special section / By Heidi Walters

Have RV, still gonna travel

(June 12, 2008)  Well, you bought the damned thing — you might as well use it. That’s the advice one rich fella says to another rich fella who, perhaps, is wondering whether he and the wife oughta take their Fleetwood Bounder with the boss triple slide-outs for a spin this summer. It’s also the attitude RV parks around here could be counting on during these eye-spinning times of daily fuel-price increases.

“The RV industry has really evolved, and the cost of these vehicles now is typically $150,000 and up,” says Tony Smithers, executive director of the Humboldt County Convention and Visitors Bureau. “The fact is, another dollar per gallon of gas is nothing to people like this. And, they’ve already invested in it. The other thing is that a lot of RVs are rented by some of our international visitors, and as far as they’re concerned, gas prices here are lower than they pay at home so it’s not really an issue for them.”

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Rising fuel prices might actually increase visitation at local RV parks, Smithers says, as people drop their far-away travel plans to, say, Yellowstone, and choose a redwoods vacation instead.

“People will change their habits,” he says. “They maybe will not drive so far, and so hopefully we are considered not so far — our main area to market is Bay Area-Sacramento.”

It’s happened in the past when something altered the American travel psyche. “After 9/11, when travel really restricted, we grew,” Smithers says. “Having said that, this year the economy is sort of stuttering, as they say, and also the gas price increase is just so much more dramatic than in the past. The expression I’ve heard is, ‘People may come anyway, but they may have their hand on their wallet once they get here.’”

For the first time in six years, says Cynthia Harris with the American Automobile Association, car and RV travel nationwide was off 1 percent over Memorial Day weekend.

John Porter, co-owner of the Benbow RV Resort (and golf course and inn), says their business was up the first four months of this year, but in May slacked. But that’s compared to an unusually buoyant May last year. And this Memorial Day “was a sellout weekend,” he says.

They’ve had just one cancellation so far, says Porter — a woman from Reno who’d actually prepaid to stay in the park but decided she couldn’t afford the gas to get there.

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