Month: March 2024

Camping got too big for its britches

Once upon a time, “camping” meant a tent and fire ring, and “campground” meant a bunch of tents and fire rings, plus—possibly—a communal bathhouse and swimming lake. Oh, there might be some car campers, sleeping in the back of a station wagon rather than on the ground. But campgrounds were relatively unobtrusive and mostly unobjectionable, close to nature and accessible to even the most limited budget.

Time passed. Campgrounds started accommodating small travel trailers and pickup campers, putting in 20-amp and 30-amp electrical connections, then adding water hook-ups and, eventually, sewer connections. Cable television followed, then wi-fi. Sites grew larger, to match the growing size of fifth-wheels and motorcoaches, and 30-amp connections were upgraded to 50 amps. Campgrounds were now repositioned as RV parks, and they started getting a whole lot bigger, the better to cover their growing capital requirements.

Nor was that all. Camping sites were supplemented by basic cabins for those without an RV, then by ever larger lodges, complete with kitchens and bathrooms and various appliances, including large-screen TVs. Campground amenities likewise exploded. Swimming lakes evolved into swimming pools, water parks and lazy rivers; playgrounds, climbing walls, mini-golf courses, jumping pillows, pickleball courts and fitness centers proliferated; and guided activities, golf car rentals, laser tag, concerts and outdoor movies all became part of a growing menu of distractions.

More recently, glamping mania has gripped the industry. Safari tents on platforms, mock Conestoga wagons, yurts and teepees in regions that never saw the originals, treehouses—whatever “unique” accommodation can be offered to justify nightly rates starting at $200 and ranging up to 10 times that amount—are becoming ever more commonplace. Plus, of course, the kind of top-drawer amenities one associates with that kind of spending: wine bars, yoga and meditation sessions, post-and-beam common lounges, spa services, farmers markets, even upscale shopping.

And yet, it’s all “camping.” Despite the enormous social and economic chasm that lies between camping as we knew it 60 years ago and as it is today, the rate of change has been so rapid that the creaky mechanisms of land-use planning and zoning regulation have barely taken notice, much less kept up. Mr. or Mrs. Developer rolls into town with grand plans for a resort “campground” that will cost millions to build, sprawl across dozens of acres, suck up untold acre-feet of groundwater and clog local roads with battalions of over-sized vehicles, and the town burghers are hearing “campground” and envisioning idyllic sylvan retreats—and if they’re not, they’re still stuck with working with regulations drafted in an age when that was the norm.

No wonder, then, that anti-campground sentiment has been percolating with growing intensity in recent years. The sequence of events is almost always the same. Monied interests get the ear of elected officials, whom they win over with sugar-plum visions of what their project will mean for the local economy and tax base. The project’s details are disclosed to the community, usually with the enthusiastic endorsement of its wined-and-dined political leadership. And then the questions begin, and the local costs of what’s being proposed start coming out, and all of a sudden comes the realization that what’s in those Power Point presentations is not a mere “campground” but a full-blown town.

The resulting backlash is entirely predictable, and successful at derailing the monied interests often enough that you’d think they’d take a hint and slink away. But deep pockets often have deep reservoirs of patience. The Kentucky Bluegrass Experience Resort, a $40 million proposal that would include 818 RV sites, 155 cottages, 15 spots for employee accommodations and 37 rustic tent sites, has been banging around for more than three years as local residents throw every conceivable roadblock in its way, yet it persists. KOA’s announced proposal two years ago for a property straddling a main approach road to Yosemite National Park, with a 400-site KOA resort on one side and an 80-90 site Terramor glampground on the other, has yet to be submitted in a formal application, leaving locals twisting in the wind—even as they take the opportunity to get more organized.

But it’s not just megaprojects that are being challenged, as local residents increasingly realize that even a modestly sized RV park can be as disruptive to their way of life as any other industry. The Pickens County, S.C. planning commission earlier this month rejected a proposed campground that would have had a mere 25 RV sites, apparently in response to neighbors’ concerns about safety and property values. A 130-site campground proposed for Fife Lake, Mich. got shot down a couple of weeks ago by the village council following widespread opposition centered on its potential noise, pollution and other environmental impacts—not to mention that when full, its population would exceed that of the village itself.

Other towns, hamstrung by a lack of appropriate regulations allowing them to reject a poorly conceived campground, give developers a green light—only to have local landowners take them to court. A proposed new RV park in Greene County, Tenn., is being blocked by a lawsuit that also names the county and its regional planning commission as defendants, with the plaintiff arguing that the county’s approval is based on an inappropriate agricultural zoning designation. “They are not a campground, they are an RV site, which is very different,” one of the lawsuit backers told a local TV station. “The infrastructure in the area would not be able to support the large vehicles, campers and RVs that would be required to go down the main road that the campground is on, which is very narrow.”

The outdated inclusion of campgrounds as permitted uses in agriculturally zoned areas is widespread—and, increasingly, recognized as unsuited for the massive recreational vehicles that are becoming commonplace. That is causing a small but growing number of jurisdictions to put a pause on campground approvals while they reevaluate. In upstate New York, for example, the town of Ovid has scheduled an April 10 hearing on the advisability of imposing a one-year moratorium on the development of new or expanded campgrounds. The nearby town of Newfield already adopted such a moratorium a couple of months ago, and the town of Oneonta, while rejecting a moratorium on a 2-2 vote, is pushing ahead with a series of proposed amendments to the town code that would affect future campground developments.

Whether today’s “campgrounds” are compatible with agricultural areas of narrow roads, possibly limited aquifers and soils with questionable septic capacity are not the only issues planning officials are starting to question. There’s also the increasingly hazy distinction between campgrounds with row upon row of cabins, RV park models and tiny homes, and a conventional subdivision. The latter typically has numerous zoning constraints, as well as construction and inspection requirements; the former, very few or none. The upshot is that savvy developers will apply for campground approval when their actual goal is to build a vacation-home resort, indistinguishable from a conventional resort other than for the (skirted and invisible) wheels under its dwellings.

That’s the sleight-of-hand confronting the residents of the Animas Valley in southwest Colorado, where Roberts Resort Development is plunging ahead with plans to build a “campground” with as many as 277 sites, up to 140 of them—the number fluctuates—to be occupied by park models. The park models will be for sale, and if sales are brisk, the developer has said he will want to convert even more of the RV sites to park models. The 277 sites on approximately 30 acres will create a housing density roughly 18 times that of the surrounding area. Yet despite these obvious similarities to a trailer park or to conventional suburbia, the valley’s land use plan arguably embraces the fiction that this is merely a campground or RV park, and therefore a “minor” special use, for which approval by the county’s commissioners is not needed.

Local residents, livid over the blatantly sham nature of this proposal, have thrown up enough protests to at least slow it down, with the developer’s required paperwork now delayed by months. Whether they’ll ultimately succeed in derailing it altogether, or whether the Roberts interests have deep enough pockets to ride out the storm, remains to be seen. But this kind of grassroots opposition will only become more common as developers keep piling into this corner of the commercial real estate market, and as they take advantage of outmoded zoning regulations replete with loopholes big enough to drive a 45-foot Prevost through. The irony? The more those developers provoke such a response, the more the whole RVing and camping thing will lose its luster, to their own detriment.

For the most part, it’s not “camping” anymore. It’s often not even RVing. But whatever it is, it needs a new vocabulary, a new understanding of its many permutations, and a far more nuanced regulatory framework.

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Deschutes dithering about RV homes

There’s a lot of dithering these days in Deschutes County, Oregon, about whether it’s a good idea to give a government stamp of approval to people living in RVs as permanent residences. No other county in Oregon has yet taken that step. And as county commissioner Phil Chang noted in today’s commission meeting, there’s a difference between “the bleeding edge” and “the leading edge” of innovation, with no telling what the consequences may be for those leading the charge.

Or as plaintively asked by commissioner Patti Adair, “For once, do we need to be first?”

Occasioning such angst has been a will-they-won’t-they struggle by the three-member board to decide whether to include RVs as permissible dwellings under an Oregon law that allows accessory dwelling units on single-family rural lots. Although two public hearings last fall elicited strongly negative comments about the whole idea, the Deschutes planning commission only narrowly shot it down, on a 4-3 vote—close enough for the county’s board of commissioners, after discussing the planning board’s decision at a Feb. 28 meeting, to decide it should keep talking. Because, as Adair also noted, “it could have gone either way.”

Today’s upshot? A vague decision—no date has been set yet—to hold another public hearing on the matter. Maybe before Memorial Day—or maybe in the fall, with a thinly expressed hope that some other county (Tillamook and Clackamas were prominently mentioned) will bite the bullet first, “allowing for an assessment of those programs and the lessons learned therein.” After you, my dear Gaston. No, no—after you, Alphonse.

To be fair, today’s meeting was called in part to get answers to questions that were raised at the Feb. 28 meeting, principally having to do with wastewater management. But those answers weren’t encouraging: RV wastewater characteristics are significantly different from a regular household’s, according to Todd Cleveland, onsite wastewater manager. It’s more concentrated, and the chemicals that RV owners add to reduce odors are not septic-system friendly, regardless of what the label may say. Among the most frequent complaints fielded by county enforcement officers about RV tenants are surface wastewater discharges, presumably because their septic systems are over-burdened. And soil quality in Deschutes County is such that adding an RV to a single-home site will require at least a one-acre lot for adequate percolation—and even that’s a guess because “we haven’t evaluated RVs for permanent use.”

No matter. Despite all the uncertainties, not to mention abundant other reasons why legitimizing RVs as suitable year-round housing is an enormously woeful idea, the pressure is on to provide some kind of alternatives in a state—like much of the U.S.—desperately in need of affordable homes. The Source, a county weekly newspaper, pressed the issue late last month in an editorial headlined, “With Affordable Housing, Why Are Deschutes County And The City Of Bend Ignoring The Low-Hanging Fruit?” as though the only difference between an RV and a bungalow is its placement on a tree of housing options.

In that respect, however, Deschutes County and the concessions it seems prepared to make are far from unique. Earlier this week, for example, RVtravel reported on “good news for RVers in the U.S. Navy!” Navy families may now “choose to live in an RV park for up to a year as they await availability of base housing when reporting to a new duty station.” The new policy, “an initiative of the U.S. Navy Morale, Welfare and Recreation Program,” is “aimed at reducing the stressors that come with a military lifestyle.”

The best way to reduce such stress, it should go without saying, would be to provide military families with something other than an aluminum or fiberglass band-aid. Living full-time in an RV—especially for more than a couple of adults—is its own significant stressor. But as the U.S. Navy has demonstrated, and as Deschutes County—and its Oregon peers—are sure to emulate, the normalization of RVs as an acceptable housing “solution” is well underway. Codify it, regulate it, inspect it—but not too closely—and hope for the best, because at least it gets people off the streets and out of those damn tents.

Meanwhile, it’s noteworthy that the RV industry, despite years of adamant public statements about how its products are specifically not designed for full-time occupancy, has remained completely mum on this issue. Not a word has emanated from the Washington, D.C. suburbs headquarters of the RV Industry Association to deplore this misuse of its recreational vehicles. Recreational, residential—what’s the diff? The important thing is to keep those production lines moving, especially after the post-pandemic slump, and leave it up to someone else to do the policing.

That may work in the short-term. What the RVIA has yet to understand is that the long-term consequences of such a laissez-faire attitude is a growing public disdain for RVs in general. It happened with “manufactured homes,” aka house trailers, which increasingly came under attack from their better-heeled neighbors. And it’s already happening with RV parks, which likewise are being seen as a blight on the community, to the long-term detriment of the entire industry.

Next post: A look at some of the pushback against proposed new RV parks.

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Milking a hollow Senate hearing

The outdoor recreation industry’s ambivalence about climate change and what it means for business was on ample display this past Wednesday, when the Senate Budget Committee held a public hearing titled “Recreation at Risk: The Nature of Climate Costs.” Scarcely longer than an hour in duration and sparsely attended by less than a handful of its 19 committee members, the hearing featured five witnesses, only three of whom paid attention to its ostensible subject matter.

Those threadbare qualities did not, however, prevent the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR) from trumpeting the event as an example of how it’s fighting the good fight on behalf of the environment. In a press release headlined “Outdoor Industry Highlights Impacts of Climate Change,” faithfully reproduced by RVBusiness, the roundtable reported that its president, Jessica Wald Turner, “emphasized the economic implications of climate change on one of the world’s largest and fastest growing industries.”

“As we’ve heard today,” the release quoted Turner as saying, “climate change is increasingly impacting how people can recreate outside, and businesses of all types and all activities know the climate crisis needs to be addressed.”

All of which may be true—Turner may indeed have said as much—but it wasn’t before the committee. The roundtable didn’t have a seat at the hearing. Nor did any of the largest outdoor recreation industries or businesses that one might think would have the most at stake in a fraying environment: not OHI, representative of the “outdoor hospitality” segment, nor the RV Industry Association, nor any of the big RV manufacturers, like Thor or Winnebago. Instead, the “outdoor industry” was represented by Theresa McKenney, a director of NEMO, a family-owned camping gear manufacturer with 50 employees; a Montana-based fly-fishing guide and shop owner; and a 23-year-old Nordic skier.

All had compelling stories to relate about how a warming climate and increasingly violent weather have severely affected their businesses and outdoor passions, but they were no more “the outdoor industry” than any cluster of three or four words on this page tell the story I’m unfolding. Arrayed against them, meanwhile, were two suits and one smarmy Louisiana politician. And the first suit, Joao Gomes of the Wharton School of Economics, must have wandered into the wrong hearing, because all his remarks were about “the dangers of excessive U.S. debt,” which while compelling, never once touched on the hearing’s subject of outdoor recreation.

The smarmy politician? That would be the unfortunately named Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, who sidled into the hearing apparently for the sole purpose of rattling an earnest but still young world-class skier by demonstrating the latter’s jejune understanding of greenhouse gases and carbon economics. Were this a debating society, Kennedy would have won hands down. Were this a serious exploration of an existential issue in which Kennedy was seeking to expand his own understanding—but that’s a silly supposition. (Kennedy’s 7-minute assassination can be seen here, starting at around the 1:08 mark, after which he just as promptly exited the hearing.)

The second suit, meanwhile—Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center—opened by lamenting the lobbying efforts of outdoor apparel manufacturer Patagonia, as though that were somehow un-American. His expertise, he claimed, is “in political operations from groups that try to influence public policy while enjoying complicated funding streams enriched by billionaires. The phenomenon often appears in environmental debates, including with pressure groups that claim to represent outdoor recreation interests but often engage in merely partisan political battles.”

Not, of course, that there’s any money on the opposite side of environmental debates—or that there’s any unraveling of outdoor recreation interests from partisan politics.

But to give Walter his due, the second half of his remarks touched on the inherent contradiction within the positions staked out by those outdoor recreation interests—the same contradiction that explains why those interests had such thin representation at Wednesday’s hearing. It’s the same contradiction that explains why the ORR’s press release highlighted its support of the America’s Outdoor Recreation Act and the Expanding Public Lands Outdoor Recreation Experience Act, both of which are designed to increase use of public lands—but completely ignored the Inflation Reduction Act and efforts to modernize the Farm Bill, both intended to reduce greenhouse gases, and both explicitly endorsed by McKenney in her committee testimony.

Reducing greenhouse gases requires moving away from a carbon-based economy, which is why a Louisiana politician can’t stoop too low to shoot down the idea. And it’s why the ORR, whose members include motorcycle, power boat, snowmobile and off-road vehicle interests—and, yes, OHI and the RV Industry Association—censors any mention of the subject even while patting itself on the back for its advocacy for “healthy people, places and the planet.”

Walter, on the other hand, pointed out that such lobbying efforts “never mention some obvious, powerful threats to outdoor recreation” posed by those very same business interests. “For example,” he contended, “it is obvious that in the foreseeable future, outdoor recreation cannot flourish without the availability of inexpensive transportation for ordinary Americans. And that transportation will require fossil fuels for cars, trucks and planes, and support for the roads and parking needed for those cars and trucks. . . . The hostility of environmental extremist groups to forms of travel that most Americans now take for granted is intense.”

One doesn’t have to accept Walter’s questionable conclusion about requiring more fossil fuels—there are alternatives—to acknowledge his underlying observation: more people traveling to outdoor recreation destinations adds to the environmental burden. So do the people flooding outdoor spaces in their boats, all-terrain vehicles, RVs and snowmobiles. No wonder, then, that those who profit from selling, servicing, accommodating or otherwise feeding off the motorized exploitation of outdoor spaces stay silent about the environmental consequences of such activities—even as they seek to make them more widely available.

The upshot was a meaningless public hearing that a shameless ORR nevertheless presented as some kind of bold statement by outdoor interests that would just as soon not look too closely at their complicity in a worsening crisis. On that score, a comment by committee chair Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse during his opening remarks should be especially eye-opening: one-third of this country’s prodigious national debt, he averred, was created in response to climate emergencies. Without a change in how we do business, that proportion will just keep growing. Tick-tock.

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RV red flags keep popping up all over

Representatives of RV manufacturers and campground owners keep radiating good cheer about the upcoming season, paying extravagant notice to every uptick in sales and reservations. And indeed there is cause for cautious optimism, with new RV shipments having arrested last year’s free-fall and notching slight gains, while KOA has reported that 64% of campers already have made reservations “for some sort of trip” in 2024. So maybe the first day of spring truly is a sunny one.

Yet it’s also clear that industry participants remain leery of what lies just over the horizon, and there’s good reason for that, too. Short-seller interest in Thor Industries and Winnebago Industries, the two 800-pound gorillas in the RV manufacturing segment, is high, not least because Thor earlier this month slashed its 2024 outlook based on soft demand and high interest rates. Winnebago, meanwhile, will be announcing its 2nd quarter results tomorrow, following an 11% drop in share price this month.

Late last week, meanwhile, Marcus Lemonis, chief executive officer of Camping World Holdings, unloaded nearly a fifth of his company’s stock holdings, selling 100,000 shares at an average price of $25.63. The $2.56 million payday comes several weeks after Camping World announced a 10.6% decline in revenues for 2023, with new vehicles sales for the year down 16.6%. Investor interest in this company also is bearish, with 17.53% of the float sold short.

As the Camping World example illustrates, the industry’s ongoing problem is a post-pandemic hangover that just won’t quit. The explosion in RV sales that started in 2020, while a short-term windfall for manufacturers and dealers, has proven to be too much of a good thing: too many units were cranked out in too short a time, resulting in significant production quality issues, while unceasing demand drove prices way too high. When the wind dropped out of the industry’s sails, dealers were left with too much outdated inventory that is still clogging their lots even as newer—and lower-priced—models are being delivered.

Lemonis tried to put a bright face on his company’s year-end report by noting that used vehicle sales were up even as new vehicle sales dropped, but as overall revenue figures suggest, that wasn’t nearly enough: while used vehicle revenue increased $102 million, new vehicle revenue dropped $651.8 million. And the average selling price of both new and used RVs declined—4.3% and 4.8%, respectively—further underscoring how greatly inflated the industry’s entire pricing structure had become. Indeed, the monthly Black Book reports on wholesale auctions have recorded six consecutive months of price declines for towables, while motorhome value trends have trended downwards since October of 2021, albeit in seesaw fashion.

Meanwhile, general economic news provides little to no reason to think demand will pick up significantly. With interest rates still high because of ongoing inflation anxieties, Americans are either tapped out or turning to deficit spending to sustain their lifestyles. Credit card debt is up and is taking longer to get paid down, with unpaid balances surpassing 2019 for the first time and delinquency rates continuing a steady rise since 2021. With record numbers of Americans unable to afford their rent, and many costs related to car ownership outpacing the consumer price index—AAA calculates that the the total annual cost of owning a new car was $12,182 last year, up from $10,728 in 2022—more people are using their 401(k) accounts as piggy banks. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, 3.6% of Vanguard’s 401(k) plan holders took early withdrawals last year for financial emergencies, nearly double the pre-pandemic average of about 2%.

All of which explains why the nearly 200 respondents to a recent Wells Fargo/RV Business survey of RV dealers had, at best, a tepid outlook for the coming year. More than a third (39%) expect a flat-to-down year, while an almost equal percentage (38%) expect growth of 0- 10%. Asked to describe the general state of the RV market, only 14% agreed “it’s solid, despite increasing interest rates, soft demand and other headwinds.” At the other extreme, 19% said it’s the “worst it’s been since the 2008-09 recession, ” while 39% admitted to being “nervous about inflation, potential recession and other challenges.”

Some of the dealers’ comments, meanwhile, echoed what many RV campers have been saying for several years. When it comes to repairs, for example, “parts and service has only gotten worse and the factories do not care at all,” while “manufacturers underpaying for warranty work is a major problem.” Or as another respondent observed, “It appears most industry executives, both suppliers and builders, are under the impression their quality is good. In most cases this is laughable.”

And on a more poignant note that should touch a nerve in all corners of the RV and campground ecosystem, there’s this: “I think the industry has lost touch [with] what camping was all about. Where has affordable family fun gone?”

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The seal on your RV? Just a tax stamp

Buy a manufactured RV, and chances are that somewhere in a prominent location near the main entrance you’ll see a badge that looks much like the one at right—gold if it’s a motorhome, silver for travel trailers and fifth-wheels. Truck campers and folding campers, alas, are relegated to plain-vanilla white.

The badges, or seals, are your supposed assurance that the recreational vehicle you’ve just purchased meets certain quality and safety standards, but the truth is that they’re bought by the manufacturer even before a vehicle is built. No one has inspected your RV to determine that it complies with NFPA 1192. Such seals are aspirational statements by RV builders, self-certifying about something that may or may not be true—and as a chorus of voices has attested, that can be a hollow assurance indeed.

Put another way, the seals are little more than private-sector tax stamps, saying as little about the product to which they’re affixed as government tax stamps say about a pack of cigarettes. They’re not a legal requirement. RV manufacturers who aren’t members of RVIA—admittedly a rare breed—don’t have them. But they are a revenue generator for the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association, and as such the income they generate dwarfs all other RVIA revenue sources: of RVIA’s total 2023 revenues of $9.4 million, $5.3 million came from seal sales. Membership dues, the next highest revenue generator, brought in only $2.9 million, with the balance coming from events, sponsorships and other sources.

Here’s the problem with that: when RV production exploded in 2021, hitting more than 600,000 units, so did revenue from seal sales, hitting a record $13.4 million. And when RV sales tapered off, and then swooned, so did seal revenue, plummeting 60% over the next two years—even though spending remained largely unchanged. The bottom line is that RVIA’s total revenues last year, with seal sales still being the main income contributor, covered only 73% of the association’s $12.9 million in expenses.

Although that is a sizeable shortfall, RVIA President Craig Kirby opted not to highlight it in this past week’s annual message to members, stressing instead that he “can’t help but feel optimistic about the direction we are heading.” A financial report footnote, meanwhile, asserted that the association and its related parties “strategically planned for a material loss in 2023,” drawing on operating reserves accumulated in recent years to cover expenses. Those expenses, it’s worth noting, were reduced by only $171,285 year-over-year and were still $860,000 higher than they were two years ago.

Meanwhile, other financial storm clouds are forming. The “related parties” mentioned in the footnote include its promotional arm, GoRVing, which hasn’t covered its expenses in several years—and the hole is getting deeper. Much of GoRving’s revenues come from additional fees added by RVIA to its seal sales—a surcharge, if you will—that brought in $24.9 million in 2021, for example. Yet that same year GoRVing’s expenses outstripped revenues by $2.4 million, a gap that widened to $3.6 million in 2022 and to $9.3 million last year. All told, then, in just three years GoRVing has run up a deficit of $15.3 million, with no public explanation of how that hole is being filled.

And as with RVIA, GoRVing isn’t eager to indulge in belt-tightening: last year’s expenses of $26.9 million, while restrained in comparison with the $32.2 million expended the previous year, were just 1% lower than in 2021. Bottom line, GoRVing’s income covered only 65% of last year’s outgo, an even bigger shortfall than RVIA’s 73% deficit. How much longer can operating reserves make up the difference? RVIA isn’t saying, keeping those figures out of public view.

Kirby’s gamble, one assumes, is that RV production is going to bounce back in 2024, and with it the sale of RVIA seals and GoRVing surcharges. He could be right, although the 11.8% increase RVIA is currently projecting—to 350,000 shipments in 2024, up from 313,174 reported for 2023—is far from enough to cover the gaps. Moreover, even some of the industry’s most seasoned participants have warned that the storm clouds may persist right through the end of the year, and the current economic outlook is wobbly, at best. And as last year’s record of repeatedly downgraded production forecasts suggests, RVIA has a tendency toward overly rosy expectations.

So what’s the answer? Only the usual: raise taxes. Seals will cost more, the GoRVing surcharge will jump even more and RVIA membership dues will go up. RV buyers will pay a little more, but any question about the line charge on their invoice for an RVIA seal will be explained away as the cost of a good housekeeping assurance. And, of course, the lobbying on behalf of RV manufacturers will continue as always, funded by those gold and silver (and plain-vanilla white) stickers. That’s how the system works.

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Campers flying solo and on the cheap

Overworked though it might be, the parable about six blind men describing an elephant—each varying wildly from his companions, depending on what his hands encountered—couldn’t be more appropriate for the coverage of The Dyrt’s recently released 2024 Camping Report.

Compiled from an annual survey of 7,000 of its members, a representative sample of 1,ooo U.S. residents and of camping property managers across all 50 states, The Dyrt’s report is as comprehensive as any in the industry. For all that, however, published analyses of the report’s findings have been surprisingly superficial and repetitive, hitting the same high notes while missing other potentially significant but less obvious findings, or how they might interact. Yes, the elephant has a snake-like trunk, and yes, its legs are like tree trunks, but. . . .

This year, the most hyped finding was that more people than ever went camping in 2023, at a whopping 84.8 million—but good news! Campgrounds had met the increased demand by adding sites, presenting campers with “more options than ever before.” As a result, “only” 45.5% of campers reported difficulty booking a site because a campground was sold out, or four times more than in 2019—but down from a peak of 58.4% in 2022.

But that’s only part of the story. Because as the report also found, nearly two-thirds of campers said they sought out free camping in 2023, up from just one-third in 2019. Whether it’s boondocking or Walmart parking lots or a friend’s back 40, campers have been looking for and finding—thanks in no small part to The Dyrt’s listings—cheaper or more scenic alternatives to commercial campgrounds, and even to state or federal facilities. All of which explains, for example, why KOA has reported elsewhere that camper nights stagnated or even declined last year, even as revenues rose, thanks to higher rates.

If that’s not a wake-up call for campground owners, here are a couple of other statistics teased out of The Dyrt’s report that should give them pause. Number one, while there were 5.5 million first-time campers in 2023, that’s barely more than half of the pandemic-driven freshman class of 2020. And while that’s still more than double the average annual increase prior to the pandemic, the downward trend is unmistakable and a clear sign that the high-rollin’ years are over. The low-hanging fruit has been picked.

Number two, contrary to all the industry euphoria about how camping is no longer dominated by old people, industry growth is occurring at the two ends of the age spectrum but has dropped in the middle. According to the report, those 65 and older comprised 29.1% of all campers in 2023—the single biggest cohort—increasing their share by 4.9% over the previous year. Yes, grandparents are still spending their kids’ inheritances. From there, meanwhile, it’s all downhill through the generations, with those 55-64 comprising 25.4% of the total camping public in 2023, down 3.1%; those 45-54 comprising 16.9% of the total, down 13.7%; and those 35-44 at 13.9% of the total, down 8%. It’s not until we get to campers who are 25-34 that we see another uptick, by 10.8%, to 10.7% of the total. And while campers 18-24 exploded in numbers, by 65%, that’s only to be expected when you start with a low base, since they still made up only 3.9% of the whole.

What’s it all mean? Just that the working-age population, having tried camping at a time of social distancing and greater acceptance of remote work, is reverting to more established behaviors. Been there, done that—and other responsibilities and opportunities are calling.

At least two other findings in The Dyrt’s report deserve to be highlighted. One provides an illuminating insight into the problem of booking sites: fewer than half of campers (42.7%) used all the camping reservations they made in 2023. Most eventually cancelled the reservations they couldn’t keep, potentially freeing those sites for someone else—but 14.9% couldn’t be bothered to cancel at least once. Moreover, the older the camper the less likely he or she will be a no-show, with millennials and Gen-Zers 52.6% more likely than Gen-Xers and baby boomers to be no-shows.

And oh, yeah: having a lot of money apparently results in cavalier behavior (who knew?), with campers having annual incomes of more than $250,000 twice as likely to be no-shows as those making less than $50,000.

The other curious fact to emerge from the report is that 29.8% of campers in 2023 went camping alone. That’s up from 18.8% in 2021, when social distancing might have been a large part of the reason for going solo, but the report has no explanation for the sharp increase.

Finally, all of the above should be taken with a grain of salt. Comprehensive as The Dyrt’s report may be, it includes some numbers that beggar belief, such as its finding that the average RVer camped 54 nights in 2023. That number makes sense only if a significant number of respondents were full-timers, but The Dyrt makes no effort to parse such distinctions, potentially skewing many results in one unhelpful direction or another. That’s not to say the report is useless, but as with so many data sets generated by vested interests, it’s best approached with a skeptical eye.

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Hustlers, beats and Wendy’s CEO

More years ago than I care to remember, I took a college course titled “Hustlers, Beats and Others.” Taught by Ned Polsky, the course was described as an exploration of “deviant branches of American life.” Chief among them, as I recall, was the subculture of pool hustlers, for whom Polsky evinced a great fondness.

But the fact I remember most clearly from that semester was the news that loan sharks charged 20% interest. A week!

Twenty percent interest rates are now commonplace, if on an annual rather than weekly basis, but even that seems to me only slightly less outrageous than the mob’s cut. In a world in which inflation is less than 3% and wages grow annually by about the same amount, isn’t 20% to 24%—the range of most credit card interest rates—too high? And what do we mean by “too high”? Can something be too costly if someone is willing to pay its price? What’s the difference between maximizing profit and price-gouging? Why does North Carolina have a usury limit of 8%, but the usury limit in Arizona and Rhode Island is 36%?

Too much? Too many obscure questions? Blame Wendy’s. And bear with me: this post eventually will get around to campgrounds and RV parks.

It’s been nearly a month since the fast-food hamburger chain’s CEO, Kirk Tanner, kicked up a shit-storm of consternation among his customers by telling industry analysts that Wendy’s would start experimenting with dynamic pricing in 2025. There was a lot more, having to do with digital menu boards and generative AI and “suggestive selling”—a phrase that itself is rather suggestive—and Tanner never used the words “surge pricing.” But “surge pricing” is pretty much how the hamburger-eating public got the story, and quite quickly, and the resulting kerfuffle continues to this day.

Amid a widespread backlash that included calls for boycotting the chain, Wendy’s tried to walk back Tanner’s comments by declaring it has no plans to raise prices “when our customers are visiting us most,” a curious qualification. Any pricing changes it might implement “would be designed to benefit our customers.” Digital menu boards, for example, will “allow us to change the menu offerings at different times of the day and offer discounts and value offers to our customers more easily.”

See what they did there? Dynamic pricing simply gives Wendy’s the opportunity to lower prices, not to raise them. Dynamic pricing is a good thing for consumers.

Let’s call this out for the BS it really is. Number one, the comments that triggered all the fuss are part of a blizzard of adjacent phrases—surge pricing, demand pricing, dynamic pricing, competitor pricing, supply and demand, real-time market data, pricing algorithms, price fixing, price gouging—that revolve around one fundamental purpose: to increase profits by charging whatever the market will bear. Some of that might be legal, some of it may not be. What’s legal today may be illegal tomorrow and vice versa, or be legal in one state but not in another. But throughout, the game is all about revenue “enhancement.”

Number two, Tanner’s comments were made not in a newspaper or TV interview but on an earnings call, whose primary purpose is to provide analysts with the information they need to predict how well a company will perform financially. That information, in other words, tends to stress what the company will be doing to increase profits, not lower them. (Not that CEOs are allowed to lie, or fail to disclose adverse information.) The initiatives CEOs will describe are meant to fatten the bottom line, by raising prices or lowering costs or increasing efficiencies.

But the biggest sleight-of-hand has to do with Wendy’s protestations that it will use dynamic pricing only to lower prices, not to raise them—which, aside from whether that declaration can be trusted, raises the question: lower them from what? And to answer that, we can turn from the food and beverage industry to its sister industry, the hospitality business, which pioneered this kind of deception.

Go to any hotel or motel and look at the card that’s usually mounted on the back of your room door, and you’ll see what’s called the “rack rate.” Unless you’ve had the bad luck of booking a room in the path of the solar eclipse (for example), you’ll see an impossibly high rate that you’d never dream of paying and may congratulate yourself on getting a “deal.” Of course, nearly everyone else in the building also got a deal, which is just another way of saying you didn’t get stiffed. The only true value of the rack rate to you as a customer is that it establishes the maximum you might be charged, but it certainly doesn’t help you understand what a “fair” rate might be, or what that same room may cost next week or next month.

“Rack rate” got its terminology from the hotel rate cards that were kept in a metal rack at the front desk. The campgrounds and RV parks version of such cards used to be printed sheets that spelled out site rates, but those increasingly have become just a memory—no posted rack rates for campers! That absence, however, hasn’t kept the industry from embracing dynamic pricing with a salivating eagerness, propelled by the promise that doing so will yield higher profits—which it has, and with remarkably little pushback from the camping public. Wendy’s customers and RVers, it seems, must occupy non-intersecting portions of the Venn diagram of consumerism.

(Campgrounds and RV parks, it should be noted, also have their own version of “let’s give you a deal” by offering so many discounts—AAA, senior citizen, KOA, Good Sam, first-responder, active military, retired military and on and on—that anyone who can’t get at least 10% off his or her site rate could be sold a bridge in Brooklyn.)

The common denominator of all these pricing schemes, however, is their lack of transparency to the average consumer. Indeed, the more that pricing and payments are computerized and driven by algorithms, the less a customer can understand his or her options and the more of an upper hand is gained by businesses over their customers—customers who repeatedly are assured that they’re the winners, regardless of the asymmetrical relationship in which they’re engaged. Indeed, industry “thought leaders” urge all kinds of businesses to hammer the “good news.”

Take, for example, a recent analysis of Wendy’s missteps by Sherri Kimes, an emeritus professor at the Hotel School at Cornell. “Always frame things as a gain for customers,” she wrote in QSR Magazine, a food industry publication. “Rather than saying that you’re going to charge more at certain times, talk about the discounts or special promotions that customers can get. . . . Make sure customers are aware of when they can get better prices. No surprises here! . . . Keeping them in the loop maintains trust and keeps them happy.”

Maintain trust, indeed. The Hotel School at Cornell, it should be pointed out, is cranking out a steady stream of Kimes acolytes to further shape the hospitality industry—inside and outside, hotels and campgrounds alike. Today’s hustlers may not break your kneecaps if you don’t pay up, but they have something far more effective than a baseball bat: college educations and computerized pricing and a shameless willingness to convince you how lucky you are to be doing business with them.

And just wait until they start harnessing the power of AI. . . . .

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