MC Fireside Chats – August 7th, 2024 

SPEAKER_01:

This is MC Fireside Chats, a weekly show featuring conversations with thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and outdoor hospitality experts who share their insights to help your business succeed. Hosted by Brian Searle, the founder and CEO of Insider Perks. Empowered by insights from Modern Campground, the most innovative news source in the industry.

Brian Searl:

Welcome, everybody, to another episode of MC Fireside Chats. My name is Brian Sero with Insider Perks. We’re super excited to have no one here except me and Scott today who showed up. They all had conflicts, although we had a few people who still might join. Mark Kep said he’s going to be here and confirm via email. So we’ll see if he pops in. And I think a few other people are just finishing up calls, may or may not join. Either way, we’re going to have fun today because we’re going to talk about data and all kinds of things that are, well, boring but important, right, Scott?

Scott Bahr:

Absolutely. That’s my life. Actually, what I did is I called everybody and told them not to show up. The show was canceled. Because you wanted to do it. That makes sense. That’s how I could dominate the whole show.

Brian Searl:

And you can do that, right? You can just threaten to write a report about the people who do show up. Right. And then that’s why they don’t show up.

Scott Bahr:

Absolutely. It keeps them away. A lot of leverage. I can do that, or it’s just my personality can do the same thing.

Brian Searl:

Well, it’s probably me more than anything. I mean, it’s a miracle. We would probably have 100,000 viewers a week if it wasn’t for me hosting the show. And as it stands, we have, I think, eight or something like that. Eight, my favorite number. Yeah. Is it really?

Scott Bahr:

It is. And see, I didn’t even mean to do this, but there’s a reason behind it. My birthday is 8-8, August 8.

Brian Searl:

1. That makes sense to me. What year?

Scott Bahr:

You want me to tell you that?

Brian Searl:

Yeah. You’re not a woman.

Scott Bahr:

You can tell us that. It rounds out the third eight, actually. 62. 62.

Brian Searl:

62. But not an eight. Well, oh, 62. Yeah. OK. And to be clear, that wasn’t a slight on women. That was a slight on men for not caring.

None:

Right.

Brian Searl:

We’re weird. We should care. So OK. So let’s talk about data. Let’s, I think, you know, you and I were talking about looking at some things related to, to marketing and some of the interesting figures that we’ve seen from the industry as a whole. But I think I want to start with, let’s start with the last report. We just put out a report. Was it yesterday? Yeah. We just released a report yesterday. Another embassy hospitality highlights. Do you want to briefly, like, I’ll see if I can pull that up on the screen. We can kind of go through it. And then do you want to just give a little bit of a, some of the highlights surrounding what you found there?

Scott Bahr:

Sure. I think first, just to get started, is that it probably isn’t a surprise to people that a lot of people make changes to their plans based on the weather. It’s fairly relevant. I think the figures around 6 and 10 make some kind of adjustment. The other 4 and 10 are locked in, typically, and they you know, go regardless. A lot of those, by the way, are RVers. So RVers are much less likely to change plans than tent campers, especially. But yeah, a lot of people adjust their plans. And it can be anything from changing the date, canceling their trips, or delaying changing it to a different time, or even changing the type of accommodation they stay in, which is one of the results I think is really interesting and very from the perspective of an opportunity. Oh, we have Jeff. All right.

Brian Searl:

Hi, Jeff. Now, everybody’s showing up, but we’re still doing our thing, Scott. They were late. We’re doing our thing.

Jeff Hoffman:

I didn’t catch up on the link. It’s all right. Keep going.

Sandy Ellingson:

I did the same thing. I was over there waiting all alone in a Google Meet.

Brian Searl:

You guys lost. This is all about data now. You’re going to have to just suck it up, and we’re talking about data the whole show. Go ahead, Scott. Sorry.

Scott Bahr:

So the idea here with this information is, one, just for people to understand that a lot of people are making adjustments. Any kind of weather, severe weather, people want to go camping. They want to be outdoors when the weather’s decent. So that’s quite intuitive, I would say. The big question is, is how are you going to respond to that? Like, and how are you going to respond if people are actually there while the weather turns bad? Or how do you entice them to keep their trip and to come to your park, even if the weather conditions aren’t ideal?

Brian Searl:

Make it non-refundable and have a cold, wicked heart and don’t give them their money back.

Scott Bahr:

Exactly. Just say later, you know,

Brian Searl:

We got that tip from Jeff, by the way, from Camp Strategy.

Scott Bahr:

So that to me is the big thing here is how are you going to adjust to this? I mean, there’s the opportunity to offer weather insurance. There’s the opportunity, you know, whatever your cancellation policies are. But I think if when people start to think a little bit more creatively about and understand that there will be a lot of people who, for whatever reason, it could be work, When they’re locked into their vacation, they’re locked in. They still want to go. They still want to be there. They still want to take their vacation. And how can you make the best of that? And I think that there’s the opportunity for any campground to offer something for people to do and some way to alleviate the idea that the weather was less than ideal.

Brian Searl:

Well, so this is interesting to me on a couple of different fronts, right? I mean, one, you step back and look at the weather as a whole. The people who are on the road full time in RVs or the local people who are coming out to your campground for the weekend have a lot more flexibility to play with the weather, right? If you’re local, you can say, OK, well, I want to cancel my reservation. I’m not going to come or I’ll come next weekend or in a couple of days or whatever, right? You’re local, you’re close, it’s easy for you to do. If you’re a full-time RVer, I think you’re going to need a place to park your RV anyway. But maybe you could, like, if you were driving across two states or something, you could say, oh, the forecast looks bad. I’ll just wait a couple days where I currently am. You have that flexibility. But I think if you’re planning a vacation and you’re not a full-time RVer, or you’re staying in a cabin rental or glamping or something like that, then I think it’s a situation where you don’t have, like, you probably already requested time off work, right? So it’s not easy for you to go and say, well, it’s raining. I’m just going to cancel the trip. I can’t really go another time because my kids will be back in school or, you know, me and my husband both requested off of work. We don’t have that flexibility. We don’t work from home. We work from an office. Right. So it’s, it’s interesting to me then as you take that further into like some of what we’ve talked about, Scott and I’ve talked about some of the clients is, you know, we, we know that camper nights are down. across the board for many, many people this year. As you look at people who are now perhaps, and it differs based on area, but if you look at people who are now taking one weekend trip versus two or three, or staying three nights instead of four or five, there’s less of an opportunity now for them to say, well, I’ll just reschedule it another time, or maybe my second weekend will be better. This is their one vacation. So I wonder how that impacts whether two and how they react.

Scott Bahr:

I think it has a huge impact. And when you consider that for many people, this year especially, they said that they’re delaying their trips. So now if you delayed your trip already to a little bit later in the season, and all of a sudden you run into bad weather, I mean, it’s either you don’t go or you figure out a way around it.

Brian Searl:

The change location thing here is interesting to me, right? That’s obviously easy if a hurricane is coming toward Houston. But if it’s raining, how far away are you actually driving from where you can easily just switch the location to somewhere where it’s not raining? Do you just strive to drive three hours north instead of three hours west? Again, I think that’s easy when you’re a full-time RVer. But how easy is that for everybody else to just change the location to somewhere it’s not pouring? Because again, you’re not changing your location based on a forecast of 30% rain on Saturday, right? Right. For 90% the whole weekend.

Scott Bahr:

Yeah, the changing location thing is interesting, but, you know, again, living in New England, you know, it’s very typical that, you know, southern New England could be getting drenched with rain and northern New England would be great or vice versa. We’re kind of looking at that this this weekend where where I live in the western part of the state of Maine, we’re looking at two to maybe six inches of rain Friday and Saturday, yet just to the north of us, not too far, it’s not going to hit at all. So again, you could make that kind of adjustment. Again, a lot of these two are in combination, change the location and the type of accommodation. It could be, you could change from a camping trip to staying at a hotel or a cabin.

Brian Searl:

Well, how do you, so how do you then make sure, so if I’m a campground owner, right? Like what you just said, if I’m a campground owner, how do I make sure that I’m communicating to you that if I do, I have cabin rentals. Or I have glamping that you can switch to. Is this something we should be proactive with? Like, if you see a terrible, horrific weekend coming up of rain, should you be proactive and offer people a chance to upgrade? Should you leave it alone? Is there ways that you can combat the, well, I want to still go to the area, but maybe I’m going to switch to a hotel. So let me head that off and say, well, no, you don’t have to choose a hotel. I have something for you. And then does amenities play this too? Like we were talking a few weeks ago, we had that guy on the show, really huge luxury resort. I can’t remember where, but he had the whole huge theater that they build out with like Broadway style musicals. And there’s plenty of stuff to do if it rains. Obviously that’s not feasible for 99.9% of the world who own RVs, RV parks, sorry. But are there things that they can do that help convince people still to come, you know, game rooms,

Scott Bahr:

Yes, I mean anything indoors um events any kind of indoor event that the idea of You know like having a movie night having some indoor events having covered areas where people can hang out You know in terms of like you just mentioned being proactive For example here. I I know that someone local she was a Well, she still is on TV as a meteorologist, but she has her own consulting business. And she consults with a lot of resorts and especially ski resorts because they use her forecast for their area, like specifically at their area. to determine how they’re gonna, what they’re gonna do for a weekend. So if you’re, I use the ski resort. If you know that there’s gonna be a certain type of weather coming in that maybe, maybe it’s gonna rain instead of snow. Happens a lot here. You do a promotion for, we’re gonna have some sort of event. We’re gonna have some sort of music festival, some sort of food thing going on. And they respond to that and they respond quickly. You know, a lot of businesses are, are doing that now as a way to get ahead of it before it happens. That to me is the best thing that you can possibly do is get ahead of it. And again, be creative with what you’re offering.

Brian Searl:

Because there’s really no negative to that, right? I mean, I suppose once in a while you might have a guest be like, oh, I didn’t look at the weather. This is horrific. Thank you for telling me. I want to cancel. But most people are going to be grateful Either A, they’re going to do the no change, like you said most people do. And you’re in the chart that we looked at above. Or B, you’re going to have that opportunity to switch them to somewhere that’s indoors, right? But I don’t. This is interesting to me, too, because if you have an RV, you’re inside. So what is the benefit of switching to a glamp, like playing devil’s advocate? What is the benefit to switching to a glamping or cabin when you still can’t walk outside on your porch?

Scott Bahr:

In my mind, the advantages, in terms of the cabinet, could be space. Some of the cabins might have more space. It’s a little differently where it’s a little bit easier to get, unless you’re in a class A or a big fifth wheel, your space is gonna be limited. And if you’re a family with a couple of kids in there, it gets tight really fast.

Brian Searl:

That’s an upsell right there. We have two cabins available for the weekend. You can put your kids in the other one. Right.

Scott Bahr:

Exactly. Perfect. Perfect. Yep. So I think at a practical level, there’s that issue as well. And a lot of times, a lot of these places will have a covered area. They’ll have a covered patio or the option for a covered patio too.

Sandy Ellingson:

I think it’s really funny because you’re talking about my life right now because we left the panhandle of Florida and came to central Florida, arrived just as Debbie was making landfall. They’re having a big event here at the park that I’m at. And so my concern was how many people are going to cancel because most of them were coming from the north to central Florida and had to drive in all that weather. And fortunately, I think there were only two people out of the hundreds of rigs that are here that actually were concerned about driving in the weather and didn’t come. But this particular park we’re at has, they have afternoon thunderstorms being central Florida all the time. And so they’ve built a really large pavilion and they have activities and all that. all summer long in there for kids when it rains. But of course, for us here at the event, it’s been really nice because we haven’t even noticed the rain. I mean, we’ve just moved everything indoors and still went right on and had the event. So it’s been great.

Brian Searl:

And did you say did you say, Scott, that I’m sorry, I just forgot. I haven’t read the whole entire report word for word, but the heat was the main driver of the change.

Scott Bahr:

Heat tends to yeah, especially, you know again, this is timing summertime, but heat is a big big driver of Changes because you know If anyone’s a tent camper, they know if you’re if you’re out there and in the heat Humidity, it’s miserable. It’s miserable. You can’t sleep and then RV many the RVs are climate controlled so the heat actually drives a lot of people away. And then if you can’t be outside, again, this summer, here where we’re at, which is typically fairly, you know, cool, we’ve had heat index above 100 many days already, and you can’t do anything outside.

Brian Searl:

So it’s like, I mean, I mean, I’m looking at this list right in front of us, right. And in some of this, obviously, is not for everybody, and isn’t something you can solve right away. And nobody always is going to want to spend millions of dollars to put in an expansive splash pad and stuff, right? But there’s a lot of things that you can do here that you probably already have. Like many people have an air conditioned office already. Not that they have extra places for people to sit, but some do. You could create something like that. Not easily, but easier than installing a splash pad. Water stations is fairly easy, right? Like, I mean, just setting up the coolers or ice filled stuff or whatever, if you had that. Ice cream stands and beverage bars feels like a revenue opportunity for me, right? Like, I mean, you can go get some of those at Walmart and just resell them, right? Beverage or ice cream bars or something like that. I don’t know how hard frozen fruit is, but mobile beverage carts, what else you got here? Water-based activities, obviously, it depends on your location, right? But you could still help. Water balloon fights is easy, right?

Scott Bahr:

Absolutely.

Brian Searl:

What would you, what would you counsel Jeff a park to do if, you know, of these things, if you were creating a list, obviously you need to prep this in advance. You can’t react and plan all this stuff and what you could, but in two or three days based on a forecast, but if you were advising somebody to have a plan like this in their back pocket, what would you say they do off this list?

Jeff Hoffman:

One, I wish I could read it. Let me make it a little bigger. I can.

Brian Searl:

I can read it all to you, Jeff, if you need me to. We were talking about age before you came on.

Jeff Hoffman:

Yeah, and it’s getting worse.

Brian Searl:

It wasn’t about you, but now you’ve made the whole thing about you.

Jeff Hoffman:

Actually, and it depends on the size of the part and what you’re trying to do. One of the things that seems to be going You know, we’ve averaged into the 90s with 80% humidity in Ohio. And it’s miserable to try to do it outside. So anything on this list that can cause them to cool and still remain to be cool but sedentary type activity you know, running around type activities. The water balloons are good. We have noticed the trend with the heat. We’re putting in a splash pad next to try to alleviate some of the, because we just, we put in a second pool and now we’ve got to go to something else because that’s getting crowded. But we also, I would recommend that you air condition all of your facilities, your restrooms, and it gives people that don’t have a place like a tent camper a place to sleep over a spike, and it also makes the restrooms a lot cooler and better to use.

Brian Searl:

How do you balance that with the increased cost of electricity, though? I would never tell anybody not to do that, but I’m just curious.

Jeff Hoffman:

I just think if we’re looking at camper satisfaction, I think that’s where you get your return. Ever since we climate controlled our bathrooms, our guests have been happier, our employees have been happier because they’re being in comfort, dying in the heat when they’re trying to clean. That’s fair. It’s worth it. The electric cost on these new systems is not that bad. You no longer have to run all the ductwork. You just slap these little units in and they work.

Brian Searl:

All right. So what’s the flip side then? How do they adjust to the cold when it’s extra cold? Scott, do you want to talk about that for a second?

Scott Bahr:

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is just kind of looking at kind of the opposite of what Jeff was just talking about in terms of having some heated areas. And, you know, this, I think, you know, when you think about cold, it doesn’t have to be winter. I, as we all know, I talk about winter camping a lot. I think it’s a, I think it’s a great opportunity. But, um, when you look at the fall here, we’re going to, it’s cold here today.

Brian Searl:

I’m not sitting outside. It’s like 13 degrees Celsius. Like it took a, That’s a 20-degree dip in Fahrenheit, right? And it’s August here.

Scott Bahr:

And right. And we’re looking at within this next week having nights in the 40s here as well. And it’s still prime camping season. So again, it’s making some of those adjustments to offering opportunities for people to stay warm, fire pits, group fire. activities. And again, the indoor area that that’s heated away, you know, again, looking at revenue opportunities, we talked about the ice cream, you know, station before a coffee station, a coffee truck would be I think, I think it’s a great idea.

Brian Searl:

Again, to, and it’s low hanging, like, it’s a low hanging barrier here, right. So this is this is what and I don’t want to distract you from the cold weather thing, right. But going back to the ice cream carts, To me, this is a low-hanging, easy profit center. Now, I have not done the math on this, so I’m probably wrong. But, like, downstairs, I have a $400 ice cream maker that I make homemade ice cream in that takes an hour, and I could sell, like, I don’t know how many cones you could get out of that, right? But if you can’t find a supplier nearby or that supplier is too expensive or you don’t want to set up a contract, you don’t want to have a whole counter, like, I don’t know what the rules are. Like, obviously, there’s permitting and food and all those things you need to go through. But there’s multiple different ways that you could bring this type of stuff into your park, right?

Scott Bahr:

Absolutely. Again, I always say, be creative. It’s like, be creative about some of this stuff. The whole idea of offering opportunities for people to learn, how do you plan for the cold weather trip, what are some of the things that you can do, what about your gear, all those things. And again, like you even having the opportunity for, you know, sell warm weather or warm clothing, not cold weather clothing, but… Sweatshirts, yeah. Or you could even rent jackets and so on if people need that. But again, having that opportunity there, if you know it’s gonna be cold, having a few things, really good socks, don’t sleep on the socks are one of the most important things you can wear. So there’s, you know, these are opportunities because most people, and I could say most, a lot of people are going to show up very ill-prepared for what, whether it’s too hot or too cold. There are many, many people will show up ill-prepared for that. And Jeff can probably attest to that more than I can. So.

Brian Searl:

Go ahead, Jeff.

Jeff Hoffman:

Yeah. Well, that’s one. We all have souvenir wear in our stores and bathing suits, because nobody packs correctly for the weather. So why we have ponchos and other things to supply them when they don’t prepare for what’s coming.

Brian Searl:

Here’s an interesting thing, and I don’t mean to interrupt you, Jeff. I want you to continue if you had more. But Scott, I would love to have a study on this one day. I don’t know if it’s possible. quality of merchandise versus functionality only. In other words, is there any data that shows that a guest, if they need a sweatshirt, would be more likely to purchase an expensive one versus a cheap one if they needed one in the moment? Or if like we’re talking about ice cream, right? If you had homemade ice cream versus Hershey’s ice cream or Whatever. Do you understand what I’m saying? Is there any data there? Because I remember a study years ago where we were talking about, or maybe it wasn’t a study. We were talking to a couple owners about how they put little boutique local grass-fed beef in their store and stuff. And it increased their store sales tremendously by doing that. And obviously, that could have been very localized. And I’m not saying grass-fed beef is for everyone. But local suppliers is the idea. Local beer, craft beer, whiskey. Is there any data around that that you’ve seen, Scott?

Scott Bahr:

I don’t have any, but I can see the opportunity there. Go ahead, Sandy.

Sandy Ellingson:

I was just going to say, Roy Carter does a lot of that. He’s one of the top retail people in the industry and he has a lot of research. He’s spoken at KOA and several of our big conferences about knowing your target market. And if you have a very, if you have young families with limited income, they’re not going to come in and buy, you know, the Yeti cooler, right, but if you’ve got people coming in and they spent a hundred thousand dollars on their unit They’re not going to come in and buy the cooler. That’s five dollars from Walmart You need to match the value against your guest and he’s actually gone into quite a few of my parks and done reviews for me where he has increased and the parks would say to me there’s no way that people are not going to buy this. It’s too expensive. And yet, because they increased the actual quality of the product, they have sold more and made more. So there’s, that hasn’t been a study, but it has been his experience working with parks almost every time.

Brian Searl:

Yeah, I mean, from my perspective, if you look at like, I’m one of those people like who will eat organic grass fed beef will go out of my way to support like a local craft brewery versus drinking a Budweiser or a Coors Light. And so that’s obviously not everybody. But I think there’s, if you look at the proliferation of I can get that Walmart cooler in, you know, at Target and at the dollar store and at CVS and at Walgreens and at That doesn’t really set you apart as a campground store. Now, not everybody wants to be set apart. Some just want to have emergency supplies and stuff like that. But from a sole source of income generation, and I’m sure Jeff and Mark could talk about this too. Mark, you’re really far away. Do you have a giant room, or do you just not want to sit close to us? Do we have bad breath?

Mark Koep:

I’m trying to figure this out. I don’t know. My camera’s over there.

Sandy Ellingson:

Um, but anyway, like I think there’s there’s it’s common sense right to say like not necessarily luxury products, but unique products well, and the other thing that Roy has a lot of people do is Use their stores in specific areas, especially if they’re rural to draw in local sales. So when you were talking about the organic Um, he’s got a park he works with when they expanded their store they actually expanded it to market to locals because there wasn’t a big mall or anything close that they could shop at and they were carrying a lot of perishables which they again argued with him over and said we don’t want to carry eggs and milk and organic And yet it’s an area where all these yuppies are moving into and that’s what they were looking for and they had to drive an hour and a half to get it somewhere else. So he was able to actually market to people that weren’t really coming to the campground. But in the process, they found the campground and either came or talked to their friends about it.

Brian Searl:

Mark, any thoughts?

Mark Koep:

Yeah. I mean, within a, within a store, you’re, you’re basically want to serve who your guests are and who your guests, who your guests are that you want to come there. So it’s one thing to have a store. It’s another thing to have a store that sells products. So one of the biggest things I see in a lot of RV park and campground stores is they have not really set up their store environment to make it conducive for selling products. It just is a big clutter fest and people just randomly around and finding stuff. And so. There is actually an art and science to setting up your stores and doing it right. I think the biggest risk a lot of park owners face when they’re thinking about buying products for their stores and stocking their stores is they tend to think about themselves and what they would like versus what their guests are actually looking for and wanting. So that’s generally my feedback for them is, you know, try things and ask, you know, ask your guests. What do you want? Right. And listen to them when they come in and ask for. I’ve got a client in Idaho that sells pizza and propane and they deliver outside of the park because they found out they’re in a rural area. There’s no pizza places around. So they started serving pizzas and delivering it. So they deliver pizzas. And the same thing with propane. The local gas station stopped providing propane, so they opened up those propane sales to all the folks coming in. And they know that they’re not selling, they’re not renting their sites just to the folks that are on site. They know a lot of folks come to their area to go up in the forest service and do hunting and all that stuff. Well, those folks want to fill up their propane tanks, so they’re selling to those folks too. So there are many cases and there’s many stories where these stores actually generate more revenue than

Brian Searl:

Yeah, I mean you look at like especially the rural areas right like look at groceries We were just talking about like in many of these rural communities where my parents live in the middle of nowhere in Upstate New York like their grocery store is a dollar general That’s it unless you want to drive 20 miles to a Walmart And so the opportunity for a campground to carry some of those basic essentials actually could be a real nice revenue generator in a lot of places

Mark Koep:

Yeah, and the trick the trick in that is having the systems in place to make checkouts easy and having the staff there that is willing to serve the guests. Right. So it’s a holistic approach. And and the parks that we see that succeed with the stores are the parks that have that covered. Right. They they want to help guests. They have the staff there and they make sure that they have the system in place to service those guests. And they end up doing very well.

Brian Searl:

Yeah, I mean, it seems like and you were talking about like a lot of people will just stock their store with what they think. That’s another interesting topic to me because I think, and I don’t want to pick on any specific vendor, nor am I saying that this is anybody’s fault, but like, like look at will core who shows up at all the shows, they have the same type of things, right? And those are unique. Those are kid friendly, but I think there’s a, a danger in falling into, uh, everybody offers this thing. So I have to offer it to the replacement hoses, the sewer fittings, the, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t carry those. Right. But also, There’s opportunity to add perhaps to that and think in different ways, especially if you’re in an area that already has a Walmart or auto parts store or something that’s going to carry those things that maybe they don’t necessarily need. It’s interesting, like how much of a profit center is that like the sewer hoses and stuff like that, versus a just a convenient, nice.

Mark Koep:

That’s a convenient thing to have, like where you have products that your people are going to forget and need in order to service them and get them in the store, because then they’re going to buy some of the stuff that they don’t need or don’t think about. I was thinking as you were talking there, we’ve got a client park in California that started their own wine bar, they have a full wine bar in their in their store because they’re in the wine region. People come there to taste wines and they bring in local wines. Wines are massive profit, right? Your margins on wine are huge. And so they do tasting and sales and so forth. They also then have a little section where they have some sewer lines and so forth because inevitably anybody who’s RV long enough, I just did this recently. You take off and you leave the little elbow back at the other RV park that you’re at. We need a hookup for the night. And so having that on hand is likely going to allow that person to stay longer, not get them to go down to Walmart to pick up the piece. They can buy it in your store, and then your store serves as Walmart for them, buying some of the other stuff.

Brian Searl:

It’s like having a toothbrush at a hotel or a toothpaste or shaving cream or things you forgot, right? That are common. But I find that it’s an interesting philosophy overall. in that a lot of the owners will, and again, I’m not picking on anybody in specifically, but this is a, this is a handy gap for me as a business owner too. It’s not just a campground or a thing, but looking at like, these are the stables. And then they don’t think about, again, like what you’re talking about, surveying the guests to figure out what they might want, looking at the demographics in the area to see who’s coming to their park. Are they the, I hate that word yuppies, by the way, like, I’m not a yuppie. I like actually just care about the food that goes into my body. But anyway, that’s a whole nother discussion. So, um, but anyway, like, like doing those demographic studies, it’s the same thing we were talking. We’ve had conversations with clients this week about just, and I know it’s radically different. I don’t want to change the topic, but just about social media, about posting, you know, we were, we were having good conversations about people like, you know, one, you shouldn’t care about your follower count and shouldn’t for a few years. Cause it’s a vanity number, but even more now, so consumers are starting to figure out the algorithms are just serving them the content, whether they follow them or not. So they don’t need to go through the step of going to the page and clicking the Follow or Like button anymore because the algorithms already know, and they get really good. And so now you’re getting less and less people following pages because they know they’re going to get that content anyway. Well, what that creates is an environment where you have to listen to your guest or your potential audience even more and give them more content that they will value unless the algorithm will value. So stop posting the buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. That’s what 99% of camp growners get on Facebook and do. And so, again, listening to your audience and back to the store. I don’t want to shift the conversation to social media. But anybody have any thoughts on that besides Mark?

Jeff Hoffman:

I think Mark hit a point in that you can look at your store and have it somewhat professionally designed so that it actually, for your guests, And at that time, you can also sit down and take a look at your market. Because we handle a lot of tent campers, our volume of business has gone down because they can’t bring as much with them as the RV people. But the RV people come in and buy souvenirs and other items that are higher priced. So our store is better. kind of filter up our clientele, have more disposable income, and everything in the store and in the food service is going a lot better than it did before.

Brian Searl:

This is interesting to me. Let me play devil’s advocate with something you said, the design of the store. I think this is fascinating. Can we agree that one of the hardest things to do is increase the amount of retail space you have? at a campground? Is that because you either have to expand physically a construction building or demolish another area or it’s not easy, right?

Mark Koep:

No, I’ll say I’ll jump in on that. For example, this isn’t an RV park store, but it’s local Napa down down the street. They hired they hired an expert to store design who came in same footprint. He basically relayed out and got them some new shelving styles and where they’re placing their products. And they were saying that he increased their shelving space by 20 percent by simply reorganizing the way the store is showing their stuff. That’s huge. And that’s no additional footprint.

Brian Searl:

So this is where I’m going, right? So that’s one option. But two is, look at where we are. We’re in 2024. There are plenty of CVS at Walgreens, I know I’ve read articles about in urban areas, who are not even letting people come through the front door anymore. And as a result of that, and again, their justification in some of those issues is crime, right? But as a result of that, you’re able to stock 50% to 100% more items because you don’t have to have aisles that people can walk down. And then you can carry more goods. And in a world where you have an app and can easily deliver something to someone’s campsite, couldn’t that be an opportunity? Or no?

Mark Koep:

The risk you run there and I mean, I would actually rely a little bit on Jeff and Sandy on this one, because they have the experience on seeing the inventory that comes out of the stores. My guess is a large portion of the high profit items that sell out of the store are the last minute like trinkets and stuff like that, that you wouldn’t normally, that you wouldn’t even think about buying, right? The good thing about a CVS, go to CVS knowing I need a bottle of Tylenol and a bar so you kind of know. Whereas where a lot of RV parks and campgrounds, their benefit is, is that when you show up there, sometimes you’re walking through there, you know, it’s like those little, you know, little rubber band worldly things that you shoot up and they were all down. You can’t find those anywhere other than at a campground store and they’re freaking off. They pay four bucks for them. Right? So that’s just an example of kind of the random stuff that you collect.

Brian Searl:

Mark or something. I just want to know you shouted those out.

Mark Koep:

I get 5 cents out of everyone. They sell their mind.

Sandy Ellingson:

I think we’re almost going full circle, too, because when you go back to talking about the weather, the first place everybody goes when it starts to rain is to the camp store.

Brian Searl:

They want to go get ice cream. I don’t know if that’s the first place. They just wander around. I’m skeptical that it’s the first place. I agree it’s on the top three to five of the list. But I don’t know if it’s like it’s down, like I would go, it depends on where you are in the campground. and how nice the store is, and whether the office lady took a shower this morning.

Sandy Ellingson:

And there’s variables, I’m just saying. But if you’ve built the right kind of store, it will be one of the first places you go.

Brian Searl:

I can agree with that. I can agree with that.

Sandy Ellingson:

Out of boredom, you don’t want to be in that little unit with all those little darlings, and so you run them all up to the store and say, spend an hour figuring out which ice cream cone you want.

Jeff Hoffman:

Yeah.

Brian Searl:

If it was me as a kid, I would

Jeff Hoffman:

Depending on the Depending on the size of the campground Some of have like attached to the store you’ll have a meeting area and a food area So if you do limit weather, there’s lots of places to come up and disperse the crowd to carry through even I’ve seen some campgrounds that have like sit-down movie theaters and in their office area, which on rainy days.

Brian Searl:

But what do you use that for on a non-rainy day is the key, right? Because most days it’s not going to rain enough to have people in there watching movies.

Jeff Hoffman:

A lot of times, because it’s climate controlled, we produce, we don’t produce, we show movies for the kids at night before they go to bed with popcorn. So it’s a good area for them to come in and quiet down before they come in. Anything, whether people to the store and also drive store sales because they don’t want to go pick stuff up anymore.

Brian Searl:

So you’re saying as campground owners and operators, everyone should want it to rain.

Jeff Hoffman:

No, my favorite, unlike a farmer, my favorite period is the drought.

Brian Searl:

Well, but they’re not in your store then. How are you going to make money, Jeff?

Jeff Hoffman:

Oh, they still come in the store because it’s hard to sell them the other stuff that was on the list.

Brian Searl:

So you don’t want perfect weather. You want the extremes. They need to be hot or cold. So you’re the, OK. So the report was useful for you then. See, Scott, someone’s going to use it.

Jeff Hoffman:

All right. I love Scott’s report. It cuts down my workload a lot when I look at his stuff.

Brian Searl:

Yeah, I mean, I think so. So we have any final thoughts on because I want to just briefly touch on what we talked about Scott in the beginning about the statistics and stuff. But any more thoughts on stores, weather, anything like that somebody wants to throw in or?

Sandy Ellingson:

Well, this is something that came from what some of Scott’s research from years ago, but I still believe it rings true. And it was research he did that supported one of Toby’s keynotes that she did where she talked about reimagining your space. And I think every campground should look at their physical space and go, here’s my office, here’s my rec hall. What revenue is that rec hall producing? Because so many parks have these nice rec halls that nobody is using.

Brian Searl:

That’s what I’m saying with this.

Sandy Ellingson:

I wouldn’t want to sit on it. Right. But that could make an amazing store. And then that office could make a small something else like a business center or something. But you could still kind of have some of everything. But then you’re not you’re not having to build a new building for it. So that’s one of the first things when I go in and look and they want me to do an ancillary income on it. You know, where can they make more money off other than their sites? The first place I look.

Brian Searl:

I would have too much fun like I could do this as an entrepreneur like I could like I would like the ice cream maker right like if I can make ice cream in an hour I would have a luxury RV resort where my demographic was correct and they had disposable income right and if I can make ice cream in an hour I would say like name your flavor and I’ll make it whatever you want in it and it’ll be ready in an hour and I’ll charge you two or three times what you would normally charge for Hershey’s ice cream these things are like I don’t know if that works but it would be fun to try

Jeff Hoffman:

I visited a park in North Dallas that they have their ice cream flavors. Listen up, Jeff, this is my idea. Stop it. They make a ton off of it.

Brian Searl:

Yeah. I mean, it just tastes better, right? Like, I mean, I’m in Calgary, and we have all kinds of crazy, amazing, local, delicious ice cream shops. And, like, it’s just, I’m following a recipe. It’s not like it’s my creation, right? But, like, making it homemade, it just tastes so much better.

Sandy Ellingson:

Yeah. Better profit margins with snow cones, though. Even with inflation, the average cost of a snow cone right now for what you put in it with the cup is 47 cents, and they sell for $4.50.

Brian Searl:

But again, that’s your demographic, right? Can you sell? Some parks need to do the snow cones. Some parks, it doesn’t make sense to do homemade ice cream or premium ice cream or whatever else, right? So I think it depends on your, because it’s not always about profit margin, right? Sometimes profit margin can shoot you in the foot if you don’t study your demographics correctly. All right, anything else we got on stores and all that stuff before we move to some fun, perhaps not so great news? What we should talk about? OK, let’s do, hold on, I got to open this up a second. Let’s do this. I think I can share. All right, can you guys see that? Oh, yes, you can. Look, I can see that. OK, so this is interesting. This is a new SEO tool that we’re piloting called SEO Monitor. And one of the things that we like to use in it, this is the screen, right? Yeah. Let me pop that out. I think I’m going to have to switch screens again. Oh, I did. OK. So this is just like, it doesn’t matter what we’re looking at here. We’re just going to look at some different keywords. Like this happens to be just, I pulled in koa.com, right? But we have other people in here. And I think it’s interesting when you look at like, if we just, I don’t even want to look at koa.com. Cause this, again, this isn’t Google analytics, so it’s not a hundred percent accurate, but if you look at a keyword across the United States, like RV park, these are trends that we’re seeing quite a bit that I think some of this audience needs to be aware of. And I think Scott and I are going to try to do some research on this more in depth, but this is the United States. This is people who are literally going to Google and typing in the word RV park. And it’s down 33% year over year in June, in this case.

Mark Koep:

I’m laughing because as I was preparing for this call, I wondered if I would share Um, you know, campground views, we have a lot of traffic, right? And, and for example, when COVID hit, we saw the boom coming before. Um, we actually, we can trigger it back to the middle of July, actually July 13th. We saw the pink, the peak for camping search this year, um, on July 13th, normally that peak happens on August 31st. And we are, we are now, we’re now seeing that same bell curve that we normally have seasonally. It wasn’t like some sort of aberration. We’re actually seeing a drop in traffic. That’s also anecdotally going with a lot of interesting conversation with various park owners all across the country experiencing the same thing. So there has been this data is validating what we’re seeing over campground views on our data and also with our various clients. There’s been a definite change in search habits and actual activity for people looking to go camping.

Brian Searl:

Yeah, I mean, this is this is bad. Scott and I have looked at some of this data, right? I mean, again, some of these are smaller numbers. This is RV Park. And again, this is just for the entire United States. We’ve done some more drill downs into specific states like Texas and Florida, and they’re off 18% to 30%, right? I mean, here’s just searching for campground. It’s still like, wow, that’s 1.2 million, but that’s off of 2.2 million in June of last year, right? 1.8 versus 2.2. So this is down 18% year over year. That’s a significant chunk of people that are no longer, again, here’s camping in New York City off 33%. These are very clear 19, 35. And some of this is up. I don’t know who’s searching camping camping, by the way. This fascinates me when I look at Google Ads reports for people, how many people can’t spell campsite or camp whatever. But anyway, most of this stuff is down. But we are seeing some outlying trends. You know, we were looking at New Braunfels on a client call earlier today. And camping in RV park is down, but cabin rentals is up. But also hotels is down in New Braunfels. So it’s really interesting, like how you can dive into some of those areas. Again, you don’t know exactly the cause, but you can start to tell yourself an educated story behind that when you have some of this data. But I think it’s important for people to like what we’re looking at here. What this data is, is the amount of people who are going to Google and typing in RV park anywhere in the United States. RV park, RV park near me, campground, campground near me, camping, stuff like that, right? And this is literally like no matter how good your marketing or your SEO is, and again, there’s ways to recoup this in other places in some cases. But this is people who are, by a volume of whatever that number was, 18% for campground that we looked at up here, who are just not even looking on Google for this. Now, what’s interesting to me is I just had this thought, and I don’t think I’ve talked about this with you, Scott, but Mark. This is data from Google Search. We know economic conditions are impacting this because we can see the camper nights and all the things, right? I wonder how much this data is skewed by the fact that less people are searching on Google and more are using tools like chat GPT.

Mark Koep:

I actually think, I think that’s part of it, but we’re also seeing this not only on, you know, in the case of Google, but, you know, services like our own, right. Campground views isn’t a Google system. And so we’re, we’re seeing the same trend there too. So there is, there’s an overall macro change that’s going on. The other thing that we’ve seen, and this is more of a recent trend is we have parks that are doing great. But then they look ahead into the fall and they’re like, what the heck? My bookings in September are way down. what’s going on. And so what I think is happening is, you know, especially in the United States, we’re in an election cycle again. I’ve been I’ve been very open since the beginning that things are going to get hairy and they they have gotten hairy. In fact, there was an event in the middle of July that we can say that was the event that kind of started triggering this drop off. And so we’ve done some not Scott level surveys, but we’ve done some surveys of consumers and we are seeing that across the board that basically people do still want to camp. But they’re not planning a camping trip two months from now. They’re thinking they’ll go camping in about three weeks. But once they get into that week, then they’re going to make the reservations. And so they’re not booking out in advance. They’re kind of changing their oversearch parameters. The other thing that we’ve seen anecdotally is people have tightened up their travel radius. And as a result, this is anecdotal now, but as a result, if you’re a camper and you live where you live, you kind of know what the RV parks and campgrounds are around you. So you’re not going to Google to search them. You know, hey, it’s Bob’s RV park or Mark’s RV park. So you don’t need to go search. You already know where you’re going to go and you’re going to call them up in the last minute and book a site. So we’re kind of seeing that trend. I mean, obviously the macro data that’s going to come out in the North American Camping Report and everything else will kind of show that. But right now in the moment, that’s what we’re seeing.

Sandy Ellingson:

Well, another interesting, I’m sorry, Brad.

Brian Searl:

No, I was just going to say I want Scott in a second to talk on booking window because he had brought that up and we kind of see the same thing. I got distracted by camping camp. Who’s typing this stuff in? Sorry. Anyway, but like I think it’s important like what you’re saying is correct and it is for sure we’ve had this conversation with Scott about the presidential election year. But I think in some ways it’s dangerous to say that this is only a presidential election. And again, this is my opinion and I hope I’m wrong, but I think we’re in a two to four year economic downturn here that is going to impact the number of people who are looking to go. stay at RV parks and campgrounds and travel in general. You’ve seen Airbnb fall off and hotels. We just talked about New Braunfels. There’s patterns of that in specific areas. And again, I hope I’m wrong. And I’m not saying that camp, the camping industry or the outdoor hospitality industry is in danger, but there’s been a lot of overbuilt. You know, there’s a lot more competition out there. And then coupled with, there’s just not as many people who are going camping from the last three or four years coming down off of COVID. It’s just something that I think people need to be paying attention to and saying, I need to look at strategies to future proof myself. Like, what if this happens for two to four years? You know, what if it, yes, is partially, of course, the presidential election in the United States? You know, we have data to back that up. But I don’t want to have a situation where we’re saying to people like, just sit there, don’t do anything, and then cross your fingers and hope that it’s going to be magically better in 2025 because interest rates get cut.

Mark Koep:

Yeah. Before Sandy jumps in, I actually got a message from one of the state directors yesterday or the day before asking for a quote specifically around that topic, which is, in their case, they were hearing from park owners basically saying, I don’t need to market. what like there is there is if I can like amplify this to the world if you are not currently implementing or planning or doing a marketing strategy and plan for your part you will regret it in six months. And depending on your financial situation, you’ll really regret it in about a year. You need unlike any other time in modern history, running a campground or RV park, you need to have a holistic strategic marketing plan in place that you’re actually doing. And unfortunately, for RV parks, this is the really sad part, because a lot of parks haven’t had to do this, you’re actually gonna have to spend money on marketing. you know, a lot of parks haven’t had to do that, but you’re actually going to have to spend some money on marketing. And now that brings up the big question mark in everybody’s mind is what does that marketing look like? And we can go in a whole long conversation there. But I’m just going to say at this point, you need to be marketing. And if you’re not doing it, You need to start down that path really fast.

Brian Searl:

Well, and briefly, you’re right. We should, again, we only have a couple of minutes left and I want to get to Sandy’s comment that she had and then, and then Scott about booking windows, but you’re right. That needs to be a topic because marketing, you can’t just say I’m marketing. Like we had a conversation with a park this morning and I won’t say the area specifically, but we looked at his Google ads and his Google ads, because the search demand is down in the area or converting much less than they were last year. And so I’m a proponent of Google Ads, but also I know that eyeballs are other places besides Google now, both AI tools and Bing and other voice assistants. And so you can’t reach everybody on Google like you used to be able to, a significant portion still, but not everybody. And so I told him, you’re in an area that is likely going through an economic downturn. There’s a lot of overbuilt parks near you. You’ve got a lot more competition. There’s some other factors that go into play with the economy in his specific area and some of the features that I’m trying to intentionally be vague, but the features that perhaps were not as once as attractive as they were last year, right? So he’s got a kind of four or five different things working against him. But I said, if this is a two to four year economic issue, which I think it is, and that’s honestly, I think that’s a best case scenario, but that’s a whole nother show topic. You know, if this is two to four years, then you’ve got to look at how do I prepare myself for when, you know, either the area changes come back, or the economy comes back, or whatever the trigger is, how do I make sure I’m set up for that? Because the ads immediately aren’t going to work for me. In this specific case, I’m not saying Google Ads is bad. But you know that, Mark. I’m a big proponent of Google Ads. So I told him, start writing. Let’s look at blog posts. Let’s turn off your Google Ads. Let’s look at blog posts. And let’s write blog posts about the area. So that when the area starts to pick back up, Now you’ve got hundreds or dozens of these articles that talk about the area that are valuable content. So when people are going back now to the area they’re in to find these blog posts on your website, let’s do the same thing with social. Because we know, again, people aren’t necessarily researching that stuff, but the algorithm is going to show valuable stuff in their feed. So let’s train them that you’re there, and then when they’re ready to come back. So I think it’s important to have that conversation. You can’t just hire a marketing person and say, go market for me.

Mark Koep:

Agreed. And it’s funny, I had a similar conversation with The Park two weeks ago, very same topic, exact same. We were able to show their Google site traffic. In their case, their search traffic was down. Organic search traffic was down 45%. So you can only buy a percentage of that traffic in Google Ads, and we can show that you’re down. So then the next step is, there’s a difference between push and pull marketing. So pull is you’re just drawing people in that are searching for you. If that drops, you need to start pushing your ad out to places where people are going to find it. And that’s where SEO and social media and, you know, YouTube display, video ads, stuff like that, where you’re actually putting your message in front of people who may be interested, but aren’t actively searching.

Brian Searl:

All right. We can have that conversation forever. I got to cut myself off. Sandy, go ahead. And then we want to talk about booking letters real quick. And if you need to, if we go a few minutes over anybody who needs to drop off, please go ahead.

Sandy Ellingson:

Well, I was just going to say that AirDNA, which is the reporting and research tool for Airbnb owners, put out a report recently that said their average customer has 20% disposable income, and because at least the news and places they’re going to are saying that income is down by 20%. That is one of the things they’re cutting is the travel. So I thought that was an interesting parallel. The second thing is, is that we’re actually starting to see Canadians and snowbirds begin to call and ask about, can they arrive later? Which for states like Florida and Arizona who count on those six months of revenue can be very significant. But they are concerned and the weather is having to do with this, so they’re watching the weather. But they are concerned that there could be rioting after depending upon who wins and how they look at it. And so they don’t wanna come until after the election. And since that’s so close to Thanksgiving, they’re saying, hey, what would happen if we didn’t arrive until December 1? So that’s been a concern of some of my parks that are in states for those. And so those are just two of the comments I have. But I would love to see us do a show, Brian, on nothing but marketing soon.

Brian Searl:

So again, we keep having good topics here, like Mark, I’m going to address yours in a second, because we’re just going to go long here. And if anybody needs to job off, they can. But Sandy, to your points, we were talking about this with Scott earlier with Airbnb, and their business was down 14%. And we were trying to wonder, is this a cause of people are spending less on accommodations because their disposable income is down, because inflation is up, And then are they going back to traditional hotels instead of Airbnb? And then, you know, Mark, to your point, since you need to jump off here in a second, like health insurance in Canada is not the problem. The cost of health insurance in the United States for people traveling from Canada is the problem.

Sandy Ellingson:

Well, and the other thing, too, on the going back to hotels is our parks have not adjusted from COVID with their deposit policies and their cancellation policies. And so people aren’t willing to risk that money. So they’re going to a hotel instead of a campground because the campgrounds policies are still too tight.

Brian Searl:

Yeah, I that’s interesting to me. Do we have what was your second point, Sandy? Because I just got distracted by Mark’s comment after your Airbnb.

Sandy Ellingson:

because I want to have the Canadians not wanting to come till later, which could.

Brian Searl:

Oh yeah, do we have any data about that?

Sandy Ellingson:

Arizona, some of those.

Scott Bahr:

We don’t have. Data on that specifically.

Brian Searl:

We think that’s worth investigating.

Scott Bahr:

It’s like I think it absolutely is a topic with investigating. Because it it feels to me like it’s relevant to where we’re at right now. Yeah, let’s quantify that. Let’s quantify that.

Sandy Ellingson:

Well, and I was actually talking with one of the association leaders, Scott, specifically about this, where you and I have talked about timely research, things that shows up and needs to be done now, because two months from now it’s too late. And this is one of the topics, because we need to be able to counter that. What do the parks say when somebody calls and says, I don’t want to come till December? Do they allow us to do that? I mean, there’s just a ton of things that we need to know, but we need to be able to qualify that with what we’re saying.

Brian Searl:

But what can you say, right? I mean, if I was that person and I was calling a park and floor and saying, can I delay, we’re assuming that this person already has a reservation, right?

None:

Correct.

Brian Searl:

They do. So they haven’t prepaid their six months in advance, have they?

Sandy Ellingson:

They pay their first and last month’s rent most of the time.

Brian Searl:

So I think there’s a danger in saying like, OK, well, no, if I’m going to be the hard-nosed park, like, no, you can’t change it. OK, well, then I just won’t come. And you can have two months instead of six. But maybe you would have got three or four if you had let me come in in December.

Sandy Ellingson:

Well, that’s exactly the conversation. The conversation is, do you take the bird in the hand, which is December to March, or do you say, no, you either take the six months or not? Because so many of them are fully booked and have waiting lists for other people who would like to have come in. Now, is there a guarantee that person’s going to come in for six months? No.

Brian Searl:

They were probably put on the waiting list six months ago when the economy was better.

Sandy Ellingson:

Now, you’ve got a lot of seasonal parks that they have waiting lists. People are waiting to get into those parks because they all come down with their friends.

Brian Searl:

Are they still waiting if you’ve been on the list for a year? Have they already found another place or changed their mind because of the economy or went somewhere else? There’s a gamble in that, too, isn’t there?

Sandy Ellingson:

Well, most of them will have a place somewhere else, but they want to be at that park because that’s where their friends are. The snowbirds are a completely different animal.

Brian Searl:

Scott, booking windows.

Scott Bahr:

Booking windows. Something that I’ve been talking about for months and months and it appears that it’s happening. I’ve heard from some of the folks that are actually booking trips that are taking the reservations that it is real and it’s happening. I’ve talked to many campground owners who have said that it is shortened. I haven’t Not one person has said that it hasn’t changed.

Brian Searl:

And we can quantify this now, too, just briefly to say it. Like, I can quantify this from the data because I had all the people calling me in April or May panicking about June or July. And now that June or July is in the back end, they realize that it filled in and the booking window was just shorter.

Scott Bahr:

Right, exactly. And it’s going to continue to be shorter for a while. One of the risks, I think, that people run right now is that when people take a trip and move it to later in the year, you risk losing that trip. I think for a campground owner, you need to understand the booking window is shortened. Grab that work, dovetails with the marketing conversation, and go out and find those people. Make sure they know when your availability is, especially midweek stuff, which I know a lot of campgrounds want to fill up, but also do understand that it has shortened and to expect a lot more guests that are showing up at the last minute. And that’s for all the reasons we’ve had in this conversation. It all comes into play. But not the least of which is that a lot of people don’t want to have to plan six months in advance. They want a spontaneous trip. They love the idea. And Mark talked about people booking closer to where they live, too. There’s a number of reasons for people doing that. But a spontaneous trip is something that If they can get away for the weekend, and if you have availability, let them know.

Jeff Hoffman:

I think what’s happening is we’re going back closer to the model that existed before COVID. We never tightened our deposit schedule. We still only require the one night, not a full booking. We have had to play with rates a little bit And we have noticed that the booking windows on all of the parks that I work for they’re all getting shorter and shorter, but It used to be a two to three week out on most parks was standard I think owners are going to have to adjust to a the changing market in that we’re going to have to, as you said, go back to marketing, going back to easing some of the restrictions that we placed and try to get people back into our parks. It’s not going to be as easy as it once was there for a few years. And I think the well-operated parks, the ones that are listening and tracking the data, listening to your podcast and other things, those are the parks that are going to survive and do well. The ones that have just been riding the coattails of this upward trend, they’re either going to have to learn how to run their parks or they’re going to fall by the wayside.

Sandy Ellingson:

The other thing that’s really interesting post-COVID is we have many, many more multi-park owners. And now, when they’re trying to play the Google pay-per-click game, they’re competing with themselves. Because so many of them will have parks in the same area, and for every park, they’re paying for the same Google words. And so now it’s like, OK, you’re competing against yourself. And I keep trying to tell them, you can’t do that. You need to find other alternatives than to compete against yourself.

Brian Searl:

Well, you shouldn’t have bought six parts in the same area. I’m sorry. That’s a whole other conversation. So, yeah. All right. We don’t want to stay forever. Well, I could talk forever, but nobody wants to hear that. So final thoughts, Jeff?

Jeff Hoffman:

I’m actually surprised you didn’t bring AI into this conversation more than you than you did. Congratulations.

Brian Searl:

Try once in a while.

Jeff Hoffman:

But yeah, I do think we’re in the midst of a little bit of a changing market. And people will have to be very conscious of pricing, marketing, and their product.

Brian Searl:

Sandy, final thoughts?

Sandy Ellingson:

I’m telling my parks, honor your repeat customers. They’re the ones that have kept you there all these years that have come. And it’s great to get new ones, but keep those consistent people that are coming, honor them, offer them the specials first, make them feel like they, you know, you love them more than everybody else. So I think it’s really important right now.

Scott Bahr:

Scott? My final thoughts would be keep an eye on October. Get out there, And grab as many people as you can. Keep in mind that one of the things that we’ve seen trend in the last year and a half or so is that demographically the boomers are back to camping. And that’s a group that loves scenic drives and sightseeing and leaf peeping. And I think it’s a great opportunity. I think October could make up for a lot of lost ground. Not a lot, but at least some of the lost ground people had early in the season.

Brian Searl:

I don’t want to give people the wrong impression, but Scott’s advice is to go grab people. Grocery store, library. Of course. OK. I’m just wondering if there’s like local, the demographics have to match, right? Like we talked about. So. Correct. OK. All right. Thank you guys. I appreciate it for another episode of MC Fireside Chats. We’ll see you next week. Glamping focused episode next week. We’re going to change this format around in these shows. We decided to delay it till January of next year with all the conferences and all that thing and flip-flopping back and forth. But it’ll be interesting. We’re going to have more of these shows, I think, in the first week where we talk about industry trends and insights.

Sandy Ellingson:

I think we should all show up and bump those glamping people off and talk about marketing.

Brian Searl:

I mean, there’s so much, right? And I feel like I’m self-serving talking about myself. But we’ll talk about marketing more.

Sandy Ellingson:

Awesome.

Jeff Hoffman:

Can’t wait to see everybody during the conference season.

Brian Searl:

Yep. Looking forward to you too. All right, guys. Thanks. Take care. Have a great show. See you. Bye.

SPEAKER_01:

This episode of MC Fireside Chats with your host, Brian Searle. Have a suggestion for a show idea? Want your campground or company in a future episode? Email us at hello at moderncampground.com. Get your daily dose of news from moderncampground.com. And be sure to join us next week for more insights into the fascinating world of outdoor hospitality.