MC Fireside Chats –January 7th, 2026

[00:00:00] Brian Searl: Brian Searl with Insider Perks and Modern Campground. As I told everybody here on the show, if I happen to freeze or the computer crashes or I disappear or something weird, that’s just carry on as normal. The show will be better without me.

My entire computer processing unit is apparently dying and it’s a known defect and there should be a replacement. So that—that’s what I have to start 2026 off with a—with an interesting bang. So we will see if we make it through this entire show in one piece.

Welcome everybody to the first episode of 2026. Excited to have another year under our belts here of MC Fireside Chats. It’s our sixth year. Can you believe that already? Six years we’ve been doing MC Fireside Chats. We started in—at the beginning or during the pandemic. It was actually MC Fireside Chats was not called that then. But it started as a show with OHI, ARVC back then, to report on pandemic updates. And then evolved into what we have now. Interesting history.

At some point we should count how many episodes we’ve done. Probably a lot. So thank you everybody for joining us. How’s everybody’s holidays go? Did you guys have a good holiday? Happy New Year, everything? Anybody want to talk about something cool they did or you just stayed home with family like me and just was chill?

[00:01:07] Vicki Jones: We—we went to South Africa.

[00:01:09] Brian Searl: Oh, okay. Tell us about that. What’s Christmas like in South Africa?

[00:01:12] Vicki Jones: It doesn’t feel like Christmas to me because obviously I’m used to being in the Northern Hemisphere and having a cold Christmas. It was 37 degrees, which in Fahrenheit is like nearly a hundred. We were roasting and, yeah, it’s really different.

You don’t have your traditional main meal on Christmas Day. You have leftovers. You have your main meal on Christmas Eve. And, yeah, it’s just you go to the beach and, yeah, it was a totally different one for us.

[00:01:38] Brian Searl: Interesting. Okay. I’ve always like thought about doing something like that, but I like the snow and I like the winter and I like like we went to Germany and did the Christmas markets one year and I just like that vibe of Christmas. And I know Christmas is different everywhere else. I should just let it go and experience it like you did, but I don’t know, maybe one day.

All right. Do we want to go briefly around the room and introduce ourselves? Do we want to start with Phil first? Uh.

[00:01:59] Phil Ingrassia: Hi, I’m Phil Ingrassia, I’m president of the US RV Dealers Association. We represent motorhome and travel trailer dealers across the country.

[00:02:09] Brian Searl: Awesome. Thanks for being here as always, Phil. We’ll go with your colleague in Canada, Eleonore next.

[00:02:13] Eleonore Hamm: Thank you. I’m Eleonore Hamm, president of the RVDA of Canada. And like Phil, we represent the dealers across the country that sell motorhomes and travel trailers and then suppliers as well in the Canadian RV industry.

[00:02:26] Brian Searl: Awesome. Welcome. Thank you for being here, Eleonore. Scott, our other recurring guest, and then we’ll get to our special ones.

[00:02:32] Scott Bahr: Scott Bahr, president of Cairn Consulting Group. We’re a market research company focusing in outdoor hospitality and the outdoors in general.

[00:02:41] Brian Searl: We have a lot of good market research this year, don’t we Scott?

[00:02:44] Scott Bahr: We’re going to.

[00:02:44] Brian Searl: Most of it from you, but some of it I’ll have a hand in once or twice. Rachel, tell us about yourself.

[00:02:50] Rachel Hodge: Yeah, for sure. Rachel Hodge, I’m the Director of Guest Experiences here at Great Parks, which is in Hamilton County, Ohio. And we operate 22 parks and destinations across the region, over 18,000 acres of stewarded land, including three traditional campgrounds.

[00:03:07] Brian Searl: Awesome. Are these state parks or county parks or?

[00:03:10] Rachel Hodge: So, yeah, it is officially a county park system. Used to be Great Parks of Hamilton County, but we’re actually our own political subdivision, so we’re not technically governed by the county or the state.

[00:03:21] Brian Searl: So you seceded from the union.

[00:03:23] Rachel Hodge: I don’t know about that. We still have to report to a board and our CEO, but we get to make a little bit more of our own rules.

[00:03:29] Brian Searl: All right. That’s probably a little bit less hassle than government, but I won’t—we won’t dive into that. We’ll talk about other better things. Vicki.

[00:03:36] Vicki Jones: Yeah, hi. I’m Vicki Jones. I’m over in the UK. I’m on the board of directors of the Glamping Industry Trade Association, which is what GITA stands for.

So I also run my own glamping site. So I’ve got a glamping site called Tractors and Cream, which is a geodesic dome glamping site. We’ve been running our site for the last 10 years and part of what we do is we’ve got a YouTube channel all about glamping, so we help other glamping site owners with different issues that they have or we’ll talk to them about how we’ve done stuff and kind of built a supportive community and that’s part of the reason we started the trade association is because we didn’t really have a trade association or anything.

Like you’ve got the OHI over in America. Don’t know whether Canada comes into the OHI, but we didn’t have any representative organization to like lobby government and things like that in the UK. So we’ve literally been going just over a year now and are gaining members in the glamping world and, yeah, it’s been really interesting.

[00:04:30] Brian Searl: Yeah, I don’t know. That’s a good question. Like do we—I haven’t—does OHI have Canadian members? I assume so, right? If it’s the Outdoor Hospitality Industry Association. I assume. Well, it used to be called ARVC, so I think it was American. So maybe a little bit. I don’t know if Canadians are actually a part of that. We should relabel it if it is. It should be called CAGA, right? Canadian American Glamping Association?

[00:04:47] Vicki Jones: For sure, yeah.

[00:04:49] Brian Searl: If they come first for us and US comes first for you guys? Different acronyms everywhere.

Okay. So we typically start this show off like we always do asking what’s come across your desk in the last month since we’ve all been together. Let’s start there. What—anything that you guys feel is super important? I know you guys were talking about the upcoming Tampa RV show that’s coming up. Anything else that you guys want to bring up?

[00:05:10] Phil Ingrassia: Yeah, I guess I can kick it off. In the US, January really starts the winter show season. And as you mentioned, one of the largest shows in the country is out—door show at the Florida State Fairgrounds. It’s the Florida RV Trade Association’s SuperShow. And Eleonore and I will both be down there next week. They have an Industry Day where dealers and other people from within the industry, including campgrounds, can go before the crowds of consumers arrive that week. And it is a very big show. And it’s great to be able to go down there as an industry person, see the show, and then welcome all the people that are potential buyers.

There’s also large shows kicking off this month in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and in Ohio, the Cleveland RV show is getting ready to—I think it starts today actually, January 7th and goes through the weekend. And it’s a special show. They’ve been for years in Cleveland’s IX Center, which is a very large indoor show space, but they’re redeveloping the IX Center and so this will be the final show at—for Cleveland at that particular location. I do think they’re going to continue the show at a different place, but so yeah, the show season is getting underway and we’ll be watching it very closely because a lot of times it can be a bellwether for how the whole year kicks off for the US RV industry.

[00:06:39] Brian Searl: So what is the exact attendance going to be at the Florida Tampa show, Phil? I want to just give me a number and I just want to see if you’re right.

[00:06:45] Phil Ingrassia: Yeah, I don’t—I really—I don’t know. I—they have hun—literally.

[00:06:49] Brian Searl: No, you don’t. I just want—72,634?

[00:06:52] Phil Ingrassia: Yeah, no, something—maybe. I don’t know.

[00:06:55] Brian Searl: Okay. All right. Phil is not going to give us a prediction.

[00:06:58] Phil Ingrassia: It’s a big show. Let’s put it that way.

[00:06:59] Brian Searl: Eleonore, how many people are going to be there? Give us a prediction.

[00:07:02] Eleonore Hamm: I have no idea. It’s just—it’s huge. I—I cannot even guess. I could look at the numbers from last year and add some.

[00:07:07] Brian Searl: I don’t even know what those are yet. I assume it was in the 70,000s, that’s why I just made up a number, but. Scott, do you know? You’re the data guy.

[00:07:14] Scott Bahr: I don’t have it all in my brain.

[00:07:16] Eleonore Hamm: No, I’d have to search.

[00:07:18] Scott Bahr: I’m going to ask while we talk, but.

[00:07:19] Brian Searl: All right. So what else has come across you guys’s desk that you think is important for us to talk about and bring up?

[00:07:25] Eleonore Hamm: I was just going to echo what kind of what Phil said from our side in Canada. We’ve got the first two shows coming up will be the Calgary RV Show. Brian, I don’t know if you’re going to plan on attending, but and then the Halifax RV Show as well. And really we do try to monitor the show attendance to see and then what the sentiment for sales are just to try to gauge what—because they’re very good indicators usually in terms of what’s going to be happening in the industry moving forward.

I think we’re still predicting 2026 will be similar to 2025, probably somewhat flat, not a lot of growth. But on the positive side, we’ve been seeing some really good numbers of visitors and traffic to the Go RVing Canada website. So our marketing site that markets the lifestyle. So we’re hoping that some of those people will then take the initiative and attend some of the shows and continue exploring the RV lifestyle and what we have to offer.

[00:08:14] Brian Searl: 68,612 people.

[00:08:18] Phil Ingrassia: There you go. You were pretty close.

[00:08:19] Brian Searl: In 2025. So that’s how many attended in 2025. I’m going to ask AI to predict the attendance for 2026. And we’ll see what it says in a second.

[00:08:30] Vicki Jones: Wow, I’m jealous that you have these massive shows. We just don’t have anything like that in the UK. We have—we have really like small scale shows. Like our biggest show is probably the Glamping Show that we have in September. We’ve got something called the Land, Leisure and Tourism Show, which is all holiday parks. There’s nothing really for—we don’t call it RVs, recreational vehicles. We—it’s caravan and camping. And there’s nothing that sort of size.

And we’ve got maybe one or two shows across the whole of the UK in the year, whereas you’ve got like an amazing choice of different places you can go. So, yeah, I need to come to America and go to some of these shows. We did go to the Glamping Show Americas a couple of years ago and that was like next level compared to what we’ve got in the UK. So, yeah, good excuse to come over to the other side of the pond.

[00:09:16] Brian Searl: To be fair, I think we have more land and more people, so it skews our numbers a little bit higher. We cheat in that way. The UK has a little bit less. But I think, I think—at one point I’m hopeful, Scott, like maybe you and I can take over the Florida Tampa Show one year before we die. Since I’m next, because I’m going to live to be like 150, 200 years with AI, so we’ll have plenty of time. I want to make it like a Woodstock type thing. I think if we added like all kinds of music and concert performances, we could drive that attendance to 500,000 easy. You want to help Phil?

[00:09:46] Phil Ingrassia: You’ll have to talk to our friends at the Florida RV Trade Group about that.

[00:09:51] Brian Searl: I just want to bring in like Metallica and I think it would be really cool. You could get some new people interested in the RV lifestyle that never considered it before.

This is what prediction reigns: Conservative is 64,000. Most likely is 70,000, which would be up 2,000 from last year. Optimistic is 74,000. I feel like it’s just hedging its bets. So.

[00:10:13] Eleonore Hamm: We could have probably come up with that.

[00:10:15] Brian Searl: Yeah, that wasn’t really very creative.

[00:10:16] Phil Ingrassia: The weather’s going to be good. I checked the weather for next week and it should be good. That—that should help us get up to the higher end of that prediction.

[00:10:24] Brian Searl: Do most of the people come from Florida to that show or do they travel from all over or?

[00:10:28] Phil Ingrassia: It’s a combination of Florida residents, snowbirds, and people coming in from all over the Southeast. It is a huge regional show because in Florida you’ve got a microcosm of the whole US market because you’ve got all the major player dealers in that market. Blue Compass, Camping World, Lazy Days, now Campers Inn, and then a number of regional players be—beyond those national chains. La Mesa, and some of the other big ones. So it’s—those dealers are pushing attendance and of course Florida RV Trade Association puts a lot into marketing to get people there as well.

[00:11:07] Brian Searl: Scott, what have you heard about—because—cause I’ve heard some anecdotal—not real—I don’t have proof, although I probably do have proof in the data that I have now, but I haven’t looked at that proof—anec—we’ll call it anecdotal for now. Scott, what have you heard about like the occupancy in Florida parks over this winter so far? Because I’m wondering if that may play either a positive or negative impact on the attendance of the shows.

[00:11:28] Scott Bahr: Occupancy is going to be probably a little bit down overall. The Canadian market is impacting that. Sorry, but.

[00:11:36] Eleonore Hamm: No, we know. It’s okay.

[00:11:39] Brian Searl: It’s not your—it’s not Eleonore and I’s fault, to be clear. This is a self-inflicted wound, okay guys?

[00:11:43] Scott Bahr: I think it is. I think you’re causing it. No, but when you consider that Canadians don’t make a huge percentage of the stays, but it’s enough that—that it does create an impact. And so everything else being constant, you’re going to see occupancy down a little bit. It would just due to that. European travel is going to be way down too. It doesn’t make a huge segment of the stays in Florida and the lower time of snowbirds, but it is—it’s enough that it might be noticeable. One of the things we might be seeing is that the snowbirds might not be staying quite as long as in the past. So I’d keep an eye out for that. I’ve heard just heard rumblings about that that people are—it’s not anything about booking window, it’s about actually how long they stay. Those are some factors to keep an eye on.

Interest remains high. We—we can’t hang our hats on it necessarily. And I won’t hang my hat on it cause I—you’d see how gross my hair is from being outside. The—but it’s one of those factors that impacts these things. I just as an aside for example, I live in Maine, in our stays overall from Canada were way down. So some of the parks, especially on the coast, Old Orchard Beach is a big destination among people from Quebec. And but what happened was because there was now some more capacity there, other regional guests showed up. So they made up for it a little bit. And we may see that a little bit in the market like Florida.

[00:13:19] Brian Searl: It was al—it’s always interesting to me—and maybe there’s an answer to this question that somebody tracks and I’ve just never asked the question, but why I brought you into that Scott was I was always curious for the RV shows, what’s the biggest attendance? And obviously it varies depending on state and region and Florida and Quartzsite, for example, are bigger shows that attract people from other areas of the country. But how much of the people that attend those are locals versus how many are snowbirds who always come to the area who are like, I just want to see the latest, greatest, coolest stuff? And then how much are the people who come from out of state? Has that ever been studied Phil or?

[00:13:51] Phil Ingrassia: I’m sure that the shows have some demographic profile of who comes, but I can tell you that they—they do—some of the larger shows especially, which includes the—the show in Hershey, Pennsylvania in September, they do adjacent events with these shows. So they invite RVers to come in and a lot of times these people are coming from out of state and will actually camp at the show or nearby the show to check it out.

And other shows are really—for instance, I think the Cleveland show is a good example of a regional show that really will pull in from just basically that—that Northeast Ohio and maybe a little bit of Michigan area. But that’s a big show too. But they don’t have the—the multi-state type of pull I—I wouldn’t think.

[00:14:40] Brian Searl: Yeah, I’ve been to the Cleveland RV show once or twice cause I—I grew up there. I was born in Akron, so.

[00:14:46] Phil Ingrassia: It’s their 48th annual, so it’s been around for a long time.

[00:14:49] Brian Searl: Yeah, they’ve been talking about shutting down the I-X Center for I feel like for 20 years. And then they’re like, no, no, we’ll just keep it around for another five years. But you’re saying they’re actually going to do it this time? For sure?

[00:14:57] Phil Ingrassia: This is it. Yep. This is the last show there.

[00:15:02] Brian Searl: Hopefully they’ll find another good venue.

[00:15:03] Phil Ingrassia: Yeah, I hope so.

[00:15:05] Brian Searl: I just want to—I just want to see they have a dancing—they have a squirrel that waterskis at that show that always comes back. So great. It’s the best part—okay, other than the amazing RVs, the squirrel’s better guys. I’m sorry. The squirrel’s better than the RV. It’s a close—it’s a close tie. It’s a close thing, but okay.

So what else do we have to talk about? I know we want to get into booking windows. I know we want to get into some data that we were talking about, about—about that that Scott and I have been gathering. We’re working on for MC Hospitality Highlights. We’re going to be bringing that back this month and reporting on some other interesting data as well. I definitely want to get to Rachel and talk about Great Parks and things like that. Is there anything else that we think we should be covering? We’ll cover data in a second, but like the whole show is about data, but is there anything else you guys think we should be talking about? What does the RV industry look like in 2026, Phil? For the United States? For—

[00:15:52] Phil Ingrassia: Um, like what Eleonore said, we’re looking at a stair step, low single-digit increase in sales and shipments in 2026. The things that are positive that are going on: We’ve got gas prices reasonable, interest rates have gone down since this time last year. But there’s still some uncertainty out in the consumer base about uncertainty regarding tariff situation, foreign affairs, things that are volatile that create some dents in consumer sentiment.

And that’s what the industry watches on because if consumer sentiment improves, typically discretionary purchase of not only RVs, but boats and power sports typically increases. Another thing we’re looking at is because of some tax cuts that were passed last year by Congress, people in the US should be getting larger tax returns. And there’s been a lot of studies showing that when people get a lump sum tax return—

[00:16:50] Brian Searl: They spend it.

[00:16:51] Phil Ingrassia: A lot of times they’re going to buy a toy or a discretionary purchase. And RVs and boats should get some kind of lift from that. But right now it’s a stair step growth scenario here in the US.

[00:17:05] Brian Searl: If it doesn’t go as good as you think it’s going to go, Phil, you just talk to me. We’ll—there’s a new territory in Venezuela we can expand to. I’m going to get myself canceled probably at some of this point, but. Okay. So Rachel, tell us about Great Parks.

[00:17:21] Rachel Hodge: Yeah, for sure. So like I said at the start of the show, Great Parks is a county park system, that’s its own political subdivision. We have three campgrounds. One larger campground has 121 sites. Most of those are tent and small camper RV sites, about 71 of those. And then we made some upgrades last year to expand the pull-through and the full hookup sites. So we’ve got 12 pull-throughs now, 32 back-in sites, and then we have six rustic cabins.

I’m sure nothing like the glamping experiences that I’ve heard about. I’ve watched a couple episodes of this podcast in preparation and I’ve looked up some really cool places. Our cabins, not as nice as those. Rustic is the right word. But they do have air conditioning, so that’s good. And then we have two other small campgrounds that are mainly for tent camping. One’s strictly pods, tents, very primitive, no amenities on site. And then the other one has just under 50 tent and small camper sites, and then it has a shower house and things like that.

[00:18:33] Brian Searl: So I know this show is mostly about data trends and insights for our first week here. So I’m curious, how does that—how do you guys track that from a—we talked about how you’re a county park system, but you have the board and the I think chairman you said you report to, CEO. How do you guys track those dynamics? How do you guys pay attention to data? How does that impact what you guys do in your operations?

[00:18:53] Rachel Hodge: Yeah, for sure. So it’s definitely a balance because we are responsible for stewarding public land and taxpayer dollars. So at the end of the day, what the taxpayers and what our stakeholders in the community are looking for is what we’re really building towards. And then trying to, in addition to what they’re telling us that they want through our master plan process and surveys and things like that, then incorporating that market data.

Part of that master plan process, which we implemented in 2019, was to increase the unique camping experiences in our region. So we made some of those additions at the Winton Woods facility. We also took like the shower house amenity down to the studs and brought it back to life, with showers, restrooms, and then laundry facilities.

And we have to balance that kind of those amenities, things that people want, upgraded electric, Wi-Fi, nice showers and things, with our conservation focus, because we’re also a conservation agency. So taking the time during design and build to also implement those sustainable practices. So when we did the expansion last year at Winton Woods for the first half of the year really, we added seven greywater stations as well to the facility to bring our guests into our big mission of sustainability, mainly water conservation in that place.

[00:20:32] Brian Searl: So as you’re studying this and trying to—I know your title is Director of Guest Experiences—as you’re studying this and you’re trying to figure out what guests want. Obviously there’s some standard things that you can take away from the data that like Scott and KOA put out, or the data that RVIA puts out or things like that, that we know are trending in private parks, the types of RVs that are being sold. Are there other data sources that you’re going after or paying attention to that you’re looking at like how to—because you—so you talked about your unique challenge of balancing con—conservation. But are there ways that you feel like there’s a target demographic or market that you can appeal to as the county type park that has to blend that together? Whereas like you’re—because you’re clearly different than a private park who would—not saying they wouldn’t care about that, but that they don’t have a mandate to care about that.

[00:21:14] Rachel Hodge: Yeah, for sure. I think that when we’re playing this balancing act, we’re obviously looking at the data for camping, for RVs, for the types of folks and people who we need to attract for those. But then we’re also looking across all of our destinations and our facilities on what guests need at all of our locations. So that’s also part of it. Who are we attracting when we’re doing our education programming? When we’re doing our adventure programming on Winton Lake, which is in the campground, some of the sites back up to the lake.

For us it’s mainly families with a couple young children and then we have our retirees who are doing their RV, they’re going around mostly during the week. And then during certain times of the year, we are seeing our family population bloom, mostly in our tri-state area, in our region, with—we have some huge events that we do every year. Creepy Campouts is one of them. It’s a Halloween focused event where on the weekends in October and then normally the last weekend in September, we are inviting guests to design their own spooky campsite and they get awards, they do things.

And we’ve had families coming for every year that we’ve been operating it, 20 plus years. So it’s that kind of generational pull, that nostalgia we get to play off of for some of our facilities, because people have been growing up in these parks. Yeah. So that also helps with us to keep that clientele coming back year after year to our places.

[00:22:54] Brian Searl: What’s something that you’re really excited about for 2026?

[00:22:57] Rachel Hodge: I’m excited to have the Winton Woods campground open for the full year. Like I said, we were doing these renovations last year, so until Memorial Day weekend, we were not open full swing. And that’s a big hit to the revenue line obviously. So we were updating all that electric, doing the shower house, we had a bunch of the roads tore up in that—inside the campground itself.

So being able to see the facility open to its full capacity, expanded capacity this year, really looking forward to that. And seeing how the public engages with the new amenities that are available to them.

[00:23:38] Brian Searl: Awesome. Thank you. I appreciate you sharing. If—please stick around and if you have any other questions for anybody else here, like we’ll get back to you here and there and in and out, we’ll have a question at the end. But please feel free to ask questions of anybody else here too if there’s something you want to know. Cause the less I talk the better. Vicki, same question to you for GITA about trends, data, things that you’re looking ahead to in 2026. Like how do you gather that stuff in the UK?

[00:23:58] Vicki Jones: So we’re really trying to connect everybody because there’s so much online now. And obviously we’re scattered across the country, but we’re lucky in the UK that actually we’re so condensed that really you can get anywhere within a five-hour drive, which is really useful to us. So we’re looking at trying to connect people in real life more. So we’re starting our—we’ve got our first GITA Summit in the spring. So that will be in May. So we’re trying to get everybody together, all the members and do some in-person discussions and talks and education things and get the suppliers on board.

So it’s—so obviously the trade association is for everybody, for suppliers, for glamping site owners to come together. And yeah, so we’re really trying to connect everybody is our plan for 2026. Because I think we are getting oversaturated with online stuff.

So data-wise, we haven’t really got a huge capacity for working out data. We’ve—we’re a volunteer team, so we’ve got one—one actual kind of member of staff who’s doing day-to-day the consulting with the government and the kind of legal stuff that we need to do. And then the rest of the board is made up of volunteers. So they’re volunteers of—like across suppliers and across—I’m really sorry if you hear weird noises, but my son is getting ready for bed.

[00:25:23] Brian Searl: You’re totally fine. I have a dog sitting here, everything’s great.

[00:25:27] Vicki Jones: So, yeah, so we’re not in a position because we all run our own businesses to—to take time to—to gather any data. So we’re really heavily relying on what we’re told by our members and what it’s something that we need to look at for 2026. And so if you’ve got any tips for—for kind of, yeah, how we would go about gathering data from people, we’d be much appreciated to hear it.

[00:25:50] Brian Searl: I think that I will let Scott take that question after I say that Scott, do you want to in—are you interested in gathering some data for the Glamping Industry Trade Association in UK maybe?

[00:25:59] Scott Bahr: I would love to.

[00:26:00] Brian Searl: I think I would love to too. We’re—we’re willing to help Vicki.

[00:26:03] Vicki Jones: Oh, that would be amazing.

[00:26:04] Brian Searl: I probably have a price tag cause he’s actually an expert, but I would be willing to do something for free.

[00:26:10] Vicki Jones: Yeah, it’s just we put out a couple of surveys, but getting people to actually respond to these surveys is very hit and miss. And as I say, we’ve only got 120 members. And we know that the Glamping Industry in the UK, we’ve got around 5,000 glamping sites. So it’s having no marketing budget and trying to get the word out, having to do everything on a shoestring essentially until we can gather enough momentum for it, because it’s still very new.

We’re trying to keep our prices as competitive as possible to get people in, but at the same time we’ve got overheads. So that’s what we’re trying to do with connecting people and getting people together and just trying to get everybody in the same space. So yeah, any yeah, as I say, any help would be massively appreciated.

[00:26:49] Scott Bahr: No, I’d love to talk to you more about it at some point. There’s a lot we can do. I—because of my—I always tell stories of the old days and one of them was I used to work for a very large corporation and one year they cut my entire research budget. And that year we did more research than we did any other year. Just because we had to get really creative and we had to figure some things out.

So, anyway, my—my take on this, there—there’s always options. There’s always options to do the research and there’s some different ways that you can approach how you contact the people. We see as an industry—and by the way, don’t let non-response get you down because it happens to everyone. And as an industry we’re seeing it a lot. Or we’ve seen our response rates really drop. So we’ve had to work a lot harder to—to get creative. And but yeah, I’d absolutely love to talk to you more—more about it at some point and we can figure something out.

And I really—I like the fact that you’re already doing something. You’re executing some stuff, you’re doing some discussions. That you—I think you mentioned you’re doing some discussion groups and so on. It’s a great way to get rolling and to start gathering information from people.

[00:27:58] Brian Searl: Yeah, for the people who are watching this show for education and entertainment—so basically everybody’s watching the show—just hold on one second. Vicki, we should set up a call with you and Scott and I. We’re just going to do business for a second guys, so just close your eyes. But I really—I think we can help you and I don’t want to charge you anything, but I think I have a way cause Scott knows the data that I’ve been collecting in North America that’s not public yet. I guess it is now. Hi everybody. But I think we have some good ways that you could report on some data that would be useful to your members that wouldn’t require like a big research budget or things like that. So—

[00:28:26] Scott Bahr: Absolutely. And we have a lot of historical—Brian has a huge database set. I have a lot of historical data that is available that is for public use.

[00:28:36] Brian Searl: But I can also gather it in real time about the glamping industry and all the businesses in—I think it would be really interesting. We should set up a call.

[00:28:44] Vicki Jones: Yeah, amazing. Thank you.

[00:28:46] Brian Searl: Okay, welcome back everybody to the show. We just had a brief commercial break. Phil’s back with us. Welcome back Phil. Okay. What are you looking forward to in 2026, Vicki? For the glamping industry?

[00:28:55] Vicki Jones: Um, so again, I’m really excited about getting together with people and doing more what I would call like road trips. So I also work for ResNexus, who are a property management software. So that was—that all came about from having the YouTube channel. I became a brand ambassador for ResNexus, which is actually an American, US-based company. So building this—building ResNexus in the UK has also enabled me to—because it all works so well together. Having the YouTube channel, having GITA, having ResNexus, it all works really well.

So I’m really—I’ve gone on road trips for ResNexus, to GITA members to talk one-on-one with people about how they’re finding the industry, what they want out of a trade association, what they want out of property management software. And I find those one-to-one chats with people are so valuable because then you can sit down over a cup of tea and really get to grips—and I know it’s hugely time consuming. We make a YouTube video at the same time so it’s all—it all works quite well together. But I’m really looking forward to doing more in-person connection, I think.

And also we started our GITA podcast last year, which Brian’s been on. And I think doing more of those conversations, having conversations with experts in the industry. I just want to get as much knowledge to people as possible to make their lives easier. Like from starting the glamping site 10 years ago when we didn’t have a clue what we were doing, we didn’t—barely even knew what glamping was. Having no real source of information anywhere and just winging it as we went through. I think if I can—or we generally can help educate people and help them not make mistakes, costly mistakes, I think that’s what I’m all about, collaboration over competition.

[00:30:39] Brian Searl: Awesome. I’m excited for it to see what happens in 2026. Does anybody else have anything we should be talking about before we dive into booking windows with Scott? Because it’s some interesting research that we want to cover on our data and trends episode. No? You’re all just going to—okay. All right.

Scott. So we’ve been doing some research. For those of you who don’t know, we did—we started MC Hospitality Highlights, which was a data—or researcher report for Modern Campground, what was it like almost three years ago now Scott? But we took like last year off.

[00:31:07] Scott Bahr: We kind of took last year off, yeah.

[00:31:09] Brian Searl: Yeah, we had too much stuff going on in both of our companies. We were experiencing some really nice growth. We started like the Outwired podcast and then I just had a lot to do with AI and stuff like that that I’m building at my company. But we’re back. We’re going to bring MC Hospitality Highlights back this month and hopefully do it every month this year. And the first one we’re going to talk about is booking windows. And so Scott’s got some really interesting data. He’s going to talk a little bit about a preview for that and then we’ll have a report coming out here in the next few weeks. What do you got Scott?

[00:31:34] Scott Bahr: Sure. With—with a—in terms of the booking window, there’s a—this is—there’s a lot of talk about this across the industry. That it’s changing and it’s all over the place and people are trying to get a handle on it. The first thing I think that to keep in mind is that the booking window in general right now is vastly different than it was say 10 years ago.

As an example, when I first started working in this industry, we asked this question of people like what’s your booking window? Because campgrounds are interested in that. And so we found that the booking window was pretty short at that time honestly. And that was because a lot of campgrounds weren’t at capacity. It was easy to get a campsite. RVers—I think at one of the surveys we did, something like 60% of RVers at that time took at least one trip where they didn’t make any reservations at all. Compare that to a couple of years ago, we asked the same question, it was 9%. So, you have a vastly changing market overall.

I just—I’m going to just give a little background because I think it’s important to keep this in context of where we’re at now. So—

[00:32:42] Brian Searl: So you said 90% of people a few years ago make reservations in advance?

[00:32:46] Scott Bahr: No, no.

[00:32:47] Brian Searl: Just to clarify, I probably just missed it cause I’m old and have bad hearing.

[00:32:50] Scott Bahr: Yeah, correct. That is correct. So yeah, 90% made advanced reservations. They did not take last minute trips. They didn’t just go out and—

[00:33:00] Brian Searl: Okay.

[00:33:01] Scott Bahr: So that changed a lot. It was—the RV industry in many cases—and Phil could attest to this probably better than me—is that it was for years and years, a lot of people bought RVs because they wanted to be able to do that. You have a traveling home. You can take spontaneous trips, you can stay wherever you want. You don’t have to make all these plans. And then when COVID hit and the campgrounds got really packed, people couldn’t do that anymore.

So you had some other things happened with in terms of boondocking and so on, but really to focus on the campground industry and the booking part of this, what you had was people splitting out where you had more people, most people really booking as far out as they could. Because the campgrounds were packed, the good campgrounds, the good sites filled up immediately. So everybody was trying to book way in advance, as far in advance as they could.

Now, the last probably three years, what you’ve seen is there’s a split and—and that split is becoming more prominent. And I’ll get to that when I start talking about the most recent survey we did. Is that you had people who again wanted to take those spontaneous trips. Not—because I want to dif—make a—there’s a difference between someone who wants to take a spontaneous trip, which is: it’s—I just want to get up and go somewhere. Or I’m going to travel 500 miles across the country and I’m just going to stop wherever along the way and not worry about it. But in—in most cases it’s that idea that I just want to be spontaneous in my travel versus the person who shortens their booking window for other reasons.

[00:34:38] Brian Searl: Could be financial. It could be weather. It could be work or school commitments and so on.

[00:34:44] Scott Bahr: Uncertainty.

[00:34:46] Brian Searl: Un—the uncertainty and the sentiment. Phil talked about this earlier, sentiment and how important that is in how people plan.

[00:34:54] Scott Bahr: So what we have now are the group of people who are shortening the booking window—or who say that they’re going to shorten the booking window—is increasing. We still have the people who want to do spontaneous trips. That’s fairly constant, but what we’re see—

[00:35:09] Brian Searl: Is that a small number? Or you said it already. Is—is that a small number of people who want to do spontaneous stuff?

[00:35:15] Scott Bahr: No, it’s actually fairly large.

[00:35:16] Brian Searl: Really, okay.

[00:35:17] Scott Bahr: People who want to do it is 42%. 42% of people esp—and this would—I would focus a little bit more on the RVers here, it’s slightly higher. The RVer crew is the one that wants to take that spontaneous trip. Because again, it’s easier for them.

[00:35:32] Brian Searl: Yeah, they already own their RV. Yeah. Okay.

[00:35:34] Scott Bahr: Yep. Yeah, it’s—that’s the desire. They don’t actually do that. And that—that’s one of the things I want to distinguish here is between what people say and what they actually do. So, the—because for a lot of people it’s, yeah, I’d love to do that. And then when the time comes like people will tell you, I’m going to take a solo trip this year and then they drive out to a trail head somewhere or something. I don’t like this. I’m going to go get a hotel. So the intentions are there and the sentiment is there, but the follow through doesn’t always come along with that. So—

[00:36:06] Brian Searl: It’s a great time to talk about it because New Year’s Eve and New Year’s resolutions and all the people who aren’t going to gyms right now.

[00:36:11] Scott Bahr: Yep. Exactly, exactly. It’s—so what we have now is about—a little bit over half the people are saying that they’re booking their trips within a month of the trip. That’s pretty high. It’s higher than most other parts of hospitality. In other parts of hospitality it—it’s not—it’s usually a little bit further out honestly. And—but that 50% threshold is something that we’ve seen not just in—in camping and outdoor hospitality, but in some other sectors as well. It’s—depends on the economy and—and some other factors. But a month is not really a lot of time. Especially when you consider during COVID it was—most everyone was booking several months out. And so—but now people don’t really have to.

But the big part of this is short—a shortened booking window overall when you separate that from the people who want to take spontaneous trips. People who want to take spontaneous trips, that’s a positive sign. That’s good because people—they want to take trips and they like it and they like that part of it. But people who are just shortening the booking window is something to keep an eye on because what happens is when someone delays anything, the chances of them doing it decrease a lot. We can go back to New Year’s resolutions. It’s like, ah, I’m not going to go to the gym today. I’m going to start next week.

[00:37:37] Brian Searl: Yeah, I’ve got—I’m staring at my home gym and I haven’t used it in two weeks.

[00:37:41] Scott Bahr: So it’s—and we’ve—we see this. We—it happens like—you will—we’ve asked questions in the past about people delaying their trips. Are you going to delay your trips to later in the season? And that—they’ll say, yeah, I’m going to go in the fall this year. And then the fall comes and then a lot of them don’t go. Because life happens in the interim. Things happen. And whenever someone tells you that they’ll probably do it, they probably won’t. And so what we try to do is measure that softness in there. That soft kind of responses zone. The people who definitely say, that’s a little bit better. Even those—so again, getting back to the booking window part of this, is if someone’s shortening their booking window, they’re delaying making plans.

They’re delaying it for—as I mentioned, some of—in some of the reasons we’ve seen that people mention are uncertainty about pricing, uncertainty about work, family obligations. All those things come into play. Just uncertainty about the economy and gas prices. Phil, you mentioned gas prices coming down. That’s one thing that we can actually I think start removing from the consideration set because I—I think the future is—is showing that gas prices are at least going to be steady for quite a while. If not going down even more.

[00:39:02] Brian Searl: Yeah, we’ve got a new supply. We talked about that earlier.

[00:39:04] Scott Bahr: And that’s helpful for people because they know they can plan on that cost. So they—they know how much it—it’s going to impact them in their planning. So the shortened booking window is—again, we’re seeing over half the people are say they’re going to plan their trips within a month. And that—those people who are shortening their booking window, again as I mentioned, the most common reasons are life factors. Life factors. But don’t downplay the external factors like chaos. Instability.

[00:39:37] Brian Searl: Because those impact the life factors too, right?

[00:39:40] Scott Bahr: Correct. Consumer sentiment is a big one to keep an eye on. As—and what’s the tone? What’s the tone out there? How are people talking? How are they referring to travel and their plans? Those things are—it sounds nebulous I know, but it’s true. When you consider that much of our economy is driven by sentiment, consumer sentiment. That’s—the stock market runs on consumer sentiment in many cases.

So what you have then is people pay attention to that. They pay attention to what’s local especially. What’s happening around them. How is their local economy? And all those things are going to impact whether or not they make plans much further out. The one—the positive part that I would say about all this is that what we’re seeing are the people who are the most avid campers, glampers, RVers, are the ones less likely to shorten their booking window. It is the most reliable group we have and the one thing we’ve seen over the last couple of years is we’ve increased the number of those people in our ranks. So that’s a good thing. And that’s—it’s what’s helping keep us steady.

So they—they know how to make those adjustments. They know how to—you know, have a plan. They know that they’re going to go to the same place every year. And that’s one of the things that we look for too. If they know they’re going to the same place on about the same site every year, they’re going to book it as far out as they can because that’s—it’s part of what they do. What holds other people back though is when they can’t—they want to go to a destination, they can’t get a—a site or they can’t get the type of site they want. Those things will help push people to plan a little bit further out. For the health of the industry overall, I would encourage people to book further out. I would encourage them to make plans now. So anyone who’s in marketing, Brian, is—the idea is that get people to book early. Early and often as they say. And get those plans locked in because that’s—that—again, the further—the longer they wait—

[00:41:47] Brian Searl: Because we’re all people too. We’re owners of camp—I’m not cause I’m not brave enough, but you—we’re—most of us on watching the show are owners of campgrounds. And for our own mental health, book early. Please. So we don’t have to panic and worry whether it’s coming. Is that what you were going to say Scott or something else?

[00:42:03] Scott Bahr: Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, and people worry about their budgets. They worry about what’s going on. Yeah. Personally, the uncertainty of prices, and this is something Brian and I—we’ve talked about this too, that—the idea of how much it costs to stay at a campground or glamping park.

[00:42:21] Brian Searl: Oh, we have that data.

[00:42:22] Scott Bahr: There’s the perception is that the prices are—keep going up. But what we’ve seen is prices haven’t. Prices haven’t gone up. And I consider that as something—an opportunity for campground owners and managers to communicate with people.

[00:42:36] Brian Searl: It depends on where you are though. Like that—like we’ll—we’ll study this later Scott, but we ran a data point that showed it’s three times more expensive to camp in the Northeast of the United States than it is in Nebraska.

[00:42:47] Scott Bahr: That’s a regional difference.

[00:42:48] Brian Searl: Yes, for sure. But it’s interesting data though on the pricing and how much it’s gone up or down or—

[00:42:54] Scott Bahr: That regional stuff—it’s like I mentioned earlier—local. What’s happening at the local level obviously impacts all these things. So it depends where you’re drawing from. But people are staying closer to home. They want to have adventures closer to home. What we’re seeing overall that—as well—that people are are booking fewer trips. But they want to take more meaningful types of trips, maybe a little bit longer. Whereas just a few years ago it was people were—wanted to camp a bunch, take a bunch of shorter trips. But now, even though they’re staying closer to home, they—they are taking trips that are a little bit longer and maybe staying closer to home helps them do that.

And all this applies to that idea that when someone is considering booking a campsite that, you know, the calculus they’re doing is: what’s my budget? What’s—where am I going? What’s the weather? What’s the—what’s going on externally? What factors are im—impacting the—the area I’m traveling to? Is there—is—are there disruptions? Are there—again, is there weather? Is there wildfires? Is there hurricanes? Those things—we can’t control any of that. And those things are going to happen anyway. But it comes into play when you’re looking at really trying to boost your camper nights.

So again, to just come back to it again, if—the sooner you can get people to commit to booking, you do it. The other thing to do is when—the idea of pricing is going to be top of mind for a lot of people. It’s just—it just is. The—that you’re—we’re seeing a little bit of a split in the higher income folks are much more likely to go glamping and to stay at higher end parks, to buy Class A motorhomes, Phil. And they’re—but on the other end, people are looking to potentially downgrade a little bit at the type of park or type of site that they pick because they want to save a little bit of money.

And one of the things I’ve done by the way, if anyone is interested in, I don’t charge, it’s free, is that it’s a trip calculator on how to calculate the cost of a trip. For however many people are in your group, where you’re going, and how you plan to stay. And I think that—that kind of thing is something that if you’re a campground owner is something that you could think about doing. For example, the one I did initially was because of where I live in Maine, we get a lot of people from Boston who come up here to our area to—for vacation. Is what does it cost for a family of four to come up for a weekend? The least expensive by the way is to stay in a tent and cook all your meals at the campground. But, Phil, number two, bring your RV, if you own your RV and cook your meals at the campground. That is the second least expensive.

[00:45:32] Brian Searl: Is there anything—sorry, please finish. I thought you were done sir.

[00:45:35] Scott Bahr: No, that’s—I was rambling on about stuff that has nothing to do really with booking windows other than talking about costs. I’m talking about—I’m going to be talking about making biscuits in a Dutch oven here pretty quick, so.

[00:45:46] Brian Searl: Well give us—two statistics, is there a couple statistics from the data that I threw at you really quickly before the show that you think is interesting we could give people a couple data points on that is hard data of what we have? And then I want to get to the last part of the show.

[00:45:58] Scott Bahr: Yeah. I—I think the—um—that the percentage drop in that nine—nine percentage point drop in sold out inventory in that 50 to 30 day timeframe, which is the one I was talking about, is one of those issues that—that is—it’s a little bit worrisome. But it’s also that indicator of people’s intentions not fitting with their actual behavior. That—that’s—that to me stood out Brian, what you said—what you sent along. The—the 75% sold out figure in that zero to seven day window and how—

[00:46:29] Brian Searl: It actually understates actual occupancy because of the seasonal stuff. People just need to keep an eye on some of that. The—and how pricing—you know, the pricing does impact those—the occupancy rates overall too. That people should really again look at your pricing. Just look at where you’re at. Look at where the competition is and look—but really evaluate who your guests are too. It’s something that you can use as a way to—to maybe bring some people in or at least create a dialogue with them.

[00:47:01] Vicki Jones: I have a question. But—uh—people are—customers are holding off for last minute deals. Do you think us as owners should stand our ground a bit and not panic at the last minute and reduce the prices?

[00:47:14] Scott Bahr: Oh, that—that is a great question. We do know that that short—

[00:47:18] Brian Searl: You have one minute Scott. We have to finish.

[00:47:19] Scott Bahr: That shortened booking window is impacted by people who are looking for deals. That’s part of what they’re doing. They are seeking deals. Should you hold off? Probably. I would think that the—they’re—if they want to go on vacation, they’re going to show up. But I would—and if someone’s going to beat you up on price too much, then you know, they’re going to—that’s what they’re going to be focused on the whole stay. So. That’s easy for me to say. I’m not a campground owner. I’m just saying that—

[00:47:46] Brian Searl: There’s so many external factors that goes into it too. What again, what is the uncertainty? What is the reason that they’re shortening their booking window or not? Is it spontaneous? Is it not? There’s—and there’s—there’s so many reasons to say maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t Vicki, I think is the answer. That’s a terrible answer. A non-answer. Just to study your market and determine that kind of.

[00:48:06] Scott Bahr: But part of it too is—I’m just an advocate of having people in the parks. It’s maybe there’s something you offer and maybe you give them some free firewood and a six pack or something for a last minute stay—for a deal. I don’t know. I’m just—I’m—

[00:48:19] Brian Searl: But we’re doing a lot with competitor analysis too and we’ll have a new product for that out in a little bit. But it’s the same thing that we see there is like, what is the reason that they’re not coming, I already have covered. But what is the occupancy in your area? Are your competitors full? Is it just you that’s lagging behind Vicki, for example. And then maybe you need to offer deals. But if—if there’s nobody in your area, like there’s probably not anybody coming. So then at that point, would you rather have somebody in the site for less or nobody at all? Whereas if all your competitors are full, maybe it’s a last minute thing and they’ll still show up.

[00:48:52] Vicki Jones: Yeah. With having the booking platform, we’re talk—we’re encouraging people in a revenue management kind of situation to do their yield management and to look at—you can set rules so that if it’s a week out and you’ve not sold it yet, you can reduce the price. You—they look at—you can look at your occupancy and reduce the price or increase the price depending on your occupancy. So sometimes the campgrounds and the glamping sites are just doing it automatically because that’s what their revenue management software has told them to do. And so I’m wondering like—we—we don’t discount our prices. We stick to our prices at our glamping site because I would hate somebody who’s been sensible enough to book in advance—and who are the kind of people I want them to book in advance—then being discouraged from doing that and thinking I’ll just wait till last minute. And that is not how I want to operate the business. I want people to book way in advance.

[00:49:40] Scott Bahr: I agree. And by the way, people assign—the price they pay is part of the experience. That’s—they put that into account when they’re there. You don’t want them talking about it because you hope your hospitality overrides that, but it is part of the experience. Because if they come in and they’re like telling everybody what a great deal they had, by the way that’s not going to work well for you. Cause other people are going to be like, why didn’t I get the deal kind of thing. The other part of that too is just again, it can erode the value that you’re offering your guests. It’s don’t sell yourself short on the value of what the experience your guests get.

[00:50:17] Brian Searl: All right. So we normally wrap up the show with everybody asking each other a question. I don’t know how far we’ll get into this, but we’re going to try. So typically what we do in the last few minutes of the show—we start this normally at 10 minutes left, we’re starting it with two minutes left, so we’ll see how this is. But so we typically what we do at the end of the show is we go around and have everybody ask one other question, something interesting that you’d like to ask another guest on the show. For example, and I don’t know if Eleonore, if Phil if this show has done it yet. But we typically do—Eleonore if you want to ask one of the other panelists a question, go for it, but then nobody asks the—let’s say Eleonore asked Vicki a question, nobody else can ask Vicki a question. And then we do process of elimination. Vicki asks next. Eleonore, you want to go first since I called on you? Anybody you want to ask a question to? About anything.

[00:50:58] Eleonore Hamm: Yeah, I want to ask Scott about his trip analysis, the cost analysis. Is that—like we had done a survey with Go RVing Canada years ago and it’s very costly for us to update our trip cost analysis. Do you have a specific like tool that you use? Or how—how do you—that—because we—we had five different trips in Canada, dif—with different types of RVs, different types of scenarios. But you said you do this, so I’m just curious as to.

[00:51:24] Scott Bahr: I created it. Mine. Okay. So. It’s my algorithm. So yeah, that’s why I can share it with anyone I want to. If you—I should get on a meeting with you and I’ll—we can—Yep.

[00:51:35] Eleonore Hamm: Okay. Perfect.

[00:51:37] Brian Searl: All right Scott. Who else—you can ask a question of anybody.

[00:51:40] Scott Bahr: Rachel. How is—in Ohio, how’s your occupancy been in—in your area in general? Yeah, I know that we’re winter now, but the past season, how did it go? Just briefly, how did your season go? How were things?

[00:51:56] Rachel Hodge: Yeah, so last year with being closed for half of the year, not being at full capacity, it’s hard to really get an idea of the occupancy. Down a little bit from 2024. But still high on the weekends, especially Memorial Day to Labor Day. Obviously that’s our hot season. And then for us at Winton Woods, the Creepy Campouts, every site is sold out every night. That is a non-negotiable. It happens every year. They go live on November insert day. They are sold out by the first hour. So it’s nice to have something that you know is going to hit every year. And that’s what we have right now. And then we’re trying to figure out how to expand that opportunity to our other sites to give that specialized experience, but then also something that we know people are going to come to and we can guarantee that revenue.

[00:52:53] Scott Bahr: Okay.

[00:52:53] Rachel Hodge: Yeah. Thank you.

[00:52:55] Brian Searl: Your turn Rachel, you can ask a question of anybody but Scott.

[00:52:57] Rachel Hodge: Okay, perfect. Vicki, so when at the glamping, you also operate a glamping operation. Yeah. So at that operation, what is the facility like and what are the other kind of specialized amenities that guests could do in your space?

[00:53:18] Vicki Jones: So we’ve got six geodesic domes. We’ve got an event dome as well, so it’s a 10-meter event dome. So the things that we’ve done in our site to differentiate are bigger communal spaces. So we’ve got a big stretch tent that’s got sofas and coffee tables and chill out space. We’ve got an indoor games room with a soft play. We’ve converted—we had a—like an octagonal cabin, but we’ve converted into a craft hut. So now kids can go in and craft whatever they want to. It’s just a free thing that they can go in and do whatever crafts they want to. We’ve got a treasure hunt on site as well so that the kids can find their way around all these different things by going and finding letters and then unscrambling them to reveal a word and then they get a prize. So it’s all about giving the kids lots of things to do. We’ve got an honesty shop on site as well. So that the parents can chill and the kids are entertained.

[00:54:12] Rachel Hodge: Awesome.

[00:54:13] Brian Searl: Vicki? Pick the United States or Canada of RVDA?

[00:54:15] Vicki Jones: I will ask a quick one to Phil. Like what is your like average daily rate for? How much does it cost to stay at an RV site? Like I have no idea how much you guys are in Canada or America.

[00:54:28] Phil Ingrassia: I’ll maybe go to Scott for that one because it’s a major range between the fully deluxe RV parks to trans—transitory parks where people are just pulling off the interstate. What’s your range for KOA these days?

[00:54:44] Scott Bahr: In the—the rates, it’s—jeez, it’s like for a tent site it’s 50 up to—I think for the—like the—they have those super deluxe sites, they’re like 125 now to 135 I think. So.

[00:54:59] Vicki Jones: To bring your own RV?

[00:55:04] Scott Bahr: Right. Yeah.

[00:55:07] Phil Ingrassia: There’s such a—there’s such a wide variety of different sites. For instance, KOA now has sites that have their own patios and cookout areas and things like that where—and then there’s others still very basic where you’re just pulling in with just the most minimal hookups. So it—it really ranges and then of course you’ve got public campgrounds which are typically more rustic and their rates are—can be half of a private campground. It’s really all over the map literally, as how much people are charging these days.

[00:55:40] Brian Searl: We’ll give you some clarity on that Vicki in the coming weeks. Scott and I are working on something really detailed and interesting to answer that question. You’ll have it too Phil. All right Phil, you’re—you’re left with Eleonore, you can—which is the greatest person to be left with. You already know that she’s going to come to the dinner with you on—at Tampa, so you can’t ask that question.

[00:55:59] Phil Ingrassia: Yeah, I confirmed that by the way Eleonore, too, so you’re in.

[00:56:02] Eleonore Hamm: Thank you.

[00:56:02] Phil Ingrassia: But I do have a question. We’re getting some anecdotal reports about Canadian snowbirds staying home from Arizona, some of the southwest areas. Is that what you guys are seeing? Are Canadians staying—staying put this winter?

[00:56:17] Eleonore Hamm: Yeah, that’s what we’re reading in the media. They’re either going to other destinations or not traveling to the US. There definitely still are that—that are coming. The interesting thing is that because of that, some of the fall shows saw—typically the snowbirds that would be buying some of the larger product to come down to the states, that product was not selling as much in the fall. So that’s probably affected our dealers. But yeah, I would say that most of the data that, you know, and I’m just reading it in the newspapers at this point in time, but that a lot of people are not traveling or making different travel arrangements if they’re not coming here.

[00:56:55] Brian Searl: Cool. All right, any final thoughts from anybody they want to share before we wrap up the show? We’re a couple minutes late. All right. Thank you guys for joining us for another episode of MC Fireside Chats. Scott from Cairn Consulting, Rachel from Great Parks, Vicki from GITA and I can’t remember the—Tractors and Cream?

[00:57:11] Vicki Jones: Yeah, you got it.

[00:57:12] Brian Searl: Look at that. See? I’m not as old as I thought. Wait till next week, I won’t get it right. Phil Ingrassia from RVDA of America and Eleonore Hamm from RVDA of Canada. Really appreciate you joining us, all your input, all the great conversation and we will see you next week on another episode of MC Fireside Chats. If you’re not sick and tired of me, and Scott, we will be on Outwired in about 54 minutes dissecting…