Poor innumeracy. Its big brother, illiteracy, gets all the ink. Can’t read, or can’t read with comprehension? The world clucks in sympathy and looks for ways to make it all better. Can’t perform basic mathematical operations or figure out what numbers actually mean? No one cares—quite possibly because no one notices.
That’s the problem with a widespread knowledge deficit: the only people who notice are those without it. While there are a lot of people who know the world is a sphere and so will call you out if you proclaim it’s flat, there are far fewer people to notice when you fail to move a decimal point or mix up medians and averages.
Latest case in point: a recent press release from KOA announcing that registration revenue was up more than 12% this past July 4 weekend over the same period a year earlier. Fair enough—as far as it goes. But then one notoriously fawning RV “news” website took that simple fact and spun it thus: “In contrast to the broader camping industry, which saw a marginal increase of less than 1% in camping households compared to 2022, KOA’s growth in popularity is noteworthy.”
See what happened there? KOA reported growth in revenue, which the innumerate website then compared to growth in camping households. Apples and oranges. The 12% growth in KOA revenues may have been the result of a 12% growth in camping households, but it’s possible—and in KOA’s case, quite likely—that most if not all of of the revenue growth was a result of higher rates.
To be fair, the hapless RV website was helped toward its unsupported conclusion by KOA itself, starting with the misleading headline on its press release, “KOA reports double-digit registration growth for Fourth of July.” “Registration” could refer to people; it could refer to dollars; it could refer to camper nights. It is an inkblot test for the innumerate, the interpretation of which tells us more about the perceiver than about the inkblot.
It didn’t help, then, that KOA’s press release went on to quote from its own monthly research report for July, which claimed that “21.7 million households camped over the Fourth of July this year, less than a 1% increase compared to 2022.” That non sequitur was followed by the enthusiastic claim from KOA president Toby O’Rourke that “the numbers are a great indicator of how the public responds to the KOA brand,” which only gave the innumerate RV website an invitation to pile one unsubstantiated conjecture on top of another, to whit:
“The divergence [between revenue dollars and campers] offers a blueprint for success to private campground owners: carving a niche brand identity in a flat market could be a game-changing strategy. The commendable figures unveiled by KOA underline the the potential rewards of focusing on enhancing the customer experience.”
That’s quite an ass-kissing leap from an extremely flimsy platform.
It’s noteworthy that KOA didn’t make an actual misstatement—it simply threw out a couple of unrelated numbers without context, then patted itself on the corporate back for the implied connection. I doubt this was a calculated misdirection—it’s more likely that whoever drafted the release was as innumerate as the sycophantic RV website that took its premise and cranked it up a notch. But the result, whether through calculation or sheer sloppiness, is nothing more than shallow propaganda.
Here’s a different conclusion you can draw from this sketchy information: KOA is jacking up its rates so high it may soon find itself treading the same path as its avowed hospitality icon, Walt Disney, which is seeing a marked decline in amusement park attendance. Tune in at this time next year to see if that’s closer to the mark.
Renting Dirt 