MC Fireside Chats – April 29th, 2026

 [00:00:45] Brian Searl: Welcome everybody to another episode of MC Fireside Chats. My name is Brian Searl and I have Florida at the Florida the Florida Alabama conference. Right by staying right by the window here. We’ll see if that works and then I gotta get into an elevator and we’ll see if that continues to work as we do the show.

But welcome to another show. This is our fifth week one of those weird episodes where we don’t have recurring guests but we got a lot of special guests here. We’re gonna chat with and talk to.

We’ve got Ashley and Duncan and Marie. So let’s go around and just please briefly introduce you guys yourself and then if I drop off I’m gonna in an elevator. I will be right back I promise but keep talking about something interesting that’s not hard. I think you can’t if you have it’s easy to do better than me. That’s my point.

Please introduce yourselves.

[00:01:28] Ashley Cary: Perfect, so I’ll start. My name is Ashley. I am from Connecticut, third generation of my family owned and operated campground, so it’s been in our family for over 50 years now.

And I’m also heavily involved in the industry as a whole, nationally through OHI, as well as regionally and locally. So I just like to keep being involved in all the things. So I’m happy and honored to be here today and I look forward to chatting with you guys.

[00:01:55] Brian Searl: Great. Okay, Duncan. Whoever wants to go ahead. I’m getting into an elevator now, so that’s fine.

[00:02:03] Marie Nichols: Oh, okay, I’ll start. So my name’s Marie. I’m based in France actually, although I’m English. So yeah, coming from France today.

I’ve been working for park for night for just over four years now. So we basically have an app that is used to find spots for people that are traveling in RVs and camper vans, mainly in Europe. But we’ve just started to come over to the US as well.

So yeah, it’s pretty interesting for us and I’m pretty happy to be here as well and exchange with you guys on that, so.

[00:02:33] Brian Searl: Is it Marie or Mary?

[00:02:37] Marie Nichols: Say that again? Sorry, there was a bit of a cut in the internet.

[00:02:39] Brian Searl: Just how do you pronounce your name? Is it Marie or is it Mary?

[00:02:43] Marie Nichols: Marie. Uh-huh.

[00:02:44] Brian Searl: Okay, just making sure. I didn’t want to say it wrong the whole show. Duncan, last but not least, sir.

[00:02:49] Duncan Winship: Yep. Name’s Duncan Winship, own Papoose Pond campground with my wife Kitty. This is our 10th season of owning it. I think our 13th season of running it, and excited to be here.

Oh, Waterford, Maine. Also known as nowhere Maine.

[00:03:04] Brian Searl: How close are you to Scott bar up there in Maine, Duncan, do you know?

[00:03:08] Duncan Winship: Scott bar. I don’t know how far I am from Scott. Do you know where, where is he at?

[00:03:14] Brian Searl: I’m gonna go ask him right now. He’s like down here at the show, but he lives in a small town in northern, in northern central Maine, I think, so that’s why I was asking. So anyway.

[00:03:24] Duncan Winship: If he’s like Bangor area, it’s about 3 hours.

[00:03:28] Brian Searl: I don’t know. I’ll have to ask him.

Anyway. So yeah, I heard you guys asking and I normally am on the show 15 minutes before it starts, we’re talking backstage and I normally prep you guys a little bit. But no, I don’t have anything planned. I have nothing when I show up to the show to talk about.

So we just talk about what are the trends and what’s going on and what’s interesting. And obviously we talk about the people who are here. And Marie, we wanna get into your app and talk about the European camping scene a little bit and how that you think that translates a little bit into the United States where you’re trying to break into with your app.

Where do you guys wanna start though? Do you wanna start with Marie?

[00:03:59] Marie Nichols: Yeah, why not? So as I said just before, we’re a European based app. We started actually in 2011 and it started just with two people adding 11 spots on an app, just trying to find places to stay with, with their vehicles.

And it’s just grown organically. So a lot of word of mouth, user recommendation. And it’s grown just incredibly over the last, we’re celebrating our 15 years this year. So it’s grown incredibly over that time. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.

So now we have, worldwide, we have over 370,000 places. We have over 9 million users, and it’s in over, more than 100 countries now. So it’s pretty big. But we’re coming across the US as well because we started to grow enormously in the US as well.

We’ve noticed a big change in the last 12 months, with over 140,000 active users as well in the US. So it’s grown enormously. Over 200% of places have been added, an increase in places added to the app as well since 2024 in the US, and over 100% more places in Canada.

So yeah, we’re pretty excited to be coming over to the US and seeing how you guys do things as well.

[00:05:02] Brian Searl: So I think my interesting question to you first off is, given the reach of your app and the audience, are you mostly class Bs and camper vans or are you all sizes in the United States too?

[00:05:12] Marie Nichols: It depends really. In Europe mainly smaller vehicles. But in the US, yeah, we were reaching people because we went to some of the shows in Hershey and in Tampa this year, and it’s a whole mix. Really bigger vehicles generally in the US.

But people that are starting out, that are renting vehicles as well, people that want to come to Europe. So a whole range of people and a whole range of places, so it’s pretty cool. Yeah, it’s a whole mixed bag.

[00:05:38] Brian Searl: So I think one of the most interesting things I’d like to ask, and guys if you have a question for Marie please jump in too. We want this to be a collaborative discussion. Best people photo bomb me in the background.

Tell me a little bit about your insights as you come from working with 100 different countries with people who are looking to go camping all across the world. Both in Europe and obviously probably in Asia, maybe a little bit in Africa, North America, and Canada and everywhere else.

Are there differences that you see in the camping, like the way people behave, the way they book, the way they’re looking for places to stay, or is it generally the same across 100 countries?

[00:06:10] Marie Nichols: Yeah, there’s quite a large range of differences. I think it depends on the country really, because Europe is quite vast. We’ve got, so we’ve got people that, we’ve got countries like the UK that love booking ahead. They prefer to plan their trips.

It’s much more based in probably smaller vehicles still, but they like to have the reassurance of booking places. Down to your France, your Spain, your Italy, where they’re a bit more happy to go on a trip and not really know where they’re gonna end up.

It’s quite a range of different uses. And we found the same thing actually in the US when we attended the shows. There were some people that like to plan ahead way in advance because they wanted to go to specific spots. And some other people that just preferred to see what they found along the way.

Yeah, it just depends. And I think sometimes it depends on the vehicle as well obviously, because if it’s a big vehicle, it’s important to be able to know you’re going to be able to pull up in certain spots as well. But the good thing about the app is you can use it how you want.

Like some people, they like to book, they like to be able to have that advantage. So we added a booking possibility for a certain number of places in the app. So at the moment there’s the possibility to book through their booking platforms or through our booking partners as well.

And other people just like to find literally a spot like just spontaneously, just to turn up and search and see what’s around them. So yeah, it’s pretty cool for both kinds of people.

[00:07:26] Brian Searl: You see yourself having gone to Hershey and you said I can’t remember the other part or show you said you went to. Was it Tampa?

[00:07:33] Marie Nichols: Yeah, uh-huh. Tampa.

[00:07:34] Brian Searl: Okay. Those two shows, having gone to those two shows, I’m sure you’ve done some research on the competitive market in the US. Is there a competitor that you can point to that you think is maybe doing something similar to you? Obviously, of course, not as well as you.

[00:07:46] Marie Nichols: We have similar kind of apps I would say because apps are quite popular obviously now in general life. So I would say there’s probably a lot of travel apps. The only difference that we did notice a lot is that we’re not really an affiliate program.

So I think a lot of the time it’s a kind of affiliate base, whereas for us it’s more community based app. It’s users that add places, or campgrounds can add themselves too. Basically free, so people can add them, add themselves if they want to, if they’ve got a place, even if it’s not a campground, if it’s just a private area.

They can add their places, they can get some visibility in the app. People can also use the app for free, so you know, it works from that sense as well, so they can see what they like about it as well. And then there’s other additional options.

So if they want to do more with the app, there’s a paid option. If owners of places want to have more visibility or more advertising, there’s a paid option. But it’s not like they have to do that.

I’d say that we’re not really the same because it’s just word of mouth and more recommendation, and that’s why people like it, because they know that other people are recommending those places and they can see the comments about the places in advance, so that sometimes makes their decision over where they’re gonna stay.

[00:08:55] Brian Searl: Do you end up giving any data back to any of the park owners as part of either the paid or free options just to see how parked, how it’s working for them? Are you actually…

[00:09:03] Marie Nichols: Yeah, there’s options to do that as well. They can track how they’re performing as well. So yeah, it just depends what they’re looking for because obviously bigger campgrounds maybe they want some kind of statistics, that kind of thing. So it’s one of the paid options they can do that. They can get statistics back about their places. Yeah.

[00:09:19] Brian Searl: Duncan, you’re pretty sophisticated over there at Papoose Pond. Although you still haven’t got any AI services for me yet, I’m still trying to convince you. But you’re pretty sophisticated.

Tell me if you were to list Papoose Pond on an app, and maybe already have, on Marie’s app. What would you expect to get back as a campground owner?

[00:09:36] Duncan Winship: Either data wise or overall exposure, two different questions. Data feedback, I would love to see throughput of like how many people see my park, what pictures do they like about my park?

What type of information would be around the guest, are they big campers, are they small camper vans, are they just tenters, whatever information they previously stayed at, so that way I know where those visibilities are really showing up.

And then that way I’m like, oh, for Park4Night, I do really well with our kitchen and bath sites where people put up tents, it has a private kitchen, bathroom, that kind of thing. Those work really well. So that’s I’d push towards that segment versus like more our cabins, glamping options that may not be something that fits into that sector and we push in a different direction. But that’d be where I’d be looking for data wise out of the app.

[00:10:29] Brian Searl: I think that’s the biggest thing for me is, and please address that in a second, Marie, if you were gonna start to. I think that’s the biggest thing for me is the data. Is there, it feels like having been in this industry 15, 16 years now in our hospitality industry and specifically focused on the United States and North America, although I’m trying to get over into Europe, but definitely don’t have as big of an understanding obviously living as Marie.

But it feels like in the United States and in that North American market specifically, that what we have for apps and what we have for OTAs, which would be like a Spot2Nite or something like that, Go Camping America, Campspot, stuff like that, it’s very fragmented.

In that there’s no real one place like the hotel industry where you can go and book everything. And there’s a lot of people who claim to have millions of people who visit their websites, maybe they’re your audience, maybe they aren’t, maybe they’re from your state, maybe they’re not, maybe they’re looking to RV or maybe they’re looking to glamp or maybe they have a class B or class C that fits your park and they don’t.

And so there’s a lot of, what I usually run into from a lot of owners when I’m talking to them about their marketing is, I don’t know where to list, do I pay everybody, do I pay them all, who has the traffic, who doesn’t. And so how do you work through that with owners? Like both Duncan from your perspective, but also Marie, how do you make sure that the owner feels comfortable that their time is being well spent, that their money is being well spent?

[00:11:49] Marie Nichols: Sure, we spend quite a lot of time actually at the shows exchanging with campground owners and there was a lot of visibility of people visible at the shows, both in Hershey and in Tampa as well.

And I think the confidence booster with Park4Night is that we don’t, there’s no necessity to pay upfront. We just say, look, add your place, try it out, see what you think. There’s so many options you can do without having to pay straight away.

See how you feel about it, and then there’s an option as well to have different options of visibility to pay for if you want, for instance, a bigger icon on the map, up to if you want to have a banner that pops up on the map. There’s different options available for different places.

Some places we have to remember as well are much smaller and have a much smaller budget. It’s to include your kind of small private places, down to sometimes just people that just have one or two places, up to campgrounds that have thousands of places for various different kinds of vehicles.

So we just say to people, add your place, try it out, see what you think. And if they, if you want to add extra options, if you feel it’s working for you, go ahead, let us know what you want and we can contact you and see which one would probably be more applicable to you.

Yeah, it just depends really on the type of place it is and the kind of visibility that they’re looking for as well. I would say as well the budget is not really big with Park4Night, our offers are not crazy prices, it just depends on what you’re looking for. But I think you still get a good amount of visibility just from being on the app for free as well.

[00:13:20] Brian Searl: What do you think about this, Ashley, like at your park? And what I mean by that is not Marie’s app specifically, obviously, although maybe you’re on it, then you can talk about it. But how do you think about that as a park owner, manager? And same question to you, Duncan, after Ashley, like if you want to answer.

How do you think about where you spend, because it’s not just money, it’s not just paying $50 a month here or $25 a month there or whatever the cost is to whatever app. It’s also the time you have to spend optimizing your listing, uploading photos, making sure it stays consistent, making sure guests know exactly what they’re getting and it’s not misleading.

So how do you think about that from a time and money perspective, Ashley?

[00:13:53] Ashley Cary: Yeah, definitely. That’s great insight there. So yeah, we’re family owned and operated and we’re hands on. 24/7 our family is in it. We have a smaller team and we are just in it all the time. So time is definitely like the biggest factor when it comes to it, right?

Because you want to, anything that you’re putting out there, whether an app, a website, anything, which now, like you said, there’s so many different apps, there’s so many different, so much visibility that you can get now. It’s crazy.

So you definitely want to streamline where you’re putting up your information and what benefits you and your park the most. So I know people always compare the camping industry to the hotel industry, which it is very similar, like it’s lodging and all of that. But I think what’s so unique about our industry, which I brag about all the time, is that every campground and every RV park and any unit has their own niche.

So for us, we have a very small town in Connecticut, southeastern Connecticut, and we’re very rural. We have three campgrounds in our little town, and they all market completely differently to a completely different demographic. So for ours, we are more of a destination park. Family friendly, generational friendly, all of that.

So for us, for instance, we really market to the generational camping. We encourage our guests to stay on site, so we have a little restaurant on the property. We have all sorts of amenities. We’re right along the river. We have kind of activities and amenities that that market towards each generation.

So if a family is coming in and they have the grandparents on the site next to them, and then the kids and the grandkids and all of that. So we have activities that lean towards that. So for us, we market that way.

So we’re heavy on Facebook, for instance. We’re heavy on Facebook. But now we’re also on TikTok because we have the younger generation that comes in and all of that. So we just had a grandmother call in and said, hey, my 11 year old granddaughter found you on TikTok and wants to come to your campground.

So we’re like, hey, that’s great. So it benefits them both ways. It is very interesting and like Brian was saying, to have kind of an app or a location that kind of streamlines all of that. And then to jump back to what Duncan said too about what kind of data and information you would like to get out of it as an owner or operator.

That is huge because in our industry we are so data centric. And I think the more data you can get, data out of anything, what the difference between the hotel and the camping industry is we go off of the weather. If it was a rainy weekend, we’re gonna have lower occupancy than if it was sunny. Whereas a hotel, it might not matter so much.

Data is huge and we are also in contact with our local RV dealers and all of that. So we can see from the top how many RV sales are you getting and all of this and it trickles all down. So yeah, data is just everything.

So for an app like Marie’s, I think it’s so interesting to see what is attracting people to your park when they first look or find you on the map. Is it locational, is it, you know, the guest demographic compared to your marketing tactic, all of that. So I think it’s really unique. I’m going to look up your app after this, Marie.

[00:17:20] Marie Nichols: Awesome, thank you.

[00:17:21] Brian Searl: Yeah, and I…

[00:17:24] Marie Nichols: Sorry to interrupt you. I think it’s nice as well to have feedback in terms of, of the users. So that’s why we have the possibility to add comments, and really people choose their destination a lot based on the comments, the most recent comments, the comments that correspond to them and what they’re looking for.

So if they feel like it’s something that appeals to them, if they’ve had other reviews from similar kinds of people that are traveling in the same way, so other families or other couples or other older people or other younger people, it can really influence as well the kind of places that they choose. So that’s a really nice way as well to have feedback as well about your places.

You get the comments, you can see what people think, what they liked, what they didn’t like, what they preferred to do, if it was easy to find you, how it compares to other places they stayed, what they liked about it, if they liked the restaurant. There’s so many different things you can get back about that as well, and I think it’s a really important feature for the users as well, as I said, so it works both ways, yeah.

[00:18:19] Duncan Winship: I, I think one of the interesting things you, we have right now, and Brian, you touched on it a little bit, is that it’s the maturity and immaturity of the camping industry that we don’t have one platform to rule them all.

We, we haven’t had that singularity happen. And so there’s just so many different directions to try to swing at. Just social media is one, one facet of it, review sites is another facet of it, OTAs is another facet of it, and it’s, we haven’t quite seen consolidation like we’ve seen in cruising, which is its own type of travel and things like that where cruise agents and travel agents still seem to play a major role.

And then hotel bookings where online seems to have gone everywhere. I can’t remember the last time I called an actual hotel. And then campgrounds where it’s almost all three in some respects. And so I think figuring out what drives the best return for the park and for whatever style park they are, trying to make the marketing dollars be the most efficient they can.

[00:19:16] Brian Searl: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a, it’s always been a challenge, at least as long as I’ve been in the industry to try to figure out, to help an owner identify and say, okay, what are the goals you want to be at? What’s your unique proposition? Not just that you’re a campground, but what is it about that? Where are you located geographically, who comes there, why do they come there?

And then look at, out of all the options of hundreds of ways you could potentially market the park. Most of these ones cost money, maybe there’s an investment, like a Spot2Nite where you just link in your API, those types of things. And say, where can we identify our return on investment for the time we have available?

Because at least from a marketing agency standpoint historically, I’ve seen that the biggest challenge hasn’t been necessarily getting people to want to market their parks. The challenge has been them identifying where to spend the money and where to know whether to trust the people that they give the money to in the end because there is no one platform to rule them all.

And so part of that to me is finding ways that you can, as the park owner essentially, it is the maturity aspect, but it’s not giving your money as much out if, to these platforms until you know it’s going to work.

And finding ways, and I don’t know how I’m going to say this correctly to a degree, but finding ways to retain your existing guests is the biggest challenge out there right now as it relates to that, right? The biggest issue that I see is that an OTA has more marketing power than you ever will as an individual campground in most cases.

And so your goal is exactly what you just talked about a little bit is you don’t call hotels anymore, why? Because you use Hotels.com and a major conglomerate. For camping, hopefully our owners have been smart enough to retain their data from their guests so that the guest doesn’t have to go to Park4Night, not as an insult to Marie, but they don’t have to go to Park4Night, they don’t have to go to Good Sam, they just come to you because they know you.

Do you guys resonate with that as park owners, does that make sense to you or…

[00:20:46] Duncan Winship: Oh absolutely. You have to figure out, like for us it’s always a big push because we book weekly, we don’t do a lot of seasonal guests, we only have five out of the 240 sites. So we push really big to get them to come back before they leave.

That’s when you’re gonna find the most incentive on your pricing, that’s gonna find best availability, that’s, so that way the marketing dollars are spent at the park versus having to go out into the ether where then you have to catch, capture it through Google analytics, different meta analytics, you have all these other data sources versus physically being at the park and getting that booking data fresh from yourself. You are your own data source.

And so I feel picking that as our main lane, and then for those that don’t rebook, that’s when you start reaching out to either in person camping shows or advertising or just organic traffic through your social engagements.

[00:21:42] Brian Searl: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a, it’s always been the challenge, right, is trying to figure out which people, like I’m at the Florida conference, we’re sitting in it. It’s just early, it’s the first day, we only had one or two sessions so far today on the first day of the conference. But there has already been some good conversations about just, do I focus, the difference between long-term and short and transient.

Long-term and short-term. Do I go after both? Do I focus on one, do I focus on the other? Do I focus on the younger generation or the older generation? And I think like to your point, Duncan, about us kind of being in this weird transitory phase in campgrounds, I think we’re for sure going through that.

Especially as the boomers transition out and whoever comes next transitions in. And what I mean by that is obviously younger people transition in, but I don’t think there’s been quite as much of a focus on Gen Z or younger millennials or especially Gen Alpha because the boomers are still around and hanging out and still flocking these parks, especially these parks in Florida for a ton of people.

But as we start to do that shift, you have to start thinking about where is my next guest coming from? Do I target the generations just like I talked about, and I don’t mean to put people in generational buckets, but just for purposes of the show and a concise conversation, everybody’s different, right?

But how do I adjust my marketing, how do I adjust where I’m going after? Because let’s face it, like we’re going into a summer where gas prices are really high. That tends to help our industry, Scott Bahr has a lot of data about that, as recurring guests on the show. But there’s still probably a threshold number of 5, 6 dollars somewhere around there, and maybe we don’t get there, maybe we do, where it might start to hurt us.

And the economy is certainly starting to hurt us. We’re seeing reservation data in some places be softer than it was last year and in 2023. Not a normalization, a softening over Covid and everything else. So then you look at apps like Marie who reach all these international travelers in 100 different countries. And we know international travel to the US is down at least from Canada and some other places, but there are still certainly people coming over here.

So if you’ve got somebody in Europe or in Asia or in Africa who’s got Marie’s app, who’s been part of this community for years, that makes almost sense to go after, if your audience is international, if your type of guest is potentially international, right, to reach out to them.

So everything is niching is what I’m trying to say. Figure out what your niche is for your park and see your park, gather your data, figure out who your guest is, when are they coming, why are they coming, who they are, what do they like, where are they coming from, gather as much data as you can and then go out and figure out where you need to list and market your park. That…

[00:24:06] Duncan Winship: I think, I think that’s a great, great point because it’s like in hotels, a queen, a double queen room is a double queen room, you go in it’s 45 feet by 45 feet, and that’s the shape of it. And every, you can go into any, you could put me into any room in almost anywhere in the country and I couldn’t tell you where I was if I didn’t look out a window.

Versus if you go to campgrounds anywhere, like it from Maine, the Maine coast, the woods, the rivers, the lakes, just our state alone has a diversification of being dictated by the topography. Versus like Florida being dictated by its topography, so every single park is different by the sheer fact that no, not two worlds are exactly the same.

So your niches are gonna be different, your target…

[00:24:52] Brian Searl: Okay. Alright, that’s what I was waiting for you to wrap it up, I was like yeah that’s probably what he means, but is he gonna say it, I’m not sure.

[00:24:56] Duncan Winship: Yeah, I was gonna get to it, sorry.

[00:25:00] Ashley Cary: Yeah, no, that’s so true. And I think like for our industry we’re seeing the trend lately with marketing where it’s like the nostalgic and all of that. So like people now correspond like camping and campfires and being outside and all of that with nostalgia. So it’s almost like you’re getting like the middle aged people wanting to camp and then relive their younger, and then also the Gen Z that are coming in and they’re like they don’t necessarily want all of the technology.

They want the access to the Wi-Fi, but they also want the option to put it away and put it on do not disturb or whatever. So I think that’s a unique thing about our industry too, because Duncan said hotels, they’re the same, they don’t, they just put you in a room and it is what it is.

Obviously, like a lot of times you go to a hotel and you’re there for the location or the destination or something in the area, whereas a lot of times campgrounds you are the destination. Or if you’re near like a national park or something really cool in your area, that is too.

But it is, it’s definitely unique. And I think a lot of times too, like you were saying, when’s the last time you called a hotel to book a hotel room. And I think a lot of times when people go to go camping and all of that, I think they still want that. Like they want the human connection and all of that. So I know AI is getting so big and all of that, which is so beneficial in a lot of ways, but I think our industry is unique in that sense where people just want that human connection a little bit.

[00:26:35] Marie Nichols: Yeah, people will always want…

[00:26:39] Brian Searl: Yeah, I agree…

[00:26:39] Marie Nichols: There’s a kind of sense of adventure of finding something that just surprises you in all kinds of ways, you know, I think that’s a really important part of, of RVing as well is that you can just be surprised by somewhere and just, you wanna remember that place, you want to go back to that place as well and that’s a good, that’s part of the camping experience, isn’t it as well, so.

[00:26:59] Duncan Winship: Yeah, I think that Ashley hit the nail on the head with the term nostalgia. And I think as you were talking about newer generations and younger generations coming in, they went camping with their older generations, they went camping with their parents, they went camping with their grandparents, and they have these memories around it.

And so I think that drives them to look for a period that isn’t our modern period, but something that’s from a younger mindset of, oh man, I really enjoyed making s’mores with my grandparents, or fishing, or hiking, or swimming in the lake, or all that kind of stuff.

[00:27:36] Brian Searl: But there are less and less people, and we have this data. Scott Bahr has this data, and so do I to a certain extent a little bit, but he has a lot of data from his surveys more than I do about Gen Z. And there are a whole lot less people who are going through that type of experience though as a child, Duncan, than did in the past. There are a whole lot less people who are going camping with their parents and grandparents in the last let’s call it 15, 20 years.

Than history, they still is people who do that, of course there is, but generationally speaking from a majority standpoint, there’s a ton of people in Gen Z and Gen Alpha who have never been camping, who want to go outside, they have, we have the data on that too, they want to be outdoors, they want to be in nature. They don’t know how to do it. They were never taught how to do it. They were inside on screens whereas you and I, Duncan and Ashley and probably Marie were younger, I’m dating us all, sorry, I don’t mean to lump you all into an old bunch like I am.

But like when I was a kid I was out in the backyard climbing trees, falling down and spraining my wrist and skinning my knee and like they just, they don’t do that as a blanket statement. There are still people who do, there are exceptions, right, for the purposes of the podcast, we’re just gonna stereotype everybody here real quick.

But there are less and less people doing that and I think that’s a concern. And so I, like you talked about for the back end of how you need to almost niche down, and you do need to niche down and figure out who your audience is and all the things we just talked about.

I wonder, and especially as I sat in this session here with Robert Preston was talking about the difference between long-term and short-term and how he doesn’t feel like you should be siloing them or separating them, which is a somewhat controversial opinion because our industry has long been like either you’re a long-term park or you’re a short-term park or you’re a mixed park and the long-terms are in their own section and the short-terms are in a different section.

But his point is if you treat everybody, every guest the same way, in other words your site has to look the same as a transient guest whether you’re here for six months a year or not. Your point to about hotels, Duncan, is I could walk into a Residence Inn by Marriott and I would have no idea that’s an extended stay hotel except that I know the brand is extended stay.

Just like you could probably walk into an Extended Stay America and the only reason you know that’s a long-term hotel is because of the name. And there are certainly exceptions to that and people don’t run their franchises all the same way, but generally speaking as a blanket statement.

So I almost wonder if it’s the front end should not be niched down. But the back end should be from a data perspective. If you think of the front end as a, as the campground experience as the in person guest experience, should we figure out ways to treat all campers not the same, but have the ability for each camper to enjoy the experience the way they want to enjoy it.

And that’s where I think like, maybe we’re, maybe we’re just making this too complicated from a front end perspective. Like we released a report on Gen Z that we worked on with someone that’s part of the industry, a little secret who that was that was a part of it, but getting at his eyes on it before we released it from an insider person that’s available on our website, you can go download it.

But it talks about one of the ways that it talks about how to get Gen Z involved is there are some Gen Zs who want to be in groups and want to socialize, and there are a whole lot more who don’t want to be in groups and don’t want to socialize.

If you give them the ability, one of the ideas that was in the report, it was just an AI idea, it wasn’t my idea, right, but it was to take like a, have green lanterns available, like painted green lanterns that you can put on the pedestal right outside your site, and that signals to the other campers that you’re open to being social.

You’re open to somebody coming up and saying, hey, how are you doing, you wanna hang out by the campfire, you wanna go s’mores, you wanna chat about your experiences or where have you been or how, where have you come from? But if you don’t have that lamp on, then you just wanna be left alone and you wanna be.

And so I think there’s just ways, what I’m trying to say from a front end experience is I think there’s ways to bring everybody together as a community, which I think we’ve lost a little bit of. Not in campgrounds, it may be the last bastion of community, right? There’s ways to bring people together as a community versus on the back end, you want to break them apart because you need data and different ways to get them there to begin with. Am I off topic or what do you guys think as owners?

[00:31:25] Duncan Winship: I would say that, yeah, community in the camping industry is a huge part of it, and a huge part of how big your family is, family units don’t get together the way they used to. And communities as a cultural, at least here in the United States, is a huge subject of discussion as well.

As we become more polarized and things like that, I think it will continue to be a challenge. And is it up to us to lead it, is it up to us to try to manufacture it, is that what people are looking for, is that manufactured experience? I don’t know, sometimes, but not always.

[00:32:04] Brian Searl: But if you give them the option, right? Like you have to, you, so you provide it and then you just let them self service.

[00:32:11] Duncan Winship: Self select, right, yeah.

[00:32:12] Brian Searl: Just like you have a community fire pit that you, not everybody’s gonna use. The people who want to take part in the community and meet their neighbors will navigate to that community fire pit or go to the ice cream social or do or turn on the lantern or whatever it may be, right?

But if you have an experience where, and this is a blend of a couple different topics, right, but if you have an, if you have what Robert’s talking about, if you have standards and set expectations and say the long-term guests are the same as the short-term guests, then there’s no more concern about the short-term guest seeing a bunch of junk outside of a trailer or an ugly fence or not feeling like they fit.

They don’t know whether to say hello to the person next to them as long-term or short-term because everybody is treated the same.

[00:32:50] Duncan Winship: Yeah, I think that’s a great point though. And I think that’s how easy long-term guests, especially ones that are in a park year round, can make a difference on their site. Because it’s incremental little steps. Like first the shed shows up and then the deck shows up and then it’s a deck, a shed, a fence, a dog run, storage underneath the camper, all that kind of stuff.

Versus these are the things that we allow to be on site, and everybody must follow. And that’s, I think really well run parks continue to hold those standards both for their long-term guests and their short-term guests, versus the ones where all they have are long-term and they’ve let it slide a little bit.

[00:33:32] Brian Searl: And I think if you’re all long-term, then there’s probably a, if that’s the type of park you want to run, and that’s doesn’t mean I don’t think I’m saying that’s a bad park, but if you want to be all long-term, then you don’t have to worry about the transients or the different things.

So I think that’s a different animal. But if you want to be mixed, if you want to have different people from different generations or short-term and long-term or all the things that we’re talking about, I think you’ve got to provide facilities and not just amenities, but ways that they can all enjoy it at their own individual level because everybody is different.

[00:33:58] Marie Nichols: Sure. Yeah, and I think that’s part of the community, community part of camping, isn’t it, that you’re gonna meet a whole different range of people. You’re gonna be able to mix with people like of all different ages, with families, with older people, and it’s the experience as well, it’s part of the experience of that, to be able to, to be able to exchange with other people that have loads of experience in camping and some people that have no experience in camping.

And just to share all of those experiences, I think it’s a great, it’s a great part of camping for me.

[00:34:28] Brian Searl: Yeah, I think that’s, it’s one of the most powerful things, again, that’s why it wasn’t my words, I think Robert said it. He was the one who said camping is, campgrounds are one of the last places that community really truly exists in America right now.

I don’t know if I necessarily agree with that, but he’s close, he’s not far off. And that we still provide that community aspect. Like if you look back at the movies from the 60s and 70s or that are set in that period that they kind of had, kids ran around the neighborhood and, you know, you didn’t have to worry about them and all that kind of stuff.

But I think it’s also important for us to sometimes remember is, and I’m not a campground owner, so you guys can tell me if you disagree, that not everybody always wants the community experience.

One of the common things you always hear from campground owners, at least I do, is well we’re not the same as hotels because you can get outside and socialize with everybody. Yes, that’s correct. But not everybody wants to do the same socialization.

And the boomers for sure did. They were a huge generation, they wanted to do that. The older millennials, the Gen X, they wanted to do all that socialization and that’s who still fills up the majority of campgrounds on a regular basis, very typically again, lumping everybody into a bucket for purposes of our short chat today.

But I think it’s just important to remember that people want different things and if you’re able to provide those things while maintaining a community and having it there and having it be the main focus, but it’s not required to be a part of that community, I think that can win on all aspects.

Ashley, you have some thoughts on that? I know you do a lot on the young professional side. Have you seen, and I know it’s hard to make a blank statement and I shouldn’t probably do it, I already did, have you seen any kind of divide there with how you, people you hang out with who are younger versus people who kind of want the traditional aspect of things?

Or have you seen any differences there or no really?

[00:41:25] Ashley Cary: Yeah, no, that’s definitely a loaded question and totally a completely different dynamic.

[00:43:24] Brian Searl: It’s harder than, because you’ve had that lived experience, to understand that the majority of Gen Z has not had that experience and that you need to tailor it differently to them. So that’s one example but just take it wherever you want.

[00:45:28] Ashley Cary: Yeah, no, that’s actually so interesting. So with our young professionals committee, I’m so proud of them, so shout out to all of them because they’re incredible. But we have a very active Facebook group and everybody always posts like looking for suggestions on this or whatever. And we host our monthly happy hours through OHI as well and they’re just so active and so energy focused and all of that.

So yeah, I think that’s a very interesting concept and I’m actually gonna bring it up in our next happy hour because they are, a lot of our young professionals are either grew up in their own family business, so they’re involved in it in that way.

And then yeah, looking at it from that perspective, I do think a lot of them are very focused on that kind of nostalgia aspect as well, and reteaching the disconnection type of thing because like I hinted on before, Gen Z seems to want the access to the Wi-Fi and the technology and the modern amenities, but they also want that disconnection. So they don’t wanna feel like it’s in their face 24/7.

Which is interesting because I feel like a lot of, and I’ll use it, the older generation a lot of them think that the Gen Z are like in their phone all the time and all of that, and I think…

[00:46:41] Duncan Winship: No, never.

[00:46:42] Ashley Cary: No, never. But I think that’s a misconception too because they are, they have them on, they know how to access information, but they also want that little bit of a disconnection.

So yeah, I think that’s really cool and we’re like in a cool place where the Gen X and the older millennials and all of that are kind of paving the way for that a little bit, and it’s gonna be neat to see where this leads with the upcoming generation. And I had somebody calling the other day that they’re like, oh yeah, I was born in ’04, and that to me is wild, but I’m like yeah, you’re old enough. Yeah, it’s wild. But so yeah, very interested to see where it goes.

[00:47:24] Brian Searl: Anything else you want to add from the young professional side?

[00:47:27] Ashley Cary: I don’t think so. I think a lot of our young professionals too, they’re very data driven as well. So they’re always looking and it’s very interesting the statistics and the insights and analytics that you can pull from a reservation system as well.

And it seems like a lot are, that’s another thing that’s not fully streamlined because there are so many different reservation systems out there and so much technology and all of that. So we all bounce around ideas along that line, but it’s interesting and it’s also interesting to chat with them to see okay, so you work for your family or you grew up in this and now you’re working for your family.

So what does the dynamic look like there? So it’s not only generational your campers, your customers are generational, but you’re also, your staff and your team is generational. So working that out too, like I work under my parents now, and then we have high schoolers that are with us as well. So it’s very interesting to see that dynamic shift a little bit too.

Not everyone is as comfortable using a reservation system or, so it’s all that learning curve and teaching each other, multiple generations bringing that all together.

[00:48:38] Brian Searl: Alright, let’s spend the last few minutes, we usually end the show by having everybody ask each other questions. Because I’m usually involved in asking bad questions the whole show, so we try to wrap it up with something good at the end.

And I don’t know if you guys have ever been on a show where you’ve done this before, but so Duncan if you want to start, just ask any question that you want to either Ashley or Marie and then we’ll just do a round robin and wrap up the show.

[00:48:58] Duncan Winship: Okay, I’ll ask them both the same question and it’s a question I ask…

[00:49:02] Brian Searl: You gotta pick one. You gotta actually have to pick one.

[00:49:04] Duncan Winship: All right, I’ll pick Ashley then. And then I will ask you, Hershey’s or Reese’s with your s’more?

[00:49:09] Ashley Cary: Oh, I just asked this question the other day to our campers on socials. I say Reese’s. Always Reese’s.

[00:49:19] Brian Searl: That’s probably the, that’s probably the quickest question that anybody has ever asked as part of a show like that.

[00:49:26] Ashley Cary: Can’t go wrong.

[00:49:27] Brian Searl: Okay, I was hoping, I thought you were gonna, they usually ask something intellectual Duncan, so I don’t want to like, actually…

[00:49:32] Ashley Cary: That was very intellectual. 

[00:49:33] Duncan Winship: Very fundamental. It really is. What do you want, do you want it’s like a hot dog a sandwich, like…

[00:49:40] Brian Searl: Is a hot dog a sandwich?

[00:49:42] Duncan Winship: I don’t think so. It’s a piece of bread.

[00:49:46] Ashley Cary: Huh. 

[00:49:46] Brian Searl: And I… we should we go ask AI?

[00:49:52] Ashley Cary: Hey, that was very…

[00:49:53] Duncan Winship: Which one?

[00:49:56] Brian Searl: Would they all answer it the same or differently?

[00:49:58] Duncan Winship: No, I think it’d be all different. I think it’d be all different and I think it’d be different across models.

[00:50:04] Brian Searl: I’m gonna test it as soon as the show’s over. We’re gonna have to have a regroup show where we all get together again.

[00:50:08] Duncan Winship: Yeah, send me a message if, what they said, but that would be, that’s my question I love to ask is what types of candies do you like on your s’mores.

And then what happens is they go into your store and they’ll buy every single candy I mentioned, try it and then report back the next day.

[00:50:25] Brian Searl: Because an affiliate relationship with Reese’s or Hershey’s?

[00:50:28] Duncan Winship: No. A lot of people think of Hershey’s, but I like Reese’s better.

[00:50:34] Brian Searl: I like, I don’t eat either of my, I try to eat like local chocolate wherever I can which is way better than Hershey’s, but there’s no really comparison to Reese’s I will give you that, so.

Ashley, do you have a question for either Marie or Duncan?

[00:50:45] Ashley Cary: Oh gosh. Okay, I don’t know if this is going to be long, but Marie, how did you get involved in this industry to begin with?

[00:50:53] Marie Nichols: How did I get involved? Basically, I fell into it a little bit because I was in the travel industry before, I was working as an air stewardess.

I was always interested in travel and I really wanted to be involved in travel still, and then I just got the bug for the camper vans industry as well, it was just like the combination of everything I love, of traveling, of having that experience as well in the van, which is completely different to traveling any other way.

And yeah, so I was pretty lucky because I found like I’ve got everything that I love doing all at once. So yeah, it’s pretty cool. That was just by luck, it wasn’t at all planned.

[00:51:28] Ashley Cary: Love that, that’s awesome.

[00:51:29] Brian Searl: Usually always by luck.

Unless you’re lucky enough to grow up in a campground family, then it’s…

[00:51:35] Marie Nichols: Yes, yeah, which is also very super cool.

[00:51:39] Brian Searl: Marie, do you have a question for either Ashley or Duncan to wrap us the show?

[00:51:41] Marie Nichols: Yeah, let me ask Ashley. If you could travel to anywhere in Europe, where would you go? What would be your number one?

[00:51:51] Ashley Cary: I would say Italy, I have to say Italy. Yeah, it’s, my grandparents or my great-grandparents are from Italy, and my dad always is telling stories about them and all this, and it just looks so beautiful, so I would love to go to Italy one day.

[00:52:08] Marie Nichols: Awesome.

[00:52:09] Brian Searl: Have you ever been to Europe at all, Ashley?

[00:52:10] Ashley Cary: Never, nope.

[00:52:13] Brian Searl: My answer, I don’t know what my answer would have been to that question, but I really love Slovenia.

[00:52:18] Ashley Cary: Oh yeah.

[00:52:19] Brian Searl: I really love Slovenia.

[00:52:21] Marie Nichols: Yes, it’s a beautiful place, yeah. There’s a lot, it’s hard, it’s that beautiful, that’s the problem. It’s too difficult to choose.

[00:52:27] Brian Searl: It is, it is. Yeah, it is difficult. There’s so much I haven’t seen yet. All over the world.

Marie, any final thoughts and where can they download your app if they’d like to?

[00:52:37] Marie Nichols: Yeah, you can go to the website, so the website’s park4night.com. You can have a look on there if you want to add yourselves as well as campsite owners, just check it out and see what you think.

Users can add themselves as well, they can create an account, they can start using the app for free, so really it’s just a tool that can help people find places to stay if you’re a user. And for place owners like you guys, you can have some visibility and you can see different ways of advertising yourselves as well to a different community of people. So yeah, I would recommend it definitely.

[00:53:06] Brian Searl: Thank you so much, I appreciate you being here, Marie. Ashley, any final thoughts?

[00:53:10] Ashley Cary: No, I think it was great chatting with you guys today and I’m honored to be here. And yeah, really good conversations 

[00:53:18] Brian Searl: Thanks for being here, appreciate it. If they are a young professional, unlike me, where can they can they learn more about joining young professionals?

[00:53:25] Ashley Cary: Yes! You can go to the OHI website, there’s a young professionals tab right on there. Fill out our application, anything. You don’t have to be a park owner, operator, you could be in the activity department, you could be anything to do with the industry, a supplier, anything, as long as you’re under 40 unfortunately.

But yeah, you can apply there, join our Facebook group, join the conversations, happy hours, you don’t need to be a member of OHI. And yeah, come and chat with us.

[00:53:51] Brian Searl: Awesome, thanks for being here, Ashley. And Duncan, final thoughts and then where should we start an old professional group?

[00:53:56] Duncan Winship: I’m gonna start a geriatrical professional group. I choose to be founding fathers of the over 40 professional group. I don’t have a website yet, but as soon as I do I’ll share.

No, anyhow, I think. 

[00:54:07] Brian Searl: You don’t, you don’t need a website for the geriatric group, we find each other by walking around the mall aimlessly until we see each other.

[00:54:15] Duncan Winship: There you go.

[00:54:18] Brian Searl: Any final thoughts there did you say?

[00:54:20] Duncan Winship: I would just appreciate it and the fog of war lays thick upon the land.

[00:54:29] Brian Searl: I don’t even know what to say to you anymore, Duncan. Speechless. But a hot dog is a sandwich for sure and we’re gonna prove it on AI after the show.

Alright, thank you guys for joining us for another episode of MC Fireside Chats. I’m at the Florida Alabama show. Appreciate you guys all being here, Marie, Ashley, Duncan, for some great conversation. We’ll see you next week on another episode of MC Fireside Chats. Take care guys, appreciate it.

[00:54:48] Ashley Cary: Bye guys, thank you so much.

[00:54:51] Marie Nichols: Take care now. Bye.