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.
Renting Dirt 