Donna Genie (Campground News) reviews the ARVC 2022 Trends & Insights report, focusing on a survey of ~288 campground operators about year-over-year profits: 64% reported profits up, 22% about the same, 9% no answer, and 4% down. She argues that many who are stagnant or unresponsive likely lack good financial dashboards or have not raised prices, and urges operators to increase prices and better track performance.
Chapters
This week in news for The Campgrounds, the ARVIC report of the 2022 Trends and Insights is now out. If you haven't seen this and you're an ARVIC member, I encourage you to log into their website and download it as Got some really interesting things in there that will show you the trends of where the industry is going. You probably already have a good idea, but it's always good to see the numbers behind it. So let's take a look at their study they did on profits. So they asked, in comparison to 2020, do you anticipate that your 2021 profits will be up, down or about the same? So very interesting here. We don't expect that. We wouldn't have a lot of people who said it was up, but only 64% said their revenue was up or their profits. I'm sorry, so what does that mean? Let's dive a little deeper. First off, this 22% who said about the same two cases for this, either they have no clue what their numbers are and it's difficult to manage a business if you have no clue what your dashboard looks like or how fast you're going, how slow you're going, what you need to do to improve, or the second effect is that they have not raised prices or they haven't raised prices enough. Prices need to go up. Each and every year the cost of living goes up. And we know right now from inflation that you've got to increase those prices. Yes, I know that there will be two or three people who are unhappy about it. Most will not say anything at all. Okay, so let's get out of that fear factor of making one person upset. You've got to run a business and you've got to run it properly, and that includes raising your prices. So the other really interesting thing is we have 9% who said no answer. And those again are probably people who don't know. So between the two of these, we have 31% who are either stagnant or have no clue what's going on in their business. That's a sad state of the industry. We've got to fix that. And worse yet, the 4% who are down, let's hope that they are down because they had some repairs to make or something like that. To be down in the highest time of our industry is going to be a tough thing to combat. You've got to be able to make a profit. Okay? So taking a look at the people who were up, it would be interesting to know how much they were up. But we don't have that data. This is Based on about 288 respondents in their survey, so you can take a look at where they're located in the regions across the country. Again, the south and the Midwest being the two biggest ones who are up, and the two biggest or about the same were in the Northeast and the south as well. That's kind of confusing, but this survey did include independent campground owners, corporate owned and franchised with a number of different variables, either little campgrounds or big campgrounds. They're all inclusive. So pretty good representation of the industry. If you can't answer this question to be in this UP column, if you were doing the survey, love to chat with you. There's no reason why you shouldn't have income and increasing profits right now, especially at the point we're at in our industry. I'm Donna Bordeaux with campgroundaccounting.com I'm Donna Bourdeau from campgroundaccounting.com Please follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Make sure you check out our blog and our website from the link below. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell to be notified when we post. To contact me, email me@donnacampgroundaccounting.com.
