Skyrocketing Campground Insurance Threatens Future Costs of Camping

Above, The Beast at Diamond Lake RV Park in Oregon near Crater Lake National Park. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

With thousands of new RVers hitting the road in their new RVs, the pressure on finding campsites increases.

Even before the pandemic, the numbers of new campgrounds had been lagging. But in today's world, if a campground cannot get reasonably-priced insurance, then they can't open or stay open.

Such is the topic of a new article in RV Travel.

Here's a snippet:

Insurance is a “must-have” – if you can find it

You can’t run a campground business without good insurance. When a park is crammed with hundreds or even thousands of daily visitors there are going to be problems. People slip and fall, and amenities such as swimming pools and Jumping Pillows raise risk ratios. Yet it’s the ever-present risk of wildfires that is really sending campground insurance costs into the stratosphere.

Two Oregon campgrounds recently destroyed by wildfires resulted in insurance claims of $1.8 million and $800,000, respectively. One insurance industry executive told me that those amounts together were more than all the annual campground insurance premiums collected in the entire state of Oregon. From the perspective of the insurance companies, those sorts of payouts are a recipe for going out of business.

In fact, that’s exactly what’s happening. A few insurance companies have folded in recent months, and a few more are deciding that insuring campgrounds in high-risk wildfire areas ironically isn’t worth the risk. Some are pulling out of campground insurance markets entirely in some Western states.

To read more, go here.