Donna Genie covers wildfire insurance claims hitting $1.8M and $800k, with premiums jumping from $17k to $76k annually. She also benchmarks campground retail: Jellystone stores averaged $223k in sales in 2021, with tips on inventory management and store layout.
Hi, I'm Donna Bordeaux with campgroundaccounting.com let's check out this week's news for campgrounds. Here's an article from RV Travel about the skyrocketing cost of insurance premiums for campgrounds. This article focuses a lot on the fact that there have been full losses in a lot of parks with fire damage. Two Oregon campgrounds were destroyed recently based on wildfires and had insurance claims of $1.8 million and $800,000. Also, they've got wildfire issues coming in California. The state is putting some extra regulations on the insurance companies insuring those in California. One campground owner had his rate go from $17,000 a year to $76,000 a year for less coverage than he had before. Ouch. This comes to light shortly after a conversation that Chad had at the ARVIC conference with an insurance carrier about the skyrocketing costs that he was telling him too. He said, there's also been a lot of cases of just kind of the slip and fall where juries are providing a whole lot of money to folks in these settlements. So it's not a matter of, you know, settling a small claim out of court. People are taking this all the way into the jury, knowing that the jury has this big opinion that corporate America is some evil thing and we need to punish them and punish the insurance companies because of these claims. So keep an eye on your insurance. And also please make sure if you make any modifications or changes in your park, please talk to your insurance carrier. Ask them what you can do to reduce the premiums, or ask them what you can do to minimize the potential for claims. Interesting stuff. Also, some other news. Jellystone had their conference. For some reason, koa, Jellystone, and Arvik all seem to ride right on top of each other for their convention times, but Jellystone also had theirs. They had some interesting things to report in their article in Woodall. Well, one of the facts I found really interesting was about the Jellystone store. As you know, Jellystone does a lot of themed merchandise and really focuses attention on their stores. The typical Jellystone park store generated $223,000 in sales in 2021. Amazing. How's your store doing? Are you beating that? I would venture to say that most stores that I see do not come anywhere near those numbers, but this tells you there is potential. So take a look at your stores. Many times I walk into campgrounds and see that their store doesn't look like it had much thought to it. It looks like somebody took some commonly placed items and put them on some shelves, but really never thought about the retail impacts and the impulse buyer decision. Please do yourself a favor and take a look at your store restructure. Make sure you have speed bumps. If you don't have speed bumps or you don't know what those are, check out kaiserbender.com There are some retail planners that I work with in several businesses to make sure that their retail presentation generates more sales. Now's the time you've got a little slow point. Maybe go in there and clean that store out. If you have slow moving merchandise, get rid of it. Get fast moving merchandise in your store. Track what you're selling and make sure that those are the things you carry in your inventory. Hope this has been helpful for you. Look forward to seeing you next week with some more news. RA.
