs above change meaningfully. The "Last updated" date at the top reflects the most recent substantive change.