Tag: ARVC

ARVC/OHI: adrift without a rudder

The organization formerly known as the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds, or ARVC, is having one heck of an identity crisis.

Last November, supposedly after a year of vaguely referenced “surveys and interviews,” the association’s leadership announced that it was “rebranding” itself and henceforth would be known as Outdoor Hospitality Industry, or OHI. That awkward word jumble without a subject noun was explained away by ARVC/OHI’s executive director, Paul Bambei, as marking the association’s transition toward becoming “the trusted voice of all outdoor hospitality.”

Delusions of grandeur, anyone?

While Bambei and his enablers thus laid claim to global aspirations for their modest little industry association, ARVC’s dues-paying members couldn’t help but notice that they had been disappeared. An organization originally founded “for the purpose of promoting camping through the private sector and protecting the camping industry from unfair legislation and unfair competition” apparently had decided that “camping” was—what? Too old-school? Too limiting? Just not as focus-group attractive as “outdoor hospitality”? Whatever the case, “campgrounds” and “RV parks” seemed to have ceased as an integral part of the organization’s identity.

Predictably, the grumbling soon started. Critics pointed out that the outdoor hospitality industry’s “trusted voice” presumably would be speaking on behalf of not just campgrounds, RV parks and glampgrounds but also bed-and-breakfasts, inns, ski lodges, marinas, resorts and even hotels and motels if they were in any way connected to the “outdoors.” Worse yet, the new “outdoor hospitality” umbrella would cover Harvest Hosts, Boondockers Welcome and Hipcamp, long seen by many campground owners as unfair competitors who don’t have to comply with RV park licensing requirements. How would all these disparate businesses have their conflicting interests represented by a single voice except in the most abstract sense?

Less than a month later, the grumbling became more serious when the Pennsylvania Campground Owners Association voted to quit its partnership with OHI. The national organization’s “mission and vision” no longer aligned with its own, PCOA leadership explained, adding that its members had grown increasingly concerned about OHI’s lack of communications and transparency about various changes it was implementing.

Decisive though it was, however, PCOA actually was slow on the uptake: ARVC/OHI had been signaling its intentions at least a year earlier, with little apparent pushback—and, indeed, may have been emboldened by the muted response. Early last year, for example, I wrote a three-part post making the case that ARVC had lost its way. (Indeed, in an ironic foreshadowing, I suggested at the end of the second installment that “perhaps it should rebrand as the National Association of the Outdoor Hospitality Industry.”) I observed at the time that ARVC had adopted a “mission statement” that was couched “in soulless corporate-speak,” to wit: “We empower outdoor hospitality businesses by providing industry-tailored resources, organic connections, consumer exposure, professional development, and proactive legislative action.” 

This past week, apparently in belated response to PCOA’s secession, ARVC/OHI backpedaled furiously. According to its press release, because the new mission statement neglected to explicitly identify its “core membership,” the wording would be changed to the following: “To empower RV parks, campgrounds and glamping businesses with the community, resources, professional development, and legislative advocacy needed to ensure successful futures for all Outdoor Hospitality Industry businesses.” (The new wording, it added, is to be approved at ARVC/OHI’s board meeting this spring—raising the question of just who decided this is a good idea that should be announced before board approval.)

No mention of the name change to OHI and its silence on the subject of camping. No mention of OHI’s “vision” statement—“an empowered outdoor hospitality industry”—also cited by PCOA as a point of contention.

The proposed new mission statement is known as trying to have your cake and eat it, too. As with most such efforts, however, it fails as a semantic construct, since there is no logical connection between empowering RV parks, campgrounds and glamping businesses on the one hand, and ensuring the successful futures of all outdoor hospitality businesses on the other. The “empowering” of a part does not ensure the success of the whole. On the other hand, the way this sentence is constructed, its unmistakable meaning is that RV parks and campgrounds need to up their game so that the outdoor hospitality industry as a whole can thrive.

Bambei, meanwhile, proved himself just as fuzzy-minded as the organization he leads by insisting in the press release that the core constituency he serves really hasn’t changed, “it’s simply expanded.” Which is not unlike saying our little town of New Amsterdam really hasn’t changed, it’s simply expanded—into New York City. 

But logical thinking and precise language aren’t the point: muddying the waters is. Whatever he may say after the fact about his primary concern for ARVC/OHI’s “core,” Bambei just can’t keep his grandiose ambitions from spilling into the open—and so, in that same press release, he goes on to to declare that “we know it is important that the hospitality industry has a national organization positioned to represent it well into the future.” And so, by golly, the RV park and campground industry might as well shoulder that burden on behalf of all those other unrepresented businesses. With Bambei at its helm, of course.

PCOA’s secession apparently had another, more salutary effect: almost simultaneously with its announced mission restatement, OHI’s board voted to allow direct RV park and campground membership across the United States. In doing so, it ended a much-criticized requirement that campgrounds in partnering states—like Pennsylvania—could belong to ARVC only if they first joined the state organization. (On the flip side, campgrounds that belonged to a partnering state association were in most cases required to pay national dues even if they didn’t want to be ARVC members.) That compulsory package deal was so unpopular that the country’s biggest state associations had been seceding from ARVC, one by one, with Pennsylvania’s departure the final straw.

But while long overdue, this change means that OHI will relinquish having captive dues-payers delivered by compliant state associations and will have to actually earn those members by convincing them it has their best interests at heart—a daunting prospect for an organization increasingly criticized for being out of touch with its grassroots and given to top-down decision-making. That, as much as any dreams of representing a vaguely defined but overarching “hospitality industry,” explains why ARVC/OHI seems so unmoored these days.

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O, hi! Did you know ARVC is no more?

The RV park and campground industry, increasingly dominated by investors with a background in hotel management, has for some time put on airs by claiming to be in the “hospitality” business. Today, it went one step farther: the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds has renounced its name and rebranded itself as Outdoor Hospitality Industry, or OHI.

Announced at a plenary session of ARVC’s annual convention, the name change was justified in a letter to members from executive director Paul Bambei as being more representative of “the breadth of the industry, where it is today, and—especially—where it will be in the future.” OHI, he added, “will continue to grow as the trusted voice of all outdoor hospitality businesses and will continue to be the organization that is at the forefront of a growing and dynamic lifestyle for the Outdoor Hospitality Industry and camping consumers.”

Although Bambei claimed that the rebranding is responsive to “surveys and interviews conducted this past year” that found 80% of “participants” felt a name change was warranted, he did not offer any particulars about who was surveyed or interviewed, nor exactly what they were asked. Nor is there any indication that ARVC’s current campground and RV park membership had pushed for a name change, or that it wanted its organization to represent a more generalized “outdoor hospitality” industry that presumably now includes many hotels and motels as well as bed-and-breakfasts, Harvest Host sites, inns, ski lodges, marinas, resorts, glampgrounds, and so on. This clearly was a top-down initiative, driven by ARVC’s leadership wanting to play in a bigger sandbox.

I’ve written before about this loss of focus and why it’s detrimental to ARVC’s core constituency. But grasping after a broader mandate isn’t just a disservice to existing members; it’s out of step with current events, coming at a time when “hospitality” at campgrounds and RV parks is becoming ever more elusive. These days, with institutional money piling into the industry, it’s really all about efficiency and return on investment, goals inherently at odds with a labor-intensive aspiration.

Hospitality, after all, requires interaction with one’s customers. It means face-to-face encounters. As one industry website summarizes it, it means “making your customers feel special and even spoiled,” which “is an art that only dedicated, trained staff can achieve.” Yet staff, dedication and training are in woefully short supply at all except the very largest and the very smallest campgrounds and RV parks, the former because of economies of scale and the latter because mom and pop are not being overwhelmed by a flood of customers.

Just how dire the situation has become can be seen in ARVC’s annual industry survey, released this week in ironic juxtaposition to the name-change announcement. As flawed as the survey is, as detailed in my last post, its less granular, more reliable findings reveal that many campgrounds are hard-pressed even to take the trash out, with the typical (median) campground of 90 sites employing just three full-time and two part-time workers during its main season—and that’s actually one full-time employee less than in 2022.

To call such staffing skeletal is generous. Consider, for example, that a campground with an office-store open 10 hours a day—or 70 hours a week—will require a minimum of two employees just to put one person behind the counter. Additional staffing during the busiest hours—say, 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.—will require at least one more full-timer or two part-timers. For the average campground that also wants its bathrooms cleaned at least once a day, its cabins and “glamping” accommodations cleaned at check-out, its swimming pool maintained and its lawns mowed and edged, the choice comes down to shorter office hours or not getting some things done—and don’t even think about hosting activities of various kinds.

Why not just hire more employees? Aside from the question of whether some campgrounds choose not to because they prefer a fatter net income, one very likely reason is because most people don’t want jobs that pay at or barely above the $15 minimum wage in effect in some of the biggest camping states, including all three West Coast states and Colorado. As the ARVC survey reports, the typical park pays general staff a median rate of $15.01 an hour, which in much of the country—issues of minimum wage aside—is barely competitive with fast-food restaurants and big box stores that also provide year-round employment. “Dedication” won’t be bought that cheaply. By comparison, hotel front-office managers get paid on average $42,740 a year, according to Glassdoor, while directors of housekeeping receive $55,266.

The National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds was always a mouthful, and the ARVC acronym didn’t even track, but at least the name conveyed whose interests the organization represented. Outdoor Hospitality Industry isn’t just awkward because of its lack of a subject noun (is it an association? a coalition? a cooperative, federation or guild?), but it borders on false advertising at a time when “hospitality” is found more in its rhetoric than in reality.

Another year, another flawed survey

When the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds holds its annual convention next week, among its featured presentations will be the release of a “highly anticipated” survey of the industry. The “in-depth look at the current state of park operations across the U.S.” will provide “valuable insights into the outdoor hospitality industry” that “will be an important tool for parks looking to gain a competitive advantage,” according to its advance press.

If that’s not enough to get your heart pounding, consider that the 2023 Outdoor Hospitality Industry Benchmarking Report “is not just a collection of statistics but a narrative of the industry’s pulse.” Campground owners consulting the report will find “the hidden potential in regional distinctions,” enabling them to turn those distinctions “into strategic advantages for success.” Or so we’re promised.

Well, maybe not. As in years past, ARVC’s attempt to paint a reliable statistical portrait of its membership suffers from several limitations, not least among them that same membership’s reluctance to share information. (This is not unique to ARVC, as other industry would-be profilers have encountered the same problem.) In this case, although the survey sampled 4,823 campgrounds, only 8% of ARVC’s members responded, as did a mere 4% of non-ARVC campgrounds. That left an acceptable 282 survey responses—enough for the report to claim a 5.6% margin of error at a 95% confidence level, which isn’t bad for the report overall.

Where that confidence breaks down, however, is in the report’s attempts to reach conclusions about various sub-categories, such as campground size or location or type of ownership. The report’s authors acknowledge as much, albeit only in general terms, by noting that “the margin of error for percentages based on smaller sample sizes will be larger.” How much larger? Your guess is as good as any, particularly because virtually all of the survey data is presented as statistics, not as hard numbers that would enable some independent crunching.

Indeed, almost the only hard data that we can calculate from the provided information is the number of respondents in each of four regions of the country: 45 in 12 western states, 51 in 14 northeastern states, 82 in 12 midwestern states and 104 in 12 southern states—or twice as many respondents from the south as from the west. Yet many of the survey’s charts run percentages side-by-side, inevitably prompting misleading apples-to-oranges comparisons between regions, not to mention making a mockery of “the hidden potential in regional distinctions.”

The confusion between statistics and hard numbers afflicts the survey designers themselves. For example, a question about available accommodations asks, “How many sites/units are available at this RV park, campground or glamping park?” Instead of providing a numerical answer, however, the survey lists percentages, such as 89% for full hook up sites or 18% for park model cabins, presumably letting us know what percentage of respondents provide that particular accommodation but not how many such accommodations are available.

Elsewhere, the survey simply throws in the towel—sort of—by acknowledging that it just doesn’t have enough responses for a trustworthy conclusion. This is especially notable in a section on rates, in which several charts leave blank any field that had less than 10 responses; fields with fewer than 30 responses provide the information but are shaded grey, apparently signifying that their numbers are not statistically meaningful. The alternative, it appears, would have been even larger swaths of empty space, attesting to the limits of a relatively small sample size.

There are other problems. One is the survey’s lack of a precise time frame, with responders asked for information about “the past 12 months” instead of a specific period, such as “calendar year 2022.” Not only does “the past 12 months” vary by approximately 15%, depending on when a survey was answered during the nearly two-month window before it was tabulated, but campground owners generally operate on an annual bookkeeping cycle and for many, that’s the information they’re most likely to grab. Moreover, a survey mailed out at the beginning of May means it was reaching its target audience just as that audience was heading into its busiest season—one possible reason the response rate was so anemic.

Then there’s the occasional creative approach to averages. A chart showing changes in nightly/weekly rates concludes that the median increase from 2022 to 2023 was 5%. But it turns out that median was not the midpoint of the increases that were made, but the midpoint for all rates: 29% of the respondents had no change in their rates and 2% actually dropped their rates. An additional 4% did not specify how much of an increase they instituted, but for the survey’s purposes were dumped into the low range of all the responses, further skewing the overall median downward. The actual median increase? Closer to 8% or 9% for those who did increase rates.

But here’s the survey’s biggest red flag: the 282 respondents claimed to have median annual revenues of $3.52 million, despite a median campground size of just 92 rentable units. That works out to more than $38,000 a site, which would require a nightly rate of $105 and 100% occupancy to achieve. Such numbers should tickle even the most insensitive BS detector—but that’s not all. The survey breaks down the $3.52 million as follows: $1.43 million in overnight site fees, $1.02 million in monthly and seasonal fees, $700,000 in camp store income and $0 for amenities/activities fees . Grand total? $2.52 million, or exactly a million dollars less than the headline number. Problems with addition? Maybe. Or maybe just bad data. What is clear is that no one thought to question such an off-the-charts number.

There are a few possibly insightful glimmers in the overall survey results, although without closer examination it’s hard to tell if they’re from iron pyrite or from the real thing. But overall, ARVC convention attendees should be wary of accepting any of this survey’s results at face value. That said, it’s virtually inevitable that various survey “findings” will be trumpeted by ARVC as gospel in the service of one agenda or another. The report is “statistical,” after all. Scientific. Irrefutable proof of whatever point is best served—and besides, no one wants to admit they spent a lot of money on something of such questionable value.

When the house is on fire, yell fire!

Just in time for hurricane season, which officially kicks off June 1, the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds today held a webinar/campfire session about disaster planning. The session wasn’t without merit, but as with many ARVC offerings, it was reactive rather than proactive, following the news rather than getting ahead of it. Moreover, the session failed to deliver on a timely promise that it would “consider insurance options,” the lack of which is shaping up as a crucial economic threat to the industry.

Yes, it’s critical for RV parks to have written disaster plans, to get in the habit of educating their guests about the kinds of disasters most common to the area and how to respond to them, and to have a close working relationship with local first-responders—all bases covered by the ARVC panelists. But these and similar bits of advice are limited in scope and imagination, a quiet murmur at the back of a room that badly needs to be shocked awake by a loud klaxon wail. As Susan Motley, ARVC’s education director, mildly observed, “We’re having disasters now in areas where people aren’t used to having them”—not that there’s much outreach to ARVC members about what that means.

Campers know about the growing challenge first-hand. Nearly one in five told The Dyrt for its 2023 camping report that wildfires and other natural disasters had disrupted their camping plans in 2022—triple the rate in 2019. Tornados, hurricanes, atmospheric rivers and record-breaking snowfalls have added to an assault most prominently headlined by wildfires, with their continent-spanning smoke plumes. As reported yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle, at least five popular state parks in the Sierra are buried in so much snow they won’t be able to open their campgrounds by Memorial Day weekend—and maybe not until well into June, depending on how much damage the melting snows reveal.

An eye-opening snapshot of current environmental risks is provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose National Risk Index maps 18 different threats across the U.S. But as important as knowing where we are is knowing where we’re headed, and in that respect the news isn’t good: as I wrote back in early March, First Street Foundation makes current circumstances seem downright utopian compared to what we can expect over the next 30 years. And First Street thus far has looked at only four of the 18 extreme weather events that FEMA has been mapping.

The striking thing about all these assessments is that when they’re plotted on a map, you quickly realize the last places you’d want to live or camp—or own a campground—are either Florida (and the Gulf Coast in general) or California (and the West Coast in general). And if the maps don’t convince you of that, the insurance melt-down in both states should. Weather-inflicted damage in both states is so severe that both have back-up insurance plans (so-called Fair Access to Insurance Requirements plans, or FAIR) to provide at least some limited coverage when private sector insurers go belly-up or refuse to sell or renew policies, which has been occurring with increasing frequency. Now even the FAIR plans are foundering.

Florida’s, for example, said last month it may have to borrow as much as $750 million to cover claims caused by Hurricane Ian, an expense that comes at an especially inopportune time given today’s high interest rates. In California, meanwhile, the state-run FAIR plan has accumulated a $332 million deficit while it charges premiums that are too low and has limited reinsurance coverage in case of future catastrophic wildfires. Such plans amount to a hidden tax that politicians don’t like to acknowledge, and they’re growing at a rapid clip: Florida’s FAIR plan has tripled the number of its policies since 2019; nationwide, FAIR policies saw a 29% growth in policy numbers from 2018 to 2021.

It goes almost without saying that campgrounds and RV parks are more vulnerable than other businesses to environmental assault. Many are located along coasts, lakes or inland waterways susceptible to flooding, and many more are in heavily wooded areas that make them sitting ducks in a wildfire–but the standard guidelines for reducing fire exposure, such as removing vegetation within 100 to 200 feet of any structure or RV pad, would essentially create a parking lot. Most are located in rural areas, where fire fighters, EMTs and law enforcement are stretched thin and can need lengthy response times. Disaster is not only more likely to strike a campground than, say, a motel or hotel, but when it does, it’s likely to cause more lasting damage.

These are complicated problems to assess and analyze, which may be reason enough for ARVC to shirk from doing so. Nor does it help that ARVC members as a rule are in deep denial about their predicament—if it were otherwise, they’d be clamoring for ARVC to step up to the plate. They’d be insisting that ARVC create a national database of the specific environmental threats faced by each RV park and campground; they’d push for an inventory of which campgrounds have suffered what natural disaster damages and at what cost; and they’d compel ARVC to start the discussion about insurance options that was promised for today.

You can’t effectively address a problem until you’ve defined its nature and dimensions. What came through in today’s webinar, however, was at best a fragmented understanding of a growing threat, and a somewhat wistful reliance on the industry’s long-cherished tradition of campground owners helping each other in times of need. That’s an admirable history, indeed, but one that’s completely inadequate for the size and scale of the storms ahead.

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March madness, campground-style

There’s a different sort of March madness that has nothing to do with basketball: it’s the annual flood of numbers and statistics for the previous year, compiled from various year-end reports and surveys. Some are revealing, some are of dubious value and some hint at truths that may unfold over the next year or so. Almost all get trotted out on behalf of one agenda or another, and all are enough to make anyone’s head spin.

One of the most questionable bits of accounting has to do with the size and economic impact of the outdoor recreation industry. A malleable business segment whose definition will vary from one person to another, it generally eschews any kind of government involvement—until there are tax dollars to be dispensed, at which time various PR engines kick into high gear to extol the importance of outdoor spending to the overall economy, to the health of the planet and to the wellbeing of all Americans. And so as the Outdoor Recreation Act lurches toward Congressional adoption, supporters have been underscoring its importance by claiming that outdoor recreation contributes a whopping $862 billion to the U.S. economy and therefore is not to be taken lightly. The RV Industry Association has chimed in by claiming that its piece of the action has been $140 billion, and of that, $35.7 billion is attributed to RV parks and campgrounds.

Yowza! $140 billion from RVing? Almost $36 billion from RV parks and campgrounds? Sounds impressive as hell—until you realize that the International Dairy Foods Association claims the dairy industry had an economic impact of $753 billion in 2021, or 3.5% of that year’s U.S. gross domestic product. Just for cow juice. Meanwhile, the bottled water industry says it expects its revenues to reach $95 billion this year, a bit more than the $91.4 billion in projected spending this year for beauty and personal care products, and even the justifiably maligned tobacco industry has U.S. sales of more than $100 billion a year. Those 11- and 12-digit numbers start adding up pretty fast, and as you slice and dice the economy into its various products and services, you soon realize that their combined “contributions” to the overall economy are larger than the whole. Since that’s mathematically impossible, could it be that each group of industry promoters has been just a wee bit fast and loose with definitions and numbers?

Realistic or not, though, industry representatives by their very nature will portray their businesses as economically important, growing and vital. In that regard it’s instructive to look at RVIA’s recently released survey profiling last year’s new RV buyers. A key finding: the new buyers are unquestionably younger than in past years, with 65% categorized as millennials and only 3% as boomers. With a median age of 32 and a median household income of $80,900, last year’s buyers were buying RVs priced at an average of $92,415—suggesting either that this is a generation with unexpected wealth or one that is willing, because of its youth, to take on some lengthy financing. The latter seems more likely, but either way, RVIA is intent on letting us know that this is a growth industry with a bright future and not just some fuddy-duddy backwater.

But there are other considerations. While the RVIA survey reports that almost a third of the new buyers expect to be camping at privately owned RV parks, a national survey released yesterday by the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds suggests those parks may not be as roomy as needed. Although 48% of campground owners had projected they would add a total of 81,000 new RV sites nationwide in 2022, the actual number was closer to 17,000. Moreover, fewer RV parks anticipate adding new sites this year—only 28%, for a projected increase of 44,000 sites—so given recent history, it’s fair to assume that the actual inventory increase may well be less than 10,000. That won’t go far in relieving the increased demand.

Meanwhile, although ARVC’s study is reasonably helpful in its national overview, its sample size is too small to draw definitive conclusions about various parts of the country—which is a shame, because the numbers it does have hint at significant regional differences. Overall, the study suggests that the campground industry is considerably stronger in the 12-state southern region than in the 13 states west of the 100th meridian, including a larger percentage overall of corporate-owned and franchised operations—and therefore deeper pockets— in the south than elsewhere. It therefore may not be surprising that only 18% of western campgrounds added sites last year, compared to 31%-32% in the rest of the country; this coming year, 50% of southern campgrounds plan to add sites, compared to just 10% in the west.

As mentioned, the sample sizes for each region (66 campgrounds in the west, 71 in the south) are too small to be more than suggestive. But they are in line with another set of regional differences: while only 9% of southern campground owners expect to sell their RV parks this year, that percentage doubles for the western operations. That could mean one in five western RV parks will change hands in 2023, making an an already turbulent industry even more so. On the other hand, a lot of those campground owners may have missed their best window and may end up changing their plans. According to an interview in the April edition of Woodall’s Campground Magazine, RV park prices have fallen from 10% to 30% in the past year, due not only to market conditions but to year-over-year revenue declines.

“Generally, the high interest rates are raising cap rates marginally, which is decreasing the overall value of properties,” Jesse Pine, a broker at NAI Outdoor Hospitality Brokers, told the magazine. “Also, 2021 was a banner year for most owners and in 2022 parks were down 5%-10% in gross income commonly across the country, [which] coupled with higher expenses like rising utility, labor and construction costs, [means] the result was lower than expected net income.”

Up, down, sideways—you can probably cobble together whatever scenario you find most pleasing from all the numbers getting slung around. The only thing certain is that being in the campground business these days means one helluva wild ride.

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RV chickens coming home to roost

This may sound harsh, but the campground industry has an enormously uncomfortable relationship with Mother Nature: like the victim of an abusive spouse, it prefers not to acknowledge that there is a dark and sometimes violent side to its partner.

Two days after passing around a tin cup for donations to help campgrounds getting swamped on the West Coast, the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds (ARVC) was at it once more, this time on behalf of campgrounds at the opposite end of the country. Proclaiming yet again that “When natural disasters strike, it’s in our nature to help,” the solicitation summarized the situation as follows:

At least eight people were killed on Thursday as severe storms and tornadoes left a trail of damage across the South. Ferocious winds sent residents running for cover, blew roofs off homes and knocked out power to thousands. The storms damaged power lines, severed tree limbs and sent debris flying into streets in Alabama, Georgia and Kentucky, where at least 35 preliminary tornado reports were recorded as of Thursday evening, according to the Storm Prediction Center.

All of which undoubtedly was true, as was a similarly generic recitation about the West Coast disaster—but in neither description was there any mention of an actual RV park or campground. The reader is left to assume that campgrounds were damaged, which is quite likely, but how many campgrounds or to what extent is left to the imagination. There are no human faces put on the tragedies for which ARVC is seeking a compassionate response, for the simple reason that ARVC doesn’t know them—nor does it really want to know them. Much better to leave this all on an abstract level.

That may sound harsh, but it speaks to the enormously uncomfortable relationship ARVC, and perhaps a majority of its members, have with Mother Nature. Like the victim of an abusive spouse, the campground industry prefers not to acknowledge that there is a dark and sometimes violent side to the relationship. Yes, there are problems, but we’ll keep those to ourselves—regardless of how unsustainable that may be—while presenting only a sunny face to the public. Anything else might be bad for business.

What throws this dynamic into sharp relief is the ironically concurrent news in the journal Science, published yesterday, that scientists at ExxonMobil “predicted global warming correctly and skillfully” more than 40 years ago. The peer-reviewed study found that Exxon’s scientists made remarkably accurate projections of just how much global warming would be increased by burning fossil fuels—“as accurate, and sometimes even more so, as those of independent academic and government models,” reported the New York Times this past Thursday.

Exxon’s corporate suite, no surprise, quickly put the kibbosh those several decades ago on its own research, casting doubt on its scientists’ work and cautioning against any move away from carbon-based fuels. Global warming projections “are based on completely unproven climate models or, more often, on sheer speculation,” the oil company’s chief executive assured a company annual meeting in 1999. “We do not now have a sufficient scientific understanding of climate change to make reasonable predictions and/or justify drastic measures,” he wrote in a company brochure the following year

ARVC, whose members rely on customers who drive vehicles of unenviable gas consumption, was only too happy to fan the embers of skepticism. Calls to reduce greenhouse emissions were premature, it declared in a 1998 policy, because of the “considerable uncertainty surrounding the theories on climate change.” What was needed, ARVC contended, was “more research, data collection and scientific analysis”—although presumably not by scientists employed by ExxonMobil. And guess what? Nearly a quarter of a century later, ARVC’s policy remains unchanged, as mired as ever in “considerable uncertainty,” even as its members watch helplessly as their campgrounds get inundated, leveled and swept away by pounding seas, tornadoes, mud slides and thousand-year storms.

And the tin cup gets passed around yet again.

To be clear, asking help for those unfortunate enough to be home when the chickens come to roost is both admirable and necessary. It’s just not enough. Aside from the disproportionate ratio of need to available resources, it doesn’t deal with the underlying problem. It doesn’t answer such fundamental questions as: who’s at risk? can that risk be managed? if not, what’s the alternative? is the current campground business model sustainable? if not, what changes—if any—can make it so? It essentially ensures that without such questions being asked, the pleas for help will only grow more bigger and more frequent.

One place to start changing this vicious spiral would be for ARVC to create a reporting system so it can quickly identify which campgrounds and RV parks may be affected by the latest extreme weather disaster—to put a face on the victims. Another would be to revisit its 1998 policy, in light of the past 24 years of “research, data collection and scientific analysis,” and figure out what a meaningful revision might look like. Yet another would be for ARVC to promote discussion among its members of a common threat, so it’s no longer seen as a taboo subject, the bogeyman whose name must not be uttered.

Most of all, it would help if ARVC and its members simply acknowledged that the love of their lives is sometimes abusive. The first step on the road to recovery, as any 12-step program participant will tell you, is to acknowledge that your life has become unmanageable.

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We’re not ready for the new normal

As California reels from a two-week series of storms that have claimed at least 18 lives, forced tens of thousands to evacuate and permanently altered the landscape, the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds (ARVC) finally took notice yesterday with an email blast from its disaster relief foundation, requesting donations to help battered campgrounds. The solicitation was heralded with the bold statement, “When natural disasters strike, it’s in our nature to help.”

Well, maybe sorta.

While the jury is still out on the helpful nature of the industry’s recent wave of institutional investors, ARVC members’ recent track record of helpfulness is not reassuring. As I reported in a November post, mere weeks after dozens of Florida campgrounds were devastated—some terminally—by Hurricane Ian, the ARVC Foundation had dispensed slightly more than $20,000 in disaster relief for all of 2022. And Hurricane Ian was far from the only weather disaster to ravage the U.S. last year, as witness the following graphic (a larger version can be seen here):

Indeed, it’s ironic that ARVC jumped on the assistance bandwagon just one day after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released that map as part of a larger report on 18 U.S. weather disasters in 2022, each causing at least $1 billion in damage. That’s the third costliest such tally on record, trailing only 2017 and 2005, both those years also marked by severe hurricanes. Ian led the charge this time, with a $112.9 billion price tag contributing the lion’s share of a tentative $165 billion in total damages—tentative because the final total is still awaiting cost estimates from a year-end winter storm that could add as much as $5 billion. Oh, and lest we forget: those 18 supercharged weather events also caused 474 deaths. The price tag for those is incalculable.

Now we’re off to the races again, jump-starting the casualty and damage steeplechase with torrential downpours that are predicted to start tapering off over the next week or so. The destruction no doubt will exceed NOAA’s billion-dollar threshold for inclusion in the 2023 map, continuing a pattern that since 2016 accounts for more than $1 trillion in damage and more than 5,000 deaths. While the campground industry obviously is no more than a footnote on that balance sheet, it’s just as obvious that $20,000 in damage relief doesn’t begin to address the need. Yes, every bit helps for those lucky enough to get a donation. But let’s also acknowledge that such help ultimately is as futile as bailing out a lake with a tin cup, amounting to little more than feel-good virtue signaling.

What’s to be done? For starters, ARVC and the rest of the industry must step out of their glamping bubble, look around at the natural landscape, and recognize that the natural order of things really is undergoing a fundamental change. You can’t deal with a problem without first acknowledging that it exists. The blissfully mild and predictable weather patterns of 40 and 50 years ago are growing steadily more anarchic, and more recently have become downright nihilistic—not everywhere, and not all the time, but often enough to demand attention. Unfortunately, that means talking about a phenomenon that most campground owners resolutely deny is even a thing, much less something that requires a response from them.

Meanwhile, although ARVC might be expected to provide leadership on the matter, this is an organization that operates with a transactional business model: the things that get talked about must either a) strengthen the executive suite; or b) enable someone to sell something, be it a product or a service. EV charging stations currently are a hot topic not because of ARVC’s commitment to a carbon-free future, but because RV manufacturers are developing electric RVs that they won’t be able to sell if their customers won’t have any place to plug them in. Nothing wrong with that, any more than there was anything wrong with promoting on-line reservation systems or enhanced campground wi-fi capabilities—just don’t confuse all that with a policy-driven agenda.

So until either someone figures out a way to make money off natural disasters or ARVC has a come-to-Jesus moment about climate change, the tin cup response will be the default position—again and again. “Groundhog Day” comes to mind. So does that quotation attributed to Einstein about the definition of insanity.

Even redwood trees like this one, at Sue-meg State Park in Humboldt County, CA, are succumbing to the relentless wind and rain buffeting the Pacific Coast. Be glad you weren’t camping here.

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Part III: RV parks and campgrounds are NOT part of a ‘hospitality industry’

The first two installments of this series examined how the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds (ARVC) fails to live up to its promise of being either “national” or an “association.” That was a relatively straightforward case to make. The more abstract yet more fundamental argument, however, is to demonstrate how ARVC’s leadership has been so seduced by the idea of being part of the “hospitality industry” that it has lost its way—and in doing so has lost sight of the many existential threats now confronting its core constituency. Which, if anyone needs reminding, is RV parks and campgrounds.

The “hospitality industry” identity, which ARVC claims overtly in its “vision” and “mission” statements and which it embraces in practice, is a seductive one. It sounds high-toned and professional, even scientific, as though there were a single overarching set of principles that could be applied to all those many ways of hosting people away from home: hotels, motels, campgrounds, bed-and-breakfasts, inns, RV parks, ski lodges, marinas, resorts, glampgrounds, and so on. And, indeed, there are commonalities—including some common problems, the most obvious being the extraordinary shortage of workers willing to be hospitable. But the differences are far greater than the similarities, and overlooking them in order to lump all those disparate businesses together makes as little sense as combining trees and horses in one category because they both have limbs.

Three years after the pandemic decimated the labor force, for example, the hospitality industry still has nearly a million fewer employees than it had in early 2020. But that burden is not distributed evenly. Hotel and motel employment has rebounded almost to full strength, while campgrounds and RV parks are still struggling to flesh out their payrolls, and especially among seasonal operations. One inevitable result: campers increasingly are pushed toward making reservations online (some campgrounds, if they answer the phone at all, now charge an extra fee for the “service” of accepting your money), are encouraged to check-in remotely and may never interact with a campground employee before checking out. That might be a preferred way of doing business for some, but it makes a mockery of any pretense at campground “hospitality,” just as the “hospitality” of an automat is nothing like that of a full-service restaurant.

But that’s only part of the problem. RV parks and campgrounds are significantly more labor intensive than their bricks-and-sticks counterparts even in the best of times, with campground owners having to deal with grounds-keeping, sewage disposal, and water and electric utilities on a scale that would make hotel managers blanch. But these are not the best of times. An increasingly unstable climate has added to this burden, with more frequent and destructive weather creating disproportionate damage to open-air facilities through flooding, wildfires, ice storms or wind damage. Their labor forces depleted, campgrounds and RV parks are accumulating a significant backlog of deferred maintenance projects, while routine housekeeping is increasingly sparse—and the claim to “hospitality” becomes even more illusory.

It therefore may seem paradoxical that campgrounds and RV parks have become sought-after acquisition targets for various investment groups, which over the past couple of years have been snatching them up at a fantastic rate, for reasons I’ve discussed elsewhere. But while that may be an attractive development for campground owners wanting to get out of the business, it also creates enormous stresses and strains for the survivors—in the same way that gentrification puts the squeeze on long-term residents of a neighborhood—as site rates get pushed to unprecedented heights and campgrounds increasingly remake themselves as amusement parks.

This trend also means that an industry that once was largely diversified across thousands of small one-off operators, typically small family holdings, increasingly is dominated by companies that own dozens of properties. Being big has a remarkable effect on one’s perspective: problems that can fill a small operator’s horizon may be negligible from an absentee investor’s broader overview, with its deeper pockets, backfield of talent and abundant outside resources. But guess who’s more likely to get the ear of industry leaders?

Taken together, those three dynamics—an insufficient workforce, a more hostile natural environment and a gentrifying business model—are fundamentally transforming the campground industry right under ARVC’s nose, yet without a flicker of recognition of what that means for association members. To take just one set of examples: how should campgrounds respond to the growing recognition of wildlife-urban interface problems? What best practices can they adopt to mitigate threats of wildfire or flooding? How many campgrounds may soon find themselves unable to to obtain property insurance in environmentally threatened areas, and how should ARVC respond to that need? What are the possibilities of the industry as a whole becoming self-insuring? Alternatively, what can the industry do to promote non-private insurers of last resort?

Similar kinds of questions can be asked about a depleted workforce and gentrification, but not by an organization that doesn’t recognize them as issues in the first place. And if that organization has isolated itself from its membership base, and if it identifies itself as being a segment of a more refined “hospitality industry” than as representing a bunch of hard-scrabble dirt renters for whom this is their entire fortune, it’s every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. The most critical questions won’t be asked until ARVC remembers why it was created in the first place: to serve the needs of privately owned RV parks and campgrounds, just like its name says.

Everything else is a distraction.

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Part II: ARVC’s name is misleading, because it’s hardly an ‘association’

There are lots of nouns a group of people can adopt when creating an entity of common interests. “Grange” has a certain folksy appeal, despite its admittedly short-lived history as a farmers’ group to advance agricultural methods and to promote its members’ social and economic needs. “Society” is another possibility, as is “alliance,” as are “union,” “brotherhood” and “confederation.” But when a group of campground owners got together in 1967 to form a national group that would meet their needs, the noun they chose was “association.”

That’s “association” as in the National Campground Owners Association, decades later changed to the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds (ARVC). “Association” as in “a group of people or organizations who work together for a particular purpose.” “Association” as a collective noun whose commonly understood synonyms include partnership, companionship, fellowship—words, alas, that hardly describe ARVC as it is today.

This is an organization, after all, whose current stated “vision” is a mystifying five words—“an empowered outdoor hospitality industry”—and whose “mission” is couched in soulless corporate-speak: “We empower outdoor hospitality businesses by providing industry-tailored resources, organic connections, consumer exposure, professional development, and proactive legislative action.”  That’s a long way from the association’s founding principle, which was “for the purpose of promoting camping through the private sector and protecting the camping industry from unfair legislation and unfair competition.”

Just as ARVC has replaced the earthiness of “camping” with corporate jargon about “outdoor hospitality,” so too has it jettisoned the fraternal trappings of an association in favor of a service organization’s efficiencies. Members are asked for little more than their annual dues, in exchange for which they get a strongly hyped menu of vendor discounts, various educational opportunities and a steadily more expensive annual convention. True, ARVC has a notably energetic legislative watchdog and lobbyist in the person of Jeff Sims, whose efforts readily fulfill at least that part of the original mandate. But efforts to promote “association”? To harness the energies of people to “work together for a particular purpose”? Not so much.

Instead, under the 12-year leadership of chief executive Paul Bambei, ARVC has become increasingly transactional and more distant from its individual members. Nominees for the board of directors, for example, must have received a certificate from—or be actively enrolled in—the organization’s Outdoor Hospitality Education Program, regardless of how much campground operating experience they already have. While the full program leads to certification as an Outdoor Hospitality Professional, it’s questionable how “professional” one can become after just eight days of face-to-face instruction. What’s unquestionable is that the $3,790 tuition cost, plus the expense of hotel, travel and time lost from work, can be a steep deterrent to potential ARVC leaders and a surprising hurdle for an association to place before any civic-minded members.

Once elected to the board, however, ARVC directors conduct their duties in a bubble. Although their names and pictures can be found on the ARVC website, no contact information is provided for any of their constituents who might want to reach them. The membership is not notified of upcoming board meetings before which it might to tempted to bring up matters of interest, and the minutes of board meetings are not published for membership review. Meanwhile, the flow of membership publications has been steadily choked off, its last magazine being quietly dispatched last year without so much as a farewell notice. As a result, ARVC members have little to no idea of their organization’s internal workings, and ARVC’s leaders hear extraordinarily little of their members’ concerns. Small wonder, then, that membership ranks have been eroding.

Thus insulated from their supposed following, ARVC’s “professional” leaders are free to develop solutions for non-existent problems while remaining oblivious to actual industry threats. Among the current distractions, for example, is a renewed push—more than a decade after it was first rebuffed—to create an industry-wide set of “standards.” Regardless of whether this is a good idea or not, the lack of prior membership involvement and education—and how could that have happened, given the leadership’s near-total isolation?—has resulted in a massive backlash and still more alienation between the leaders and the led.

Just how poorly those leaders appreciate the chasm that lies before them was suggested by a letter one of the board’s past presidents wrote a few weeks ago to the various state affiliates, seeking to explain why the standards had been proposed. None of his reasons indicated that the proposal was a response to membership demands. Instead, his chief rationale seemed to be that because the “hospitality industry has emerged as a leading travel and vacation style in recent years,” “regulators” are paying more attention. And since the regulators “don’t know our industry, wouldn’t it be better if the industry itself provided the definition rather than ceding that inevitable chore to others?”

Although no evidence is presented that this is in fact a problem (what “regulators”? making what “attempts to define us”?) the argument has a certain logic—until, that is, one realizes it turns the whole association dynamic on its head. Instead of an association of campground owners “protecting the camping industry from unfair legislation,” as was originally conceived, an increasingly “professional” ARVC has reached the point at which it will attempt to institute its own regulations, its own legislation. That’s a whole lot easier than pushing back against ignorant meddling by outsiders.

And, not incidentally, it also cements the transformation of a society of equals into a corporate-style command structure. There’s the top of the pyramid, which controls all internal communication and sets the agenda for everyone else; and there’s everyone else—until they aren’t. Until they bail, out of resentment or disgust or simply because their real needs aren’t being met.

Next post: Part III of why the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds should reconsider its name. Perhaps it should rebrand as the National Association of the Outdoor Hospitality Industry?

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Part I: ARVC’s misleading name, to whit, it’s not really a ‘national’ org

There’s only one national organization that non-franchised campground owners can turn to when they need help with their business, and that’s the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds (ARVC). It’s unfortunate, therefore, that ARVC is “national” more in name than fact, and is scarcely an “association” in any meaningful sense of the word.

For a better understanding of that first point, take a look at the map above. The blue states are ones that have state associations affiliated with ARVC: if you own a campground in one of those states, you can’t belong to ARVC unless you first belong to that state’s ARVC affiliate. Indeed, so entwined are these relationships that the blue states are charged with collecting dues on behalf of the national association as well as themselves—there is no option for paying dues directly to ARVC. Want to benefit from national membership but don’t see any value in belonging to the state organization? Too bad. This is an all or nothing proposition, not dissimilar from other bundled “services” we’ve grown to resent.

Own a campground in one of the six green states? You’re comparatively lucky there, because in those states you can belong to either ARVC or the state ARVC-affiliate—or both. Your choice, courtesy not of ARVC but of those state affiliates, which apparently feel confident enough in their offerings to believe they can attract members without having to ride ARVC’s coattails.

Then there are the grey states, of which there are 24, or roughly half the total but more than half by any other measure, such as land area or population. Those are the 24 states that don’t have an ARVC affiliate in the first place, so prior state association membership isn’t a consideration—for ARVC. Take a closer look, however, and you might realize that the country’s four most populous states—California, Texas, Florida and New York, accounting for fully a third of the U.S. total—are all grey, and while they don’t have ARVC-affiliated associations, they most definitely have their own campground membership organizations. They are, in other words, competitors.

How many campground owners in those states do you think might belong to both ARVC and to their own, unaffiliated state associations? To both ARVC and TACO (Texas Association of Campground Owners), or to ARVC and CONY (Campground Owners of New York)? Some, to be sure, but far fewer than would be the case if those independent associations weren’t around. Indeed, as illustrated by the California Outdoor Hospitality Association, former ARVC state affiliates have a distressing tendency to jump the ARVC ship when it seems financially feasible to do so: COHA did so in 2019, and hasn’t looked back since. Other non-ARVC associations, meanwhile, are reaching across state lines to create larger industry groupings, as Florida has with Alabama.

The result is an anemic “national” organization from which its potentially strongest affiliates have seceded altogether, while its main membership base is sustained by a mutually dependent relationship with state affiliates that might not otherwise stand alone—not unlike two drunks leaning against each other for support. That mixed allegiance led Greg Gerber, the now-retired editor of a daily RV industry watchdog publication, to observe that ARVC has a muddled public mission. “Does it represent campgrounds, or is it an association of state associations that represent campgrounds?” he wondered in 2016, in his seminal report, “RV Industry Death Spiral.”

Good question, and one that ARVC has never answered, even as it continues to trumpet its standing as “the only national association dedicated to representing the interests and needs of private RV parks and campgrounds in the U.S. and Canada.” Which is true as far as it goes, but that seems to be progressively less each passing year: even as its overall income increased by 50% over the five years since Gerber wrote his report, overall membership has declined and now sits below 3,000 campgrounds—or less than a quarter of the industry overall.

Next post: Part II of why the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds should rethink what it calls itself, in this case focusing on what it means to be an “association.”

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