Tag: Camping World

The bloom is off the RV camping rose

One person’s blessing can be another person’s curse. Take gas prices, for example: according to AAA, Gas Buddy and the Energy Information Administration, gas demand is declining and so are gas prices, down more than 19 cents a gallon from a month ago and more than 14 cents below last year’s June prices. For the RVing public, that’s good news. For RV parks and campgrounds grown accustomed to a brisk amount of business, maybe not so much.

Although lower gas prices mean more people may decide to hit the road, one reason for those lower prices is . . . fewer people are hitting the road. “Demand is just kind of shallow,” according to AAA spokesperson Andrew Gross, as quoted in an Associated Press story earlier this week. “Traditionally—pre-pandemic—after Memorial Day, demand would start to pick up in the summertime. And we just don’t see it anymore.”

Of course, less demand is just one factor in the gas equation, and it will take months to sort through accumulating data to determine what’s really going on at the pump. Crude oil prices are one obvious variable. So is refinery capacity. But it’s not just prices that are down, as overall gas consumption is off by 10% from pre-pandemic levels. More fuel-efficient cars may account for some of that, as may growing sales of EVs. However you parse it, though, the bottom line seems to be that fewer people are driving this summer than in years past, and they’re not driving as far.

How much of that will translate into less traffic at RV parks and campgrounds? That, too, remains to be seen, but it certainly suggests the possibility that business overall will continue softening, as became noticeable early last year. One indicator the bloom is off the RVing rose: RV sales continue declining, even as RV manufacturers keep shoveling out new product on the thin hope that business will turn around any month now. Retail registrations in April, released Monday and the most recent available, marked a 9.8% drop compared to April of 2023. Nor was that a statistical blip: year-to-date sales are down 10.4% from the same four-month period last year.

The downturn has become pronounced enough that The Wall Street Journal took note last week in an article headlined, “It’s a Buyer’s Market for Boats, RVs and Other Pandemic Toys.” Extra cash, low interest rates and a desire for buffered recreation during the pandemic years resulted in a buying surge that pushed RV sales and campground visitation to record highs, but when all that turned around, a lot of new RV and boat owners were left with lightly-used playthings for which the bills keep coming. “The whole business is based on a monthly payment,” Marcus Lemonis, chief executive of Camping World Holdings, told the Journal.

Camping World’s stock price has been on a steady decline since the end of March, when it closed at $27.95 ahead of an expected seasonal upsurge in RV sales that still hasn’t arrived, and now sits at $18.68 amid a bearish short interest outlook. Lazydays Holding, an RV dealership that describes itself as the world’s largest, saw its shares tank more than 64% over the past year and lost $1.63 a share in the first quarter, as reported mid-May; it’s now on the verge of being delisted. Thor Industries, the world’s largest RV manufacturer, reported last week that sales for its fiscal third quarter were down 40% and earnings per share were down by two-thirds from the same period a year earlier.

To be sure, none of that automatically translates into slower business for RV parks and campgrounds, which may yet hope that a continued decline in gas prices will tease out more traffic. But it does suggest a shift in the recreational zeitgeist, a turning away from a pandemic-induced “it” thing to something that’s less physically demanding and with less of a long-term financial overhang. That might mean glamping—which puts the onus of capital investment on campground owners, rather than on campers. It might mean flying off to places an RV just can’t go. Or maybe it just means a return to staycations, now that most people feel comfortable hosting friends and family on familiar turf.

Then there’s the whole pesky weather problem that no one in the campground industry likes to talk about. RV park owners and RV retailers and manufacturers may resolutely turn a blind eye to the issue, but campers aren’t, and they’re making plans—or not making plans—accordingly. There are only so many crushing tornadoes or fire-ravaged hillsides or biblical floods (hello, Florida!) that most people can absorb before they begin to question the wisdom of parking out in the open in a relatively small box on wheels. Next week’s forecast calls for the season’s first truly massive heat wave in much of the country. Any doubts about how that will affect year-over-year camping statistics?

Unlike the manufacturing and much of the retailing ends of the RVing industry, campgrounds and RV parks are still privately held and too fragmented to produce much in the way of reliable metrics. Nor are its trade associations able to keep a finger on the business pulse, forcing observers to rely mostly on anecdotal accounts of what’s going on. Thus far those accounts aren’t bullish, but more illumination on that score may be provided the next time KOA chooses to publicize its reservation numbers: if it follows recent practice, those numbers will be all about the dollars, not about camper nights—which last fall it reluctantly acknowledged have been down.

Perhaps RVers can hope site rates, like gas prices, will start responding to softened demand? Isn’t that, after all, the carrot that KOA and other adopters of “dynamic pricing” have dangled in front of their customers to ease the sting of demand-driven price increases?

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It’s the good Samaritan needs help

One clue that an enterprise has lost its way comes when it starts “rebranding,” usually with the explanation that it’s seeking a wider audience or is identifying its actual “core discipline”—“people-moving” instead of flying airplanes, for example. As often as not, the change signals either a loss of focus or an ultimately futile chase after higher returns, even if that means getting into an entirely unrelated line of business.

General Electric is a poster-child example of this. Once a manufacturing powerhouse that by 1994 was the sixth-largest revenue generator among all U.S. companies, GE went on a diversification spree that created an increasingly complex and unwieldy behemoth. The transformation was led by chief executive Jack Welch, who from 1981 to 2001 closed factories, laid off workers and instead diversified into financial services, all to sycophantic praise from the Wall Street crowd. Instead of making things, GE put its energy into lending money—and soon got bogged down in various bad bets, tried to manipulate its way out of trouble and eventually unraveled. But by then, of course, an enormously enriched Welch was long gone.

This past Tuesday marked the end of that particular hubris, as the erstwhile industrial powerhouse completed a three-way split into the independent and much diminished companies of GE Healthcare (spun-off last year), GE Vernova and GE Aerospace. Tellingly, it’s GE Aerospace—a manufacturer, in this case of jet engines—that retains the GE stock symbol. Back to basics!

The one thing GE didn’t do during all that bobbing and weaving is change its name. As much can’t be said for the Good Sam Club, which while hardly in the same class, this week continued a steady march to irrelevance by announcing a rebranding “that could better speak” to a wider audience. As explained yesterday to an RVBusiness reporter by Good Sam executive vice president Will Colling, “when we looked at our niche within the RV space, what we realized is that we’re a road travel and recreation enthusiast company. We will always have the niche within the RV space, but we speak to this broader set of consumers.”

Where to start unpacking all that nonsense? For openers, there’s the mouthful about being a “road travel and recreation enthusiast company,” leading to the observation that the more words it takes to describe what you’re doing, the more unfocused you risk becoming. Ditto for the substitution of generalized descriptors for specific ones, as in “road travel” instead of “RVing,” or “recreation enthusiast” for “camping.”

Then there’s the undeserved cockiness encompassed by the phrase “we will always have the niche within the RV space.” Really? Sure about that?

Once upon a time, veteran RVers will remember, the Good Sam Club was, in fact . . . a club. It claimed more than two million RVers, organized into state and local chapters that sponsored trips and rallies. Its name was derived from the parable of the Good Samaritan, emphasizing that members were ready to assist each other when needed while pursuing this fringe idea of traveling the country in a home on wheels. Its logo featured a stylized smiling face with a halo over its head.

Then it got more corporate. In 2011, Good Sam Enterprises merged with Camping World and began its slide into obscurity—always, of course, with the intention of broadening its appeal by making itself less distinctive. First to go: the smiling face on the logo. Then the word “club” was erased. The network of state and local chapters? Dissolved in 2020, ostensibly because of the pandemic, but then never resurrected. And yesterday came the announcement that the logo has been changed again. Ixnay on the halo—indeed, bye-bye to the name itself. Jumping on the latest corporate rebranding bandwagon, now it’s just initials, “GS,” on a dark shield instead of the formerly distinctive red ball.

And, of course, there’s a suitably meaningless new tagline, “Good to Go.” As in . . . going, going, gone?

Just to be clear about what his company is doing, Will Colling emphasized that a big aspect of the rebranding is a marriage of Good Sam membership and credit card programs into a combined rewards program. Plus the revamped Good Sam will be introducing “cornerstone partnerships,” like a recently announced boat and RV storage center, as well as “other travel partners like Princess Cruise Lines, where we acknowledge that the RV consumer wants to experience more than just road travel.”

Well, sure. The RV “consumer” also wants to eat—consume—actual food, and send kids or grandkids to college or trade school, and buy clothes and electronics, and . . . why, the list of diversification possibilities is endless. Indeed, at some point the whole RVing thing will become a “niche” product under the corporate umbrella, just as kitchen appliances became a distraction for GE, its customer base trickling away because . . . why? As for the “club” aspect that once attracted so many members, or the promise of mutual assistance bound up in the now all-but-invisible name itself? That’s all history. It’s all transactional now.

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