As it’s prone to do, KOA—“the world leader in outdoor hospitality”—tooted its own horn this past week by announcing yet another “year of significant expansion.” Claiming to have notched a dozen independent park conversions in 2023, as well as eight new construction contracts, the RV park franchiser trumpeted that its increased inventory “underscores the organization’s resilience and adaptive strength in the evolving travel, camping and outdoor hospitality industry.”
Really?
Although the campground industry’s sycophantic press was quick to regurgitate the “news,” apparently no one paused long enough to let the numbers sink in—or to notice how awfully familiar they sound. Because while the same press release noted that the year’s developments increased KOA’s “elevated number of branded locations to 511 across North America,” the company had claimed 525 locations in mid-2021, up from 520 in 2020—so where’s the “significant expansion”?
A generous person might argue that the apparent two-year decline—unfounded claims of KOA’s “resilience” notwithstanding—shouldn’t be taken too seriously, a one-off because of the pandemic and its aftershocks. But the truth is that KOA’s crowing about growth in locations has been a recurring event for at least a decade, a marshaling of incomplete numbers wrapped in hyperbole aimed at convincing the public—and especially campground owners— that this is one helluva dynamic, growing company. The truth is somewhat less than that.
Consider, for example, the presentation given by KOA’s then-president Toby O’Rourke at the company’s 2018 annual convention. “This year we brought in 12 new conversions, four more are to be signed and that means we should have 515 KOAs in the 2019 directory,” she explained. “People are investing in camping and they’re investing specifically in KOA.” Which sounds good only until you notice that O’Rourke, as was true of KOA this past week, referred to only one side of the ledger. And as the numbers above indicate, departing KOA franchisees have more or less cancelled out all those incoming conversions and new builds. When it comes to campground numbers, KOA is only treading water.
It’s actually worse than that. In 2012, for example, there were 484 campgrounds across the U.S. claiming the familiar yellow logo, so at first blush one might think that at least the system has expanded by two-dozen or so properties over the past decade. But of that 484, 26 KOAs were company-owned and 458 were franchisees. By this past summer, the number of KOA-owned parks had nearly doubled, to 51, while the number of franchised properties had increased by just two. To the extent that KOA has been growing, it has done so as an owner of RV parks and not as a franchiser
Does it matter? Maybe not, but for KOA’s persistence in making its unfounded statements of franchisee growth, which begs the question: why? Why keep repeating the same cockamamie claims? KOA is privately owned, so it doesn’t have stockholders to impress. Its campers don’t much care if the chain has 450 or 500 or 600 RV parks. The only other significant audience for its overblown representations is independent park owners, whom KOA needs in its ranks to offset the deserters—and who presumably need assurances that KOA is one bitchin’ star to which they can hitch their wagons. And, indeed, that’s pretty much the case made by O’Rourke, now KOA’s CEO, as she asserted that “the healthy influx of new franchisees and new campgrounds is a clear indication that KOA is meeting the needs of our customers—both campers and franchisees alike.”
Beneath all this bluster is the unremarked fact that KOA is rapidly morphing from a company in service to its franchisees to one serviced by those franchisees: all those company-owned properties were purchased thanks to the 10% of revenues that KOA collects in franchise fees. Moreover, the RV parks that KOA buys are on the upper end of its tripartite breakdown of properties into Journey, Holiday and Resort categories, which means that corporate resources have been getting funneled into developing high-end amenities and standards, not into raising the laggards. The KOA Journeys, meanwhile, are left to fend for themselves against growing competition from the likes of Love’s Travel Stops, which coincidentally announced this week it will expand its chain of full-hookup RV parks from 54 to 98 by year’s end. Give Love’s a couple more years like that and it will be eating KOA’s lunch at all but the high end of the campground spectrum.
One other development buried within KOA’s unreleased numbers is the extent to which its individually owned campgrounds have been consolidating under group ownerships. A KOA today is as likely to be one of several owned by a corporation or an investment group as it is to be a traditional mom-and-pop operation, from some entirely native to KOA—Recreational Adventures Co., the Bell family out of San Diego—to others sprawling across various outdoor properties in and out of KOA, such as Team Outsider, Encore RV Resorts or BlueWater, to name just a few. The number of individual franchise owners, in other words, is rapidly diminishing, and with it the overall KOA culture, which is becoming flatter, more corporate and less interesting with each passing year.
KOA, as KOA likes to remind us, was founded by an aw-shucks Montana entrepreneur who wanted to provide Americans traveling to the Seattle world’s fair with a clean, safe place to spend the night. No telling what Dave Drum would have thought of what his creation has become, but I suspect the one thing that might have rubbed him the wrong way is its penchant for puffing out its chest and telling tall tales and half-truths. Sounds like something you’d expect from a city slicker.
Renting Dirt 