Pay more, get less—by the numbers

This Saturday marks the third annual attempt to gin up public excitement for National Go RVing Day, a marketing campaign from the RV Industry Association. As helpfully noted by the association, the celebratory event takes place during both National Camping Month and Great Outdoors Month and is “intended to motivate customers to embrace the RVing experience by reserving a campsite, visiting their local dealer, upgrading with a new aftermarket feature, or researching new road trip adventures.”

A sourpuss might also note that National Go RVing Day comes just a week after the start of hurricane season, not to mention an unofficial start to fire season in California and an especially brutal volley of tornadoes throughout the Midwest. Perhaps that—as well as an uneven economy that most penalizes the lower end of the economic spectrum—accounts for the season’s ragged start, as RV dealers and campground owners alike have been eyeing the coming months with some trepidation. No one really expects a disastrous season, but nor is anyone forecasting a really bitchin’ summer. Against that backdrop of anxious uncertainty, surely any marketing push can only help.

Then again, National Go RVing Day may be the most appropriate time to survey the RV park and campground industry overall to see how it’s been doing since the pandemic broke its back, in early 2020. And that exercise, for all the qualifications and caveats that must precede it and as detailed below, leads to two observations: number one, commercial camping and RVing has become significantly more expensive over the past four years, as RV parks keep jacking up their rates and larding on all kinds of new fees. And number two, industry wage growth has failed to keep pace with those revenue increases, resulting in workforce numbers that have yet to match pre-pandemic levels, even as the number of campgrounds and RV parks has grown.

Or to put it in a nutshell: if you go RVing this weekend, expect to pay a lot more than you did four years ago for dirtier accommodations and notably less personal service.

More on that in a moment, but first the caveats. Despite the fact that there are approximately 12,000 private RV parks and campgrounds in the U.S., they still constitute a niche market about which it is almost impossible to get good statistical data. That difficulty is compounded, recent acquisition fever notwithstanding, by the industry’s extreme fragmentation: for all of the growing roster of investor-driven roll-ups, the overwhelming majority of campgrounds are still owned by sole proprietors—private owners, it should be noted, who typically ignore industry surveys and tend to think it’s no one else’s business how they run their properties.

As a result, virtually all industry- and consultant-driven surveys are highly suspect, marred by flawed sampling techniques and low response rates. Even the nation’s 500-pound surveying gorilla, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, doesn’t attempt to drill down to such a granular level. Instead, it subsumes RV parks and campgrounds under a much broader “accommodation subsector,” which is defined as industries that “provide lodging or short-term accommodation for travelers, vacationers and others.” All told, that subsector included approximately 78,000 private establishments at the end of 2023, with campgrounds and RV parks therefore comprising roughly 15% of a total dominated by hotels, motels, resorts and other kinds of lodging.

Trying to understand what is happening within the campground/RV park universe using BLS data therefore means extrapolating from this broader aggregate, but despite those limitations it’s still the most extensive and reliable data set available. Moreover, it also requires factoring in the reality that campgrounds and RV parks are very much on the low end of wage scales within the accommodations sector, which means that however dismal such numbers are sector-wide, they’re even worse for the “outdoor hospitality” segment.

That noted, here are some relevant numbers:

What’s it all mean? Just this: over the past four years or so, the number of lodging establishments has gone up more than 7% while the number of people serving those establishments—greeting and booking guests, cleaning up after them, fixing the inevitable maintenance issues—has gone down 9.2%. That decline in employee headcount has come despite a 30.7% increase in wages over the same period, even as lodging prices have gone up 35.8%. In other words, campers (and other lodgers) are paying more for less service, and a disproportionate amount of that increased outlay is going to non-labor costs and margins and not to attract more and better-quality employees.

There’s every reason to believe, meanwhile, that these disparities are even greater on the campground and RV park end of things. A perusal of any campground job listings will quickly disclose that almost all are advertising wages between $12 and $15 an hour, which is scarcely above minimum wage in many states, and the accommodations sector’s “average” wage of $20-$21 is essentially unheard of among campground employees. RV park pricing, meanwhile, has readily exceeded the 35.8% increase in overall lodging prices over the past four years, and in many cases approaches or exceeds a 100% increase, creating even more of a disconnect between revenue and payroll.

Potential employees looking for a way to fill their gas tanks and stock their pantries don’t need a whole lot of number-crunching to figure out that working in the hospitality industry generally, and at campgrounds and RV parks in particular, isn’t going to cut it. And a camping public looking for an affordable way to spend a weekend or a week on a family vacation doesn’t need a spreadsheet to know that this RVing business is getting hopelessly out of hand—nor does it need a white-glove examination to understand it’s paying quite a bit more for quite a bit less in return.

The problems facing the industry, in other words, are far larger than National Go Rving Day can overcome.