MC Fireside Chats – June 18th, 2025

Mike Harrison: Good afternoon or good morning, or wherever you are, and welcome to Modern Campground Fireside Chats. I am not Brian Searl. My name’s Mike Harrison. I’m with CRR Hospitality. I’m excited to guest host this week’s edition of Fireside Chats. And Jeff, that was the first time I ever realized that there was like this little MC Fireside Chats in the intro music.

I’ve heard that probably 50 times. I just picked up on that now. But anyhow on the weekly editions every week there’s a different group of panelists as well as different topics and things that we talk about, and we discuss ongoing trends, markets challenges, wins, opportunities, threats, et cetera.

And this week we no different. We have a regular recurring guests as well as a couple new guests that will join us this week. So I’d love to go around real quickly and just introduce everybody. My name is Mike Harrison. I am the Chief Operating Officer of CRR Hospitality. We own and manage our own outdoor hospitality assets like Verde, Rancho V Resort, and we also do third party management and consulting. And always happy to be here. Jeff. 

Jeff Hoffman: My name’s Jeff Hoffman and I am a founder of Camp Strategy, which is a consulting firm for campgrounds, whether it’s due diligence, feasibility studies, or just coaching you through Campground , a little bit more profitable.

Mike Harrison: Great. And we were just talking about how long have you owned your current Campground? 

Jeff Hoffman: Yes, I am the oldest guy in the group, 1968. 

Mike Harrison: Now everybody else calculate when they were born figure out. That’s impressive. Yeah. What an amazing accomplishment. Kaleigh. 

Kaleigh Day: Oh yeah. Hi, I’m Kaleigh Day. I own Surf Junction Campground. Out on or in Ucluelet? On Vancouver Island, BC 

Mike Harrison: Cool. 

Kaleigh Day: Yeah. 

Mike Harrison: Great. Stephen? 

Stephen Saint: Stephen Saint Fort. I own Fort Welikit Campground at Custer, South Dakota in the Black Hills of South Dakota. 

Mike Harrison: Near the park.

Stephen Saint: I’m sorry?

Mike Harrison: Right near the National Park.

Stephen Saint: The Custer State Park. Black Hills National Forest. 

Mike Harrison: National Forest. Gotcha. That’s great. Before we get into trends, I’d love to hear maybe Kaleigh and Stephen, if you guys could describe a little bit about your properties. That’s always interesting to hear about and yours are both very interesting and unique. So it’d be great, if you could talk about what you do and what you run and what you own and let us know what a little bit about them.

Kaleigh Day: Yeah. Stephen, is it okay if I go first? 

Mike Harrison: Absolutely. 

Kaleigh Day: Yeah. Okay. Sweet. Yeah. Surf Junction, it’s a forested camp site or Campground located just south of the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. So we’re not on the water, but we’re very close. And the Campground itself has like the classic Campground infrastructure, so tenting sites or like partially service sites.

And then full service campsites, like the large RV. And then we have a lot of amenities like hot tubs, sauna, flush toilets, hot showers, all that good stuff. And then we have a surf school that operates out of the Pacific Room National Park which is awesome. And then we have surf rentals and a little general store and coffee shop, and we have about 90 campsites and 72 acres, but we only utilize about 40. And yeah, I think that’s about it. I’m nervous. 

Mike Harrison: Can I borrow the other 32 acres then if if we’re not being used right now? 

Kaleigh Day: No, we just want it to stay wild. 

Mike Harrison: Tell us a little bit more, talk about a niche Campground, right? How many campgrounds in the country offer surf school, right?

So maybe talk a little bit more about that, and then does it drive the Camping business? Does it standalone? What kind of revenues that do? Very interested in that. 

Kaleigh Day: Yeah, so I found that with the Campground being more of a traditional Campground, so we’re not like an RV park. We don’t really have that like high density yield on just on our land.

We also keep our Camping price point relatively low to get a lot of people in. And then we make a lot of our revenue comes from the trifecta of Camping surf lessons and surf rentals. So I found that our lower price points helps generate a lot more campers in the shoulder season.

We fill up and then we make our revenue off of the add-ons, so like the coffees, the merchandise, and then really pushing the sales on our surf lessons and then our surf rentals and doing packages and that sort of stuff. Yeah, it’s we’ve been able to grow it over the years, which has been nice.

We were able to expand the Campground, which was huge for us, hence the like 72 acres. ’cause the original Campground we bought was 18 and then we expanded back. But yeah, the surf lessons, it’s a huge part of our business and it also helps build our community with our campers and our guests and a lot of yeah, like camper loyalty I guess.

’cause they take lessons from us. They come back every year, they start doing rentals and they bring their friends, their kids grow up doing lessons and they come back over the years. Yeah. I dunno if that answers your question. 

Mike Harrison: Yeah, no, it’s there’s nothing to be nervous about, right? We’re all just having a conversation or a Fireside Chat. 

Kaleigh Day: Yeah, I know right. 

Mike Harrison: I don’t see any fire. 

Kaleigh Day: Problem when I’m nervous.

Mike Harrison: Yeah. What I’m curious and it’s not an inquisition, I’m more, I can’t help myself and I’m just curious about your business. Did you acquire the Campground as an existing and there was already a surf school there? Or did you acquire and create the surf school? 

Kaleigh Day: Yeah, so Surf Junction already existed. We bought it 13 years ago and it was on the original 18 acres and it’s one of Ucluelet’s first surf schools. It was quite a bit smaller and they did surf rentals as well out of the office. And then we’ve just expanded it. So we offer more lessons, more rentals. We pushed it out of our little office and now we have this like surf shack.

So it’s more visible. And yeah, so we bought it preexisting, but we’ve had, have since expanded it. 

Mike Harrison: And so you’re on Vancouver Island, so is it hard to get to you? 

Kaleigh Day: Yes, but we’re quite the destination. I don’t know if you guys Google Tofino, it’s like you Ucluelet’s like the less, Tofino is kinda like the well-known surf spot.

It’s Canada’s California, if you will. So there’s lots of big, beautiful beaches and it’s quite the destinations. We have a lot of European people that come. But yeah, it’s five and a half hours from Vancouver. It’s a ferry ride. It’s a long windy road out here. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Mike Harrison: So people aren’t driving by your Campground, they’re coming specifically to see you? 

Kaleigh Day: Yes. Yeah. In the area in general, it’s just at capacity with visitors. So we open our reservations in January and like by June, we’re full for the summer. 

Mike Harrison: I have more questions, but I’m gonna come back.

Kaleigh Day: Yeah. 

Mike Harrison: Stephen, how about you? Tell us a little bit about your park. 

Stephen Saint: We’re just outside the town of Custer. We’re on the north east side or Custer heading up to Sylvan Lake. We’re about 22 acres. We have a hundred sites total. 71 of them are RV sites, and they range from 30 amp water and electric only to the 50 amp pull through sites.

It’s quite a different range. One of the unique things about our place is not two sites are exactly the same. They’re all unique. They’re all very different. We are heavily tree. So you’re in the forest when you’re staying with us. We’ve got deer and turkey that run through the Campground daily, two, three times a day.

One of our unique things that we have that I really like to talk about is our Camping barrels. We have Camping barrels. They’re not traditional Camping or sleeping cabin. They look like a giant whiskey barrel. They’re really unique. We actually had to get them special ordered in from Norway.

We get a lot of comments about them. They’re just sleeping. They just have a mattress and a little bit of electricity. But they’re really neat. I tell everyone, check ’em out. We got plenty of pictures, but they’re, I think when we got them, we were the fourth Campground in the country to get ’em.

Mike Harrison: Wow. Interesting. What made you decide to order specifically the Camping barrels? 

Stephen Saint: We had some full service cabins, but they’re a little, they’re little bit pricey, and we have a two night minimum on ’em. And people just wanted a night someplace, especially like the Tenors wanted, if it was raining, they wanted to get outta the rain, but they didn’t wanna pay $200 a night for a full service cabin.

They just needed some place to crash. And so we started searching around and me and my wife are all about being different and unique and we started on a search, okay, we need to find some lower price cabins that we can get people into. And we kept seeing all the normal ones. No offense if you have ’em, but that’s not us.

And we started noticing these round things that they’re very popular in Europe. I guess there’s all different kinds of configurations in Europe. And I’m like, how do I get my hands on some of those? And I reached out to some of the companies in Europe and some of the campgrounds in Europe that had ’em, and none of them had shipped, none of them had shipped to the States.

And I found a distributor in Connecticut and he was able to get me four of them from Norway. And so we got ’em in and they come in a big crate, you gotta put ’em together. And of course the instructions aren’t all that well. So the very first one was long and laborist to try to figure it out. It’s like Lincoln Logs and after that we were professional for putting ’em together. 

Mike Harrison: I guess IKEA is Swedish and not Norwegian, but I guess it’s like putting, IKEA furniture together with those instructions and like trying to figure out.

Stephen Saint: Yeah, there was a lot of stomping around 

Mike Harrison: Are they all full hook up? Like you mentioned, you didn’t want necessarily the cabin. So do the barrels have facilities, bathroom power, bathroom, water suit? 

Stephen Saint: No, we have two small ones and two big ones. The small ones have a queen mattress in them. They have an outlet and a light and a fan. And then where you sleep in front, they have like little benches, but we set ’em up close to a bathhouse.

And that’s all they have. And it’s like the little vinyl mattresses you had when you were in kindergarten when you were done, you had to wipe ’em off and stack ’em. That’s what it is. You provide your own bedding or sleeping bags or whatever. And they’re actually way more popular than me and my wife could have ever expected.

Kaleigh Day: They sound awesome. 

Mike Harrison: Yeah. Very Instagram, right? Maybe you could surf, you could do one of those surf houses in a Camping barrel, get some water and then combine both. 

Stephen Saint: I installed a tap on the back side of the barrel so people, looks more like a tap barrel.

Jeff Hoffman: Huh 

Mike Harrison: Alright, I’m gonna come back to you too ’cause I have some more questions. But first, Jeff Hoffman, what has come across your desk recently? What’s on your mind?

Jeff Hoffman: There’s some legislation in Ohio that’s if they could affect other states. The county commissioners are coming after our, right now all taxes have to go to the first bureau or a something 

Mike Harrison: they, I’m sorry, is that, can you hear Jeff or is that my audio? 

Kaleigh Day: No, I can’t quite hear you.

Jeff Hoffman: Okay, hold on. Lemme check my, I think let me turn on. 

Mike Harrison: You’re back now. There you go.

Kaleigh Day: Yeah.

Stephen Saint: You’re back.

Jeff Hoffman: Oh. Alright. Anyway, there’s a bill in Ohio that, will allow the county commissioners take two thirds of the revenue created from bed taxes. And use it on whatever they want. In our county, we have pretty good budget.

They already take an additional 2%, but on our share of the 2%, we raise over $4 million for a very small county. Given that they would take two thirds of that, we would be hard pressed to operate. But right now I’m sitting in Hawking County, which would come under the same rules. If they took two thirds of theirs, their visitors bureau would cease to exist because they couldn’t to operate on what’s left of the funding and it’s all based on, we have one commissioner that introduced the bill that doesn’t believe marketing works and thinks it’s a waste of time and the money should go into infrastructure. So. 

Mike Harrison: We’re dealing with the same thing at one of our properties in Arizona. And, the way they make their revenue is through either sales tax or they want to increase the bed tax and, they want to go up five points, which is considerable.

They would put this small town number two in the entire state in terms of total taxes and, they could go down the street to the next city and pay five or 6% less. And the next city has more retail, more restaurants. And we’re trying to explain to them, we understand your goal and we understand, you want to increase revenues, but what’s the long-term vision of how much occupancy will you lose in dissatisfaction? Because somebody can choose to go to a more developed city or town and pay less taxes.

Jeff Hoffman: Yeah. They can do that to a point, but at some point they

Mike Harrison: Yes.

Jeff Hoffman: Kill the goat, golden goose.

Mike Harrison: That’s the conversation we’re having with them.

Jeff Hoffman: And like with me, obviously, ’cause I’m old I’ve been on that visitor’s bureau for about 30 some years and we built it from a revenue of about $250,000 where we couldn’t pay our bills to up to $4 million. And it’s only because we’ve gotten it that high that people now are interested in us because they think we have spare money.

So everybody comes with their hand out. The county thinks it’s their money because it’s a tax and I think it’s my money because I built the properties that are electing the taxes. So we have a difference of philosophies on how that money is 

raised. Yeah, I feel it’s. 

Mike Harrison: For those that dunno, both Jeff and I have been involved with the National Association OHI and the CCCA, the Credit Card Competition Act, as well as some other legislation. And, what Jeff’s talking about or whether it’s the CCCA or whether it’s stay rules, or whether it’s permitting park models.

I think the message is clear is that, it’s important that everybody gets involved in either their local, state or national associations of various kinds, tourism boards, the RV associations, outdoor hospitality associations, because our industry has been very unregulated for so long.

And as there’s more prominence and visibility into it, as it continues to grow, people are starting, just like what Jeff described. Oh, I want some more money. And they’re changing things that are not benefiting, our properties. So we’ve gotta have a voice 

Jeff Hoffman: And yeah. One of the reasons Mike and I are both involved is in the Campground that I’m sitting at, we were gonna, we were putting in a ba, brand new bathhouse and laundry.

We were doing it as a modular at first we were building it to RVIA code, which is the park model code. That was not acceptable to the state of Ohio because this county doesn’t have a building inspector. So then we had to go to the commercial inspector. So my bathhouse went from $75,000 to $140,000 to meet the Ohio Coast prices.

Yeah. So that, that’s one reason like your barrels that you built you probably didn’t have to go through a lot of zoning because you don’t have that much in the Dakotas. If I tried to build those in Ohio, I couldn’t get ’em done. I’d have to bring ’em up to some.

Kaleigh Day: Even if they’re under like a certain size, no. Interesting. 

Jeff Hoffman: Yep. Yeah it used to be in Ohio you can get by with anything under 12 by 12 is considered a shed, but once you start, we’ve got, and that’s all I got. That’s how I got some, yeah, that’s how I got some in Ohio. But then they found out people were sleeping in my sheds. And that opened up and.

Mike Harrison: It’s like you’re sitting in your giant shed that’s bigger than 12 by 12, where.

Jeff Hoffman: Yeah. This is the pavilion.

Mike Harrison: Yeah.

Jeff Hoffman: But that’ll lead to another conversation, Mike. It’s almost the end of June and I don’t have people doing activities. 

Mike Harrison: Yeah. One of the things I wanna talk about specifically as I said, I wanted to swing back to Kaleigh and Stephen, especially since you guys are north.

One of you are on the north side of the border, and the other one’s on the south side of the border. And here we are in summertime. And I’m curious, what the travel trends are looking like in your markets this summer, with, Canadian travelers coming south and American travelers going north, or Canadian travelers going west. How is everybody’s markets doing right now? 

Kaleigh Day: I know our bookings are up. Quite a bit, especially in the shoulder season. Our high season’s always full. That’s just been standard. But our shoulder season’s been great. It’s been sunnier out here, so our spring tends to be really weather dependent.

We’re in a rainforest, so if it’s heavily raining, people don’t wanna trek all the way out here to camp in the rain. But yeah, we’ve been really quite full. We’ve been having a handful of Americans. A lot of Canadians are staying in Canada, so we’ve been getting a lot of people have been canceling their trips to the States, we’ve been finding.

And then a lot of Europeans, we get a ton of Germans and Dutch coming over. They rent RVs in the Rockies and then they come over and they finish on Vancouver Island and then fly out of Vancouver. Those numbers are up from last year, I would say. But, so yeah, so far this season and our surf lessons have been going out daily which for Spring is great for us.

People have been spending money. And I think, I don’t know if it’s ’cause like things are a little bit tighter, so now people are Camping a bit more. We tend to thrive when people need to, they don’t have the budget to really stay at like the expensive resorts around here, so Camping is a great alternative.

But yeah, so we’ve had a great spring so far, and our summer’s looking really good. 

Mike Harrison: It’s interesting with the tumult of the border and tariffs and like you said, you may have an unintentional boon for Canadians visiting you and they may have normally visited south, which is positive for you. How about you, Stephen? How’s it, how are you guys doing? 

Stephen Saint: Our May was slow ’cause we were just rain and cold. This year, we were highs were fifties with a lot of rain, so May was a little bit slower than normal. Our memorial day was really horrible ’cause it rained the entire weekend.

As far as our Canadian travelers go and our international travelers the only trend that I’ve seen with the Canadians and in fact I’ve got one or two in here now. When some of the political environment happened, we saw an influx of cancellations from Quebec, nowhere else.

I don’t know what that’s about. I’m not Canadian. I don’t know. But most of the Quebec canceled. But the folks from some of the other Providences, I think I maybe had one from, Nova Scotia. But the rest of my Canadians are booking. We’ll see, and we will see an influx in Canadians at the end of September.

We’re open till the 15th of October. So I will see an influx from about the middle of September to when I close with them heading south. So I don’t know if I’ll see that this year, but my Canadian booking seem to be on track. My international bookings are actually, I think, a little higher than normal.

That may be in part the fact that last year we switched over to an online booking company and you didn’t have to call or email. So we are seeing a more influx of the international travelers with the Reynolds coming in. 

We just had a, I don’t know what you call ’em from the Netherlands. They were just here yesterday.

Kaleigh Day: Yeah

Stephen Saint: So, we do quite a few of them. Netherlands and Germany. 

Kaleigh Day: Oh. Who do you use for your online booking platform? 

Stephen Saint: Firefly. 

Kaleigh Day: Oh, gotcha. I was just curious ’cause if you, all of your sites are like uniquely shaped and that’s like our Campground as well. So we had issues with finding the right software.

Stephen Saint: I like firefly because you could go in and put your minimum maximum lengths in. So if you had a really big site, you didn’t wanna really book a 25 footer in there. You wanna try to get a bigger rig in there because that’s what I do. I have to play Jenga all summer, make sure I get rig is rig appropriate sizes of the sites, like I said, ’cause none of them are the same.

Firefly will do that. They have, and it’s worked great for me. I’ve never had any problems with it and we have some. The international travelers are booking ’cause they can, instead of sending us an email and having to set us up and go back and forth through email, they just go in and book it.

Mike Harrison: Yep. And Jeff, you said you’re empty. So to me that indicates, is it just you or is Ohio down and having challenges, I take it? 

Jeff Hoffman: A lot of it has been spring never arrived. We have had rain almost every weekend and every day with temperatures ranging from 40 to 60. It is horrible. Even our pool won’t heat.

Kaleigh Day: Oh, no.

Jeff Hoffman: Because, it’s not used to going down to 40 at night. The pool heater is running 24. I don’t know if it aided overall. I’ll have to look at that. Last year. I have tough time comparing year over year because if I have to take April out, because we had the full eclipse last year, which put a big chunk of money in April when we’re not usually even open. But I still hold the manager’s feet to the fire for the total not, yeah, I don’t

Mike Harrison: And I can’t believe that was only last, I think that was like three years ago, that eclipse. I can’t believe that was only last year. But, it’s interesting, depending on which data source you look at, Ohio released one of their reports last month and, showed that Canadian travels absolutely down and considerable for some areas, right?

And if you’re in New Hampshire or Vermont, I’m sorry, right? They’re showing that Canadian travels down like 50%, in those two states, the number one and two highest hit, according to the day to day And then some of the other northern states, like Ohio and some of the border states like Michigan are also seeing some considerable declines.

From the Canadian travel, US Southern states, we experienced it in Q1 already. Just in general, right? The value of the Canadian dollar, the gas prices, regardless of the whole political climate and tariffs and all that stuff, so it’ll be interesting to see once we hit, interesting to see once we hit our next booking season, especially snowbird season, what that looks like.

We’ve already felt like Uhoh, we’re a little nervous, but do we need to be even, more nervous for next year? 

Jeff Hoffman: Yeah. Have you noticed the booking window has shorten? 

Mike Harrison: Oh, of course. Yeah.

Jeff Hoffman: You know, we were three, four weeks out, if not more, and now I feel like I’m back in the hotel business where on Monday I’m losing my mind because we’re not booked. And then by the weekend we.

Mike Harrison: Yeah, it’s, yeah, looking at the data dig, the booking window has shrunk, 20 to 30% year on year. It’s much closer. And for us, same thing for all of our properties. We’ve seen the booking window shrink as well, 20 to 30%. And, it speaks to what Kaleigh was talking about, is there’s, much closer to home vacations, staycations, people not traveling longer distances. Which means, you don’t have the grand vacations, you have more shorter vacations, but also shorter stays as well. 

Stephen Saint: They’re also staying a little longer. I’ve noticed, at least with me we’re only about half the bookings that we normally get right now, which is normal for us.

But we’re three quarters of the way there for our nights. The nights that I expect to get over the summer we’re three quarters of the way there, with only half the bookings that we would have for all year. That indicates to me that they’re we’re getting longer stays on average.

Mike Harrison: Yeah. It always amazes me, or, it’s just so interesting. 

Kaleigh Day: It’s funny because we prefer shorter stays ’cause we want more people coming and going to make do the surf rentals, do the lessons, everything. So our bread and butter is like two, three days. Yeah. 

Stephen Saint: We’re more average about four to five, but they seem to be up to six to seven now.

Kaleigh Day: Oh, nice. Is it ’cause of just like local activities so they stay and then they go and see?

Stephen Saint: Yeah. I mean you’ve got, we’ve got Mount Rushmore, we’ve got Crazy Horse, we’ve got Custer State Park. That’s what we call the big three. But then you could come here and spend a month and not see everything that the Black Hills has to offer.

I’ve been here 13 years and haven’t seen everything. So there’s a lot to do. And a little niche for everybody. We’ve got history, we’ve got nature, we’ve got all kinds of different things for different people. We’ve got fishing, we’ve got boating.

So it’s a little bit for everybody. A lot of people come to South Dakota and think, oh, I’ll book two days ’cause we’re just gonna see Mount Rushmore. And then they get here and they’re like can I get four or five more days? I did not realize that there was so much going on here. And it’s about 50 50 if I can even give it to ’em. 

And usually they end up coming back ’cause they realize, oh, two days just isn’t enough in the Blank Hills. 

Jeff Hoffman: I think what we’re proving here is what I learned when I thought I could systematize campgrounds across the.

Mike Harrison: Oh, of course.

Jeff Hoffman: The thing is that all campgrounds have their own identity their own market, their own stay pattern. And when you try to figure them out, we just have two campgrounds on here that they’re both diverse in their demographics and what they’re getting and how they’re getting the people. So it just shows how much diversity there is across the industry.

Stephen Saint: Yeah even in the town of Custer, there’s five or six different types of campgrounds, if satellite TV is important to you, you don’t stay with me. I got too many trees. You’re not getting a satellite, and we’ve had people come in, is my satellite gonna work here? 99% sure’s not gonna work here.

There’s too many trees. And there’s a Campground on the road and they said, your satellite will work here. We have no trees. And so even in the same town, we have different aspects of Campground. Within 15 miles of me, there’s 55 campgrounds. 

Mike Harrison: I think it’s, to your point, Jeff, it’s very interesting because not just diversity of market, but diversity of sophistication.

Stephen is just talking about how he just got his online booking platform, recently, right? Where like our properties, we wouldn’t be able to exist without online booking. And we’ve had them for, years. And, the needs of each Campground and the development of each Campground doesn’t mean his isn’t successful and mine isn’t, or vice versa.

Oh, we just lost Jeff. It just speaks to that interesting diversity. One of the things that we’ve been working on with both the National Association as well as Sage Outdoor Advisory and a couple other partners. Is trying to classify the campgrounds by category, so that we can nationalize the data, so that you can have an understanding by Campground, category by market.

What is a market doing? How healthy are they? What is the data for oops. I think I just kicked them out. Try again, Jeff. Sorry. And so we’ll see how that, plays out, but it’s hard to describe trends when you’re speaking about your localized market, because every market is different.

I do have a follow-up question for Stephen and Kaleigh and, hopefully Jeff hops back on as you’re talking about your travelers there. How many of them do you think are renting an RV? Do you know? Or do you see a lot of RV rentals or something you don’t even look at or track. 

Kaleigh Day: Me? 

Mike Harrison: Both. Anyone?

Kaleigh Day: Yeah. I would say maybe a third of our RVs are rentals. Maybe more. Yeah. We get a lot of like rented RVs. The Europeans come like we have a lot of Europeans, so Yeah. And we’ve been getting more and more people local people, Airbnbing their trailers and motor homes, so driving it out to the Campground and putting it on the campsite for people to stay in, which is an interesting new thing that like has been happening the last couple of years.

So that’s been like an interesting, but that’s I guess another RV rental. Yeah, I would say probably like a third maybe, if not half of our RVs are rentals. 

Mike Harrison: Interesting. That’s a lot. How about you, Stephen? 

Kaleigh Day: It’s a huge, yeah.

Stephen Saint: I would say it’s sometimes it’s hard to keep track of ’cause I don’t necessarily know if it’s a rental or not.

But what do I do see, yeah. All our international cruise America there’s that other company was at Monterey or something like that. RV you see a lot of. And plus we work well with a lot of the RV share people here in the area. They bring out their RV, they drop it off, they come pick it up.

In fact, we have a bigger company called Jack’s campers here. And I think they have hundreds of RVs they rent out. And they do the same thing. They bring it down, drop it off. I would probably say probably 10% maybe are rentals that we’re seeing. We see ’em every day. I mean at least one or two every day of some form of rental.

Mike Harrison: And how, and Kaleigh, if you’re seeing a third to half, is that intentional? Do you market to them or how do you get there? Is it by accident? 

Kaleigh Day: No, it’s just the area. It’s like a high demand. It’s on that path that like a lot of Europeans or people that want to come see the area and they wanna see Vancouver Island and it’s spread they’re coming and they don’t have cars and so yeah, I think it’s just the best way to see all Canada so spread out.

So I think it’s the best way for them to see everything. But yeah, we don’t really advertise or have any deals with those companies. We have a handful of tour companies or like the middlemen that will book the RVs and the stays for people from Europe. And so we have a handful of them that go in and book hundreds of reservations for the summer, but they just do it all online. But yeah, no, we don’t do any type of advertising with them. 

Stephen Saint: It’s interesting and Stephen, you mentioned you don’t really track it, but, one of the things that I’ve been trying to figure out, we have multiple properties across the country, and to me, an untapped market is the connection of these RV rentals and the campgrounds.

Somebody has an RV and they wanna rent it. Then when you rent the RV, then you gotta go somewhere, right? So how do we bridge the gap, to really make sure that the people that are trying to rent, how do we get them to the campgrounds, and so we’ve been trying to talk to outdoors in RV share and figure out how to better connect, the renter, the rentee, and the campgrounds. We haven’t been able to crack that. 

Kaleigh Day: I would see, company’s called Canadian Camping Adventures, and they’re the ones that like reach out to the people in Europe predominantly that will book the RV, they book the RV and the length, and then this company goes in and sets their whole itinerary for Canada. Yeah, maybe a good one to just look into. 

Stephen Saint: One of the things that I do with the rentals is one, I’ve gotten to know most of the people that are on RV share renting their RV in this area.

I’ve gotten to know them and so when people are running their RVs looking for it, I’ve just built relationships with those people and they’re like, what Campground do you recommend? And I know there’s at least one that I know of that she will only recommend us. And then of course I work with Jack’s campers.

They’re the big company and I’m talking to their delivery guys all the time when they deliver. And it’s just gotten to know. And in fact, one of the delivery drivers, he’s told me, he goes, you’re one of the best campgrounds we’d like to come to. ’cause you’re not yelling at us all the time.

Because if they show up too early or pick up too late, that can cause check-in, checkout problems. And I try to understand they’re busy, they’re trying to do a job like me, and as long as they’re not picking it up at five o’clock in the afternoon when I got a guy sitting here waiting to get in at one, I’m usually pretty easy to work with.

And the one guy’s yeah you don’t ever yell. You’re like, Hey, Greg. Yeah, you’re here. Get out. And so I think building those personal relationships with people at least has helped me. 

Mike Harrison: Yeah. It’s interesting. Jeff, when you had hopped off, one of the things I had asked was, how many RV rentals, do you know are coming to your Campground?

And Kaleigh had said a third to half and Stephen said some, maybe 10%. And I’m, curious the question for you too. And what I had asked secondarily after that is, it seems like there’s a disconnect in the industry of how, the connection of the person who rents the RV, the renter of the RV, and then how you get them to a Campground and bridging that gap. And marketing, as a Campground directly to the renter, how do you get to them?

Jeff Hoffman: Yeah, that actually has started. It’s a new issue. That’s probably what, four years old, because before that, that market didn’t exist. But it’s the same as anything.

You just have to make the RV share person understand that the people are still under the control of the Campground. Not calling that guy to complain about how mean we are because they still have to follow our rules. And then also, we only work with RV share people that know that and work with us.

Most of the time we know who’s coming in by how they booked it. And we will offer some deals on a slow weekend to maybe get their price down to, ’cause to me.

Mike Harrison: Yeah. But that’s usually you’re on the back end of that. You’re just receiving it. And that’s, the RV rental industry, has grown to over, it’s almost a billion dollars now in revenue.

Jeff Hoffman: Yep.

Mike Harrison: And so while it’s a newer market, it’s a considerable market. And I’ve been talking to Good Sam, I’ve been talking to Outdoorsy, I’ve been talking to RV Share Camping world and how do you connect the destination with the person that needs a destination in a rental? But I haven’t figured that out yet. 

Jeff Hoffman: Yeah. No, that’s a question for the guy that runs this show. 

Mike Harrison: Yeah. Where are you, Brian? 

Jeff Hoffman: Yeah.

Mike Harrison: I even Chat GPTed it, but yeah, it wasn’t very helpful. 

Jeff Hoffman: But yeah, originally that’s how, before I switched to park models, I rented out RVs and I pity people that RVs are getting a little bit better, but most people don’t have a clue of how to operate an RV.

Kaleigh Day: No.

Jeff Hoffman: They’re always shutting off the water heater. They don’t realize it’s only like a 10 gallon tank, so they run a hot water, they have no clue how to operate the stoves, the toilet. So we did that for two years and then we switched everything over and actually I went to Indiana and designed some park models and had ’em built and brought ’em in.

So everything matched what we had at home. Flush toilet water heater. So I don’t wanna get back into the RV rental business. I’m happy if people want to do that. I just would like to get a piece of it. 

Mike Harrison: That’s the thing is you don’t need to be the rental, but how do you get the RV share, the share of the Cruise America, the outdoorsy people? How do you get them to come to you?

Jeff Hoffman: Yeah.

Mike Harrison: Kaleigh doesn’t care. She’s sitting fat and proud over here. She sells out every year.

Kaleigh Day: Not in early. That’s.

Mike Harrison: They’re up. And, everybody comes to us and we’re destinations. I don’t care.

Jeff Hoffman: And Stephen is saying that his international businesses, but I’m wondering if Kaleigh’s is up because I don’t think that the US overall is getting European trade that we used to. Right now, I don’t think we’re number one in the world as a destination country.

Wondered if that could be why you’re having an increase in European, especially Germany. ’cause I know we’re not getting along with them. 

Kaleigh Day: Yeah. I would say, I think that’s the expectation and the trend. I haven’t really looked at our summer bookings to see like what the demographic is yet, but so far this spring we’ve had a lot of Europeans, which like last year, like it’s definitely up from last year.

I haven’t really looked at the numbers ’cause like overall it’s just weather-wise. It’s just a better busier spring. But I think, I’m assuming it has to do something with that, because a lot of times they’ll dip down into the states and then come up through Port Angeles to Victoria to get to the islands. And so I’m assuming maybe I’d be curious to see if they’re just like, not going elsewhere right now, yeah. 

Jeff Hoffman: Mike, what do you see in the hotel industry for international travel. 

Mike Harrison: It’s similar trends. And Marriott had revised their guidance. It was either last month or the month before.

Interestingly enough year to date, Marriott, they’re up year on year year to date, but then they revised their guidance down the rest of the year by half a point, which is considerable, right? That’s quite massive for Marriot to do. But obviously they were looking at what the political climate was with the tariffs and, some of the trade things and, the feeling of America.

And so they’re seeing, similar trends, but as we’ve already talked about, that depends on the market too. And everything is so market dependent. So it’s hard to answer that question. ’cause if you look at some markets, they’re up 10%, some are down four and but nationally, it’s stable ish.

But, very similar trends. But, going from RV shares is another kind of segue into another topic I want to talk about, which is, every year, whether you’re up or down, clearly we always have to prove. And what are some of the things that, that you all are doing to boost revenues, right?

Whether it’s you’re down and you want to get back up, or whether you’re already up and you want to be more up, what are the things that you look at every year as you’re growing revenues? What are some of the things that you’re doing?

Kaleigh Day: Yes. You want me to go. Yep. 

Stephen Saint: Ladies first. 

Kaleigh Day: I’ll go. The babbler will start babbling. One thing that we start doing is I think when sales are low, we can always capitalize and capitalize on our surf lessons and rent rentals. So we’ve really diversified our revenue. So there’s a lot more room to if one area is lacking, we can really push towards another area, right?

So getting it all starts with our staff, in my opinion. So the campground’s always going to be relatively busy. That’s just our area in the high demand of Camping. But really pushing, not pushing that sounds bad, but really trying to get people to sell surf lessons. So doing some type of, we tend to incentivize our staff to really upsell surf rentals and surf lessons. And that is one way we can really like boost sales or increase our revenue when things are down. So I would say that’s typically like a shortsighted reaction when things aren’t going well. And then just really increasing spending money on marketing. 

Mike Harrison: Pushing. You can use the word pushing. There’s nothing wrong with the word pushing.

Kaleigh Day: It just sounds like, take it. 

Mike Harrison: Yeah. Yeah. How about you Stephen? What do you look to do each year? Are you trying to boost sales, drive revenue, find additional opportunities? 

Stephen Saint: Honestly, I’m in a good area. I’m in Black Hills from 20 miles from Mount Rushmore. Marketing is really easy here. Not only am I doing stuff, but I’ve got the state pushing South Dakota. We have a lot, some of the things that I’ve been doing over the last couple of years is personally, I’ve been going to travel shows.

I’m a board member for different organizations. And so they do a lot of travel shows. One of the Perks of going to the travel show is you get to promote your place as well as the Black Hills. So I’ve been doing a lot of that. I’ve been and it seems to be working. Last year I went to North Dakota and to a couple of the shows up there and I got an influx of North Dakotas.

This year, I went to lacrosse, a double down. I went to Lacrosse Wisconsin, and I went to Omaha. And now we have an influx of Wisconsin and Nebraska, people coming in. So that seems to be working quite a bit. I’m a big people talking person, so I like to meet people and talk to people and I don’t get nervous like Kaleigh.

It was really nice to go to their shows and she, the people, and they remember that. And so all the other campgrounds that are there getting promoted, they remember, oh, that guy talked to us. And so I’ve been doing a lot of that. So I did travel quite a bit this winter. One of the things we used to be pretty bad on Facebook, so we’re trying to be a little bit better on that social media stuff.

And there’s a couple of influencers here in South Dakota that I’ve chatted with and everything, and they’ve promoted us as well. It’s hard to say. The Black Hills really does sell itself. I just gotta be able to get out there in front of everybody else. And the stuff that I’m doing seems to be. 

Mike Harrison: Yeah, it’s interesting, especially when you’re an established Campground.

You get your repeat business and notoriety and clearly I can tell you’re bashful Stephen. I had to move Kaleigh off the main screen to the side. I didn’t want her to, be in the full screen the whole time. And you’re not babbling. You’re doing great.

Kaleigh Day: Thanks.

Mike Harrison: And Jeff, how about you when you’re consulting, right? And especially maybe a newer park, right? How do you get them to build their notoriety, to build their marketing, to build their awareness, to drive revenue?

Jeff Hoffman: When you’re starting Campground, we had brought up diversified markets and some of that before. What you have to do is figure out, looking at your data, if you’re a new park, you don’t have that yet, but comparing other industry data for that area, what’s your actual market and how do you hit that specifically?

And I usually recommend, depending on your size, hiring a marketing firm. That can deep dive into data and actually pinpoint like with yours they could hit groups that are interested in surfing and maybe interested in, because they’ve looked up surfing online someplace.

Mike Harrison: Don’t give her any tips. She doesn’t need any more business.

Jeff Hoffman: No. Oh, okay. That’s right. And neither Dakota.

Kaleigh Day: Meta specific campaigns and ads. 

Jeff Hoffman: Yep. So I guess I’m talking to you, Mike, right? You must need that.

Mike Harrison: Oh, yes, please.

Kaleigh Day: Oh, no. I’ll still take your help, Jeff. 

Mike Harrison: Please coach. 

Jeff Hoffman: But you’ve gotta find out even where you’re competing against other campgrounds. You’re going to have a niche that’s yours that you can market to, that makes you different from every other Campground that you’re competing with. And some of that is you’re gonna have to do some footwork. Also, be very involved with your visitors bureau, your chamber of commerce, your state associations, national ’cause the national does give a great data dig.

And we also get that at our state association. And it just helps find out where people are coming from so you know where to put your advertising dollars.

Mike Harrison: So then let’s let’s translate that to the Campground that you’ve been with just a short time, 57 years. For one that you clearly know the data and all the market information about how do you boost revenues year on year for a Campground that you have dialed in, maximized, how do you grow every year? 

Jeff Hoffman: It’s getting tougher. There’s 10% and 15% growths are slowing down. So anymore, I’m happy with eight. But yes, what we do is take a look at what’s new in our area, who’s looking at our area this year. What we did was market to everybody within our three hour drive limit that attended a Camping show.

So if they went to a Camping show, we somehow got an IP address for that and we could send them some emails and also try to hit them up on Google’s Google ads when anything that comes up on Camping. We have an ad there. At this Campground we have a great partner called KOA. 

That does a lot of the national marketing, so we concentrate on our three hour drive time. We don’t have to do a lot of national, so we’re looking at, we have an amusement park called Cedar Point that’s a mile away from us, and then they built sports facilities for basketball, soccer, baseball, all of that a half a mile away from us.

So we’ve been trying to book in more with Cedar Point, trying to figure out how to get their people to know that we exist, even though we’ve been there for 900 years there.

Stephen Saint: There’s a good chance I stayed at your place then. If you’re only a mile away from Cedar Point. 

Jeff Hoffman: You may have. It’s pretty good size. There’s a few. I used to own ’em all in our area and

Stephen Saint: I grew up gonna Cedar Point twice a year.

Jeff Hoffman: Did you, where are you from?

Stephen Saint: Pittsburgh originally.

Jeff Hoffman: I can bypass that.

Mike Harrison: So how many Aaron Rogers memes have you seen in the last, months? Do you 

Stephen Saint: I try to block all those. 

Jeff Hoffman: Yeah. We used to have a horrible rivalry with this team from Pittsburgh, but we no longer have a team that’s worth worrying about. So.

Mike Harrison: Neither Pittsburgh, so you don’t need to worry.

Jeff Hoffman: Oh. Oh.

Mike Harrison: You don’t need to worry about that. Kaleigh’s what’s this football thing you’re talking about? 

Kaleigh Day: I’m actually originally from Seattle.

Mike Harrison: Oh my gosh. So you’re a Seahawks fan. 

Kaleigh Day: Seahawks. 

Jeff Hoffman: One of my favorite one of my favorite coaches. I don’t know about the team, but I love the coach.

Kaleigh Day: Is it Carol or the Yeah. 

Jeff Hoffman: Yeah. He’s. Yeah. You know where he stands? Yeah. Good.

Mike Harrison: That’s I don’t like that. Oh, the Steelers, huh? Yep. Yep. I don’t like the Seahawks or are the Steelers. I don’t care about the Browns. 

Jeff Hoffman: Yeah. What have they done? What have the Patriots done for you?

Mike Harrison: More than what the browns have done for you.

Jeff Hoffman: The Browns have made me give up on Sunday football and go play golf on Sundays. 

Mike Harrison: It’s interesting. Oh my, she’s got her material. I should grab all my papers.

Kaleigh Day: I was just waiting for it. 

Mike Harrison: Yeah, man. Threw it up on the screen and I guess if you’re in Vancouver.

Jeff Hoffman: But yeah getting back to that, because we do have a franchise that markets nationally we are allowed to focus our dollars on a basically three hour drive time. Unfortunately, part of that, which is about half of our market, is water, because nobody comes from Lake Erie. So our drive time we used to get in the eighties, we got a lot of Canadians, but since the nineties, our Canadian business has been nothing.

I should look at the demographics for Cedar Point, but they don’t release ’em to see how many Canadian visitors they get.

Mike Harrison: Cedar Point doesn’t release demographic stats every year?

Jeff Hoffman: They’re very controlling of their data. Even when we try to get just raw data for bed tax use on their hotel sales. They won’t give it to us. 

Mike Harrison: We got two minutes left, so I’ll give everybody a chance to have kind of a parting word. If they have a thought or something they wanna share please feel free.

We won’t start with Katie. We’ll give her a chance to wrap up. So Stephen, you have any thoughts or parting words? 

Stephen Saint: No, I just wanted to thank you guys for having me on. It’s been great. Camping, we love it. We’re all different. And if Kaleigh ever needs advice or anything, my number’s always open.

We can always compare notes and, other than, Steelers Super Bowl wins against Seattle, we can’t really compare those too much. But no, it’s been great and I wish everybody a good, great season. 

Kaleigh Day: Yeah, thanks.

Mike Harrison: Thank you, Jeff.

Jeff Hoffman: We won’t talk about Super Bowl, we’ll leave that off the table. Other than that my parting shot is that every campground’s different. I am a consultant, but I will answer questions and talk to you because that doesn’t cost you anything, doesn’t cost me anything. We can go from there after a chat, but if you need some advice, I’m always open.

Mike Harrison: Superstar Kaleigh?

Kaleigh Day: A risky move. Opening that door. Alright, no, this is awesome. I honestly just love chatting with people that run campgrounds. It’s such a niche, weird little, career we have with lots of wild stories and, the insight is awesome and it was great chatting with you guys. And yeah, this was great. Thanks for inviting me. 

Mike Harrison: Absolutely. After you hear the outro music, you don’t need to stay on, just so you know. But yeah, I’d like to thank all of our guests, Stephen and Kaleigh for joining us as new guests, and of course, Jeff as a recurring guest, and appreciate everybody’s time and passion.

As you all say, this outdoor hospitality industry is amazing. And, it’s just so interesting and fun and able to connect with the guests in the outdoors. We’ve all got great opportunities and it’s an amazing thing to be a part of. With that, I wish everybody have a great July 4th coming up. And 

Jeff Hoffman: Kaleigh, Stephen, very nice meeting you. It was great to hear your story. Nice to meet you guys. 

Mike Harrison: We’ll catch everybody on the other side.