More Campgrounds Needed To Accommodate New RV Owners

Above, Mountain Shadows RV Park in Wells, Nevada. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Chuck Woodbury at RV Travel has an interesting post this morning in his Editor's Corner column.

In it, he relates that a new study found a huge influx of RV buyers, but at the same time, there's not enough campgrounds to accommodate them.

He begins:

The big news this week is that a large study of RVers has revealed that there are now a whopping 11.2 million RV-owning households in America. That’s 62 percent more than 20 years ago. Those of us who have been RVing all that time definitely have noticed. I’ll take a wild guess and say there are no more campsites today than 2001. There are likely more RV parks, but hundreds, maybe a thousand or more public campgrounds have been closed.

The new survey reveals that the age of today’s RVers is roughly split between over 55 and younger than 55. The 18-34 year old group now makes up 22 percent of the market. And here’s a little something to chew on: An astonishing 9.6 million households intend to buy an RV within the next five years.

“I did the math and that comes out to 5,260 new RVing households a day!”

I don’t know about you, but I am not looking forward to competing with all those newbies for a campsite. If you think finding an available site today without a reservation is difficult, it will seem like child’s play when those roughly 20 million people head out in search of peace and quiet, and, of course, Wi-Fi access and jumping pillows for the kids.

What really rubs me wrong about all this is that the short-sighted RV industry – the people who manufacture RVs and the association, RVIA, that promotes them – is not paying attention. What they care about is selling RVs, and who cares what the people who buy them do with them or whether they can find a place to stay? Hey, there’s always a Walmart parking lot. The RVIA must begin aggressively promoting the creation of more campgrounds and they must start now!

He's right. More campgrounds need to be built to accommodate the growth of new RV owners.

To read more, go here.