Survey Finds Campgrounds Booked Up For Summer

Above, The Beast at Crazy Horse Campgrounds at Lake Havasu. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

With sky-high gasoline and diesel prices, one would think that there would be plenty of open campsites for summer vacationing.

Oddly, the opposite appears to be true: campgrounds and RV parks are booked up. The RVIA (Recreational Vehicle Industry Association) as released a survey whose findings are interesting, to say the least.

RV Travel has posted an article on this and they begin it with:

If you’ve been having a hard time finding a place to park your RV, it’s not your imagination. In what may be the first comprehensive effort to inventory the nation’s supply of campgrounds and campsites, the RV Industry Association (RVIA) released a survey on May 18th in which the number one finding—ta-da!—is that campgrounds during peak season are basically full.

No surprise, right? Yet, while the study’s conclusions are unremarkable, what’s interesting are their underlying data and the fact that it’s taken this long to assemble them. KOA (Kampgrounds of America), The Dyrt and others have been taking the pulse of campground demand, and ARVC (the National Association of RV Parks & Campgrouds) periodically samples the universe of private campgrounds. But an overall understanding of the supply side of the equation has been so primitive that the industry hasn’t been able to agree on even how many privately-owned campgrounds there are. (CHM Government Services, the Massachusetts-based consulting firm that did the RVIA’s legwork, cited four sources that had a 40% spread in campground census numbers.)

To read the full article, go here.