RV Customer “Experience” In Demand: More Amenities

Above, Route 66 RV Resort in Albuquerque has everything I want in a campground. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

People seem to want their amenities in life, and that includes campgrounds and RV parks.

Using Walt Disney World in Florida as an example, RV Travel takes a look at what campground and RV park owners are hearing. People are telling them that they want more glitz and more wow at their RV parks.

Well, to provide what the people want, the owners will have to lay out some capital to include those amenities in demand. Eventually, people are going to pay the price so that owners can recoup their investment. Who wants to pay $200/night+ at a campground with extravagant amenities?

The article begins with:

To get a sense of where the commercial campground industry is heading, it’s helpful to know what campground owners are hearing. Like any other business owner, they want to know how to keep up with the competition. They want to stay on top of “best practices.” Most of all, they want to know what the market wants and expects.

That’s how campground Wi-Fi became ubiquitous over the past decade, as providers like TengoInternet and CheckBox pounded their products relentlessly at conventions and in industry publications. It’s how online booking and check-in are now following the same adoption curve, for better and worse, pushed by a dozen different online reservation systems scrambling for market share with innovations like dynamic pricing and site-lock fees. And it’s why electric-car charging stations and metered electric service are on the horizon, with pedestal manufacturers just starting to gear up new product lines.

It’s instructive, therefore, to note the increasingly prominent role among campgrounds played by the Walt Disney Company – not directly, but by example. As inspiration. Camping ostensibly may be about the outdoors, while Disney is unabashedly about manufactured environments, but both claim to be in the hospitality business and both are heavily focused on families as their primary customers. But because Disney is also developmentally decades ahead of the campground industry, and because the industry’s thought leaders frequently extol Disney as the gold standard for hospitality, a growing number of campground owners are afflicted with a serious bout of mouse envy.

For me, if an RV park has a fire pit, picnic table, swimming pool/jacuzzi and a handy store, I'm satisfied. I don't need all that other stuff and will not go to places that have them. I don't want to pay the price. If you want that stuff, YOU pay for it.

To read more, go here.