Tag: Outdoor Hospitality Industry

Fiddling while California burns

California is burning once again, after a two-year hiatus, with something like 200,000 acres already turned to charcoal—and here it is only mid-July, with three to four months of fire season still ahead of us. The state’s property insurance premiums are getting hiked by 30% or more a year. Wildfire smoke, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) analysis released in April, is contributing to nearly 16,000 deaths annually across the U.S. as a consequence of large wildfires in the western U.S. and Canada.

Alarming, right? The kind of apocalyptic onslaught that would have any thoughtful outdoor industry leadership publicly fretting about a proper response—but hey, this is California, long renowned for living in an alternative reality. So when Dyana Kelly, president and chief executive of the California Outdoor Hospitality Association, recently took figurative pen to paper to address the burning (sorry) issue of the day, it was to go after . . . the organization formerly known as the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds (ARVC). And not for anything having to do with weather, wildfires, insurance rates or other existential threats to the RVing lifestyle, either.

No, what ruffled Kelly’s feathers was ARVC’s temerity in rebranding itself as OHI, or Outdoor Industry Hospitality, which aside from being an awkward three-legged stool of a name is strikingly similar to CalOHA, which is how Kelly’s organization usually styles itself. The rebranding is not news—it happened early this year—but Kelly greeted it as though it were, sarcastically congratulating ARVC for moving “away from the standard membership of RV parks and campgrounds by partnering with Hipcamp and allowing non-permitted parks, dispersed campgrounds and possibly even backpacking locations (as indicated by their release video) into membership.” Ouch.

This kind of frontal assault in an industry of glad-handers and back-slappers was notable enough for RV Business to seek Kelly’s permission to reprint her broadside, originally written for CalOHA’s members. But to be fair, Kelly was only playing tit for tat: it wasn’t all that long ago that ARVC took legal action against the California association after it dropped its affiliation with the national group but retained the CalARVC name. The similarity, ARVC contended, was causing “confusion” for park members. So rather than get embroiled in a trademark tussle, the Californians switched to CalOHA—only to now find their roles reversed.

“Is there confusion,” Kelly wrote, reprising ARVC’s earlier complaint. “YES. A number of parks have called to inquire about an invoice they received recently from ‘CalOHA’ when it was actually a well-disguised invoice from OHI.”

Yes, of course this is a problem—but not, I’ll submit, as big as the problem that both CalOHA and OHI are resolutely ignoring. Bookkeeping confusion pales beside the fundamental climate threat to RVing’s business model, which if nothing changes will make the current contretemps seem more than just a bit precious. And quite irrelevant. But both organizations are carrying on as though it’s business as usual—nothing to see here!

If Kelly wanted a truly righteous fight to pick on a national stage, she’d take ARVC/OHI to task for its history of climate change denial. This is an organization whose official policy maintains that there is still “considerable uncertainty surrounding the theories on climate change,” so much so that the only responsible thing to do is “more research, data collection and scientific analysis” before changing emission standards—or, indeed, doing anything at all that might have an economic impact on the industry. Of course, that economic impact is felt more severely with each passing year precisely because of such a don’t-rock-the-boat approach.

Yes, that would be a righteous rumble, but also a hard slog. And not nearly as satisfying as a quick and dirty couple of jabs over something as relatively meaningless as what we choose to call ourselves.

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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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ARVC rebrand sees its first defection

It’s been less than a year since I published three successive posts taking issue with the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds—or, more precisely, with its misleading name. As I pointed out last January, ARVC was neither “national” nor an “association,” nor should it lean into the idea that RV parks and campgrounds are part of a larger hospitality industry that includes hotels, motels, resorts, inns, ski lodges, marinas, glampgrounds, bed and breakfasts and so on.

Well, sonofagun if ARVC didn’t toss in the towel on two of the three points I’d raised, even as it went all in on the third. Last month ARVC “rebranded” itself—its choice of words, telling you right there how much of a market research-driven organization it has become—by dropping the ARVC name and calling itself the Outdoor Hospitality Industry. That’s right—this membership organization is now claiming the mantle of an entire industry. And, it should be noted, by doing so is even more explicitly distancing itself from its campground roots.

The repercussions are just beginning to be felt.

Three days ago, the board of directors of the Pennsylvania Campground Owners Association voted to drop its state membership in OHI, explaining that OHI’s “mission and vision” no longer align with the state organization’s. Indeed, the board noted, the association’s campground members had become increasingly less engaged with the national organization over the past several years, a trend indicative of OHI’s loss of grassroots appeal. Moreover, PCOA’s executive director told a Woodall’s Campground Magazine reporter, Pennsylvania members had grown increasingly concerned about OHI’s lack of communications and transparency about the significant changes it was implementing, including adoption of industry standards, bylaws changes and even the rebranding itself.

The Pennsylvania association was one of OHI’s largest state affiliates, claiming more than 200 campgrounds and RV parks. Its departure, however, moves it into the column occupied by California, Texas, Florida and New York, whose campground associations are the largest in the U.S. but all of which have either dropped or never had ARVC/OHI affiliation. And while individual campground owners can apply for OHI membership in states that don’t have associations, or whose associations don’t belong to OHI, the evidence out of Pennsylvania suggests OHI will retain a fraction of the state’s campgrounds that ARVC had claimed.

Nor is Pennsylvania unique. The board of directors of the Virginia Campground Association, for example, will hold its biannual meeting this Tuesday. Among the agenda items: “We would like to have a discussion to see if the VCA membership is happy with the direction OHI is moving. VCA will then take your responses to OHI to let them know how our membership feels about this change,” i.e. the rebranding. No telling where that conversation will end, of course, but that it’s even taking place should give OHI’s leadership pause: that’s the kind of discussion that should have occurred before a major institutional change, not after.

But as with ARVC’s big surprise reveal last year, when it blindsided a significant proportion of its membership with a set of proposed “campground standards,” the OHI rebrand is the product of back-room discussions driven by industry “leaders” who believe they’re dragging a backwoods industry into the modern age. Such top-down leadership, however, works only as long as the leaders have invested in their followers. Pennsylvania, and possibly other states in the months ahead, are saying that hasn’t happened, and as a result they’re done following.

It’s questionable whether OHI will get the message. Just how out of touch it has become can be seen in a seemingly placating response by Paul Bambei, its president and CEO, to the Woodall’s story about Pennsylvania’s secession. “Our members are our most valued asset,” he began, in an unconscious flipping of the script—for who is the “our” in that false assurance? Once upon a time it would have been the campground owners themselves, and their most valued asset—one can hope—would have been Paul Bambei and his staff. To turn that around and say the campground owners are an asset of an unspecified “us” reduces them to mere enablers for Bambei & Co.’s agenda, whatever that may be.

OHI, in other words, is a membership organization that has been captured by its professional staff. And Pennsylvanians, at least, have said what they think of that by voting with their feet.

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.