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. 

The Dyrt Study: What It's Like To Camp Today

Above, the Cortez, Colorado KOA Kampground. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

There are studies looking at pretty much every aspect of modern day lifestyles. That also includes vacationing and camping.

RV Travel has posted an article on a study by The Dyrt on what it's like to camp today. Some findings are, as the article says, disconcerting.

The article begins with:

The Dyrt, a rapidly growing website and mobile app, is possibly the country’s most comprehensive platform for the camping public—which means, in turn, that The Dyrt’s users may comprise the country’s broadest demographic profile of the camping public. So when The Dyrt’s users have their temperature taken, it pays for other industry participants to take notice.

But first, some context. The Dyrt has listings of 44,000 public and private campgrounds and “other properties” that accept RVers and tenters. Last year the site pulled in more than 27 million visitors, more than doubling its 11.8 million visitors in 2020. More than a million of those visitors have been sharing tips and reviews on the site, and this past December, 3,000 of them—selected at random—responded to a far-ranging questionnaire about themselves and their experiences. An additional 2,000 respondents, chosen to be census-representative by age, race, gender and region, also were questioned, by two third-party organizations.

The result, released earlier this month, is the statistically most meaningful picture of what it’s like to go camping in America that the industry has produced to date. Some of its findings are by nature unsurprising—it’s their size or extent that may catch your breath. Other conclusions are disconcerting, to say the least.

To read more, go here.