When we bought our campground, in 2013, there was only one insurance company that would provide us with liability coverage. It wasn’t that we were an especially bad risk. Campgrounds were such a niche market, and so poorly understood, that the insurance industry simply didn’t want to touch them. The sole exception was Evergreen U.S. A., which had been founded almost 40 years earlier and was owned by campground and RV park owners precisely because that was the only way they could get the financial protection they needed. We were lucky they were around.
But that didn’t last long. Just as we acquired a campground because—among other reasons—we thought this was a dynamic industry, larger, more mainstream insurance companies likewise realized they were missing out on a sure thing and suddenly began piling on. By mid-2014, Evergreen’s board of directors had thrown in the towel and stopped renewing policies. Bigger, better capitalized insurance companies had the resources “to beat our rates and provide incentives we can’t always match,” explained Evergreen’s president, Lucas Hartford, at the time. “In these times, price is more important than ever to our customer’s success.”
Well, what goes around comes around. This month’s Woodall’s Campground Magazine has a half-page ad from K&K Insurance advising readers that it “protects campgrounds with coverage designed for your unique needs.” Campground owners should ask their insurance agent for a quote from K&K, the ad advises—unless their “unique need” is owning a campground in Florida. Because even though the ad specifically states that K&K is a licensed insurance producer in all states, with FL license #L007299, the ad just as specifically states that its campground coverage “is not available in Florida.”
Care to guess why? What is it about hurricane central, garnished with rising sea levels and appalling heat, that makes it unappealing for a company that exists specifically to underwrite risk protection?
K&K is just a canary in the coalmine, but similar redlining is all but inevitable. And it won’t be just Florida that gets hung out to dry, or just K&K pulling in its horns, as extreme weather becomes more widespread, more prevalent—and as campgrounds and other outdoor venues increasingly are seen as being especially vulnerable.
But unlike past decades, when RV park and campground owners rallied to meet a common need, the industry these days is far too fractured to respond in similar fashion. The big corporate-owned chains have deep enough pockets to self-insure or to package their various properties into more insurable risks. The national organization that once represented campgrounds and that might have taken a leadership role in addressing a common threat now has a new, androgynous name—OHI—and broader ambitions: it wants to be the spokesperson for “outdoor hospitality,” a role that apparently precludes any conversation about climate change.
That leaves the so-called mom-and-pop owner/operators fending for themselves, just as they did in the good ‘ol days.
Meanwhile, another slow-motion train wreck affecting the campground industry—and specifically those campgrounds chasing after algorithm-driven reservation systems—is shaping up in the form of lawsuits in Arizona, Tennessee and Washington, D.C. and criminal investigations in North Carolina and by the U.S. Justice Department. In their cross-hairs is RealPage, a Texas-based property-management software company that is being accused of illegally fixing apartment rental prices.
ProPublica reported extensively on this problem 18 months ago, and in a subsequent post I raised the question of how something similar is happening with many campground reservation systems generally, and with CampSpot specifically. As outlined in a second post, Campspot already has a lion’s share of campground business, which means it also has an enormous amount of reservation data to crunch, such as site and occupancy rates sorted by campground size, day of the week and any number of other variables. This data is then available to Campspot’s clients, in supposedly anonymized form, with those campground owners free to do with that information what they will.
That’s handy for the campground owner who wants to see how his property stacks up against others. It’s also a first step toward cartelization, enabling supposed competitors to adjust rates in lockstep without directly talking to each other, which would be an antitrust no-no. Whether RealPage—and by analogy Campspot, if on a much lesser scale—are nevertheless facilitating anticompetitive behavior is the question state and federal authorities are raising, but as a Wall Street Journal article a couple of days ago noted, the Biden administration is generally taking a much harder line on price fixing.
“Any rulings against Real Page could have legal ramifications for other business sectors, such as online retail, where companies also use algorithms to make pricing decisions,” the Journal noted.
The headlong rush by the industry to embrace new digital technologies—AI increasingly is coming into play, as well—is just one more step away from the fundamental aspects of camping that made it a worthwhile pastime in the first place. It’s all done in the name of improving business fundamentals, of course, but those “improvements” invariably reshape “the business” until it becomes just like everything else: more gentrified, impersonal, homogenized and packaged—and, above all else, expensive.
The glamping phenomenon is of course the apotheosis of this trend, exploding across the campground industry over just a few years. But just how far things have gone may be exemplified by the recent announcement that AutoCamp is now partnering with . . . Hilton Hotels, which has as much to do with the outdoors as Louis Vuitton. “This is the first time a major hospitality brand and outdoor lodging company have come together in this way to create even more choices for travelers while redefining the outdoor hospitality experience,” crowed a Hilton executive. How nice for OHI’s expanding portfolio. . . .
Which brings me to one final report, that of a Colorado entrepreneur who earlier this month broke ground on Kosmos Stargazing Resort, just outside Alamosa, in the San Luis Valley. The planned 22 glass-domed stargazing villas, which have received a special use permit as a “campground,” are to be rented for $700 to $1,200 a night.
Now that’s camping, eh?
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