With gasoline prices where they are, it wouldn’t seem to be the ideal time to hit the road in a 30-foot recreational vehicle that scores under 10 miles to the gallon.
But Carl and Terry Haley know a bargain when they see one, which is why the Los Angeles couple recently paid $16,000 for a used home-on-wheels.
“It was almost an impulse buy,” Carl recalled, one that had its origins, as so many impulse buys do, in a trip to Las Vegas.
“From the moment we saw it, we loved it,” the 41-year-old math teacher said of the 1997 Fleetwood Flair he and his partner acquired from friends they recently visited in Sin City. “We just saw ourselves taking vacations in this vehicle,” saving money not on gas but on hotel rooms and meals.
The Haleys are on to something. While shipments of all RV vehicles – a category that includes towable campers and “toy haulers” for transporting jet skis, dirt bikes, etc. – were down 12 percent in the first half of the year, shipments of motor homes were up more than 2 percent.
And RV rentals are up about 4 percent this summer, according to industry estimates.
“Summer vacation is sacred in this country, and people aren’t going to let $100 extra in gas expense stop them from going on vacation,” said Phil Ingrassia, a spokesman for the National RV Dealers Association.
At El Monte RV, the nation’s No. 2 RV rental operation, rentals are up 4 percent this summer after dipping 4 percent last year.
Going into the 2007 travel season, “we were a little worried,” said Joe Laing, director of marketing at the Santa Fe Springs, Calif.-based company. “But the price of gas doesn’t seem to have really affected peoples’ plans.”
California officials expect visitation at state parks and campgrounds to exceed last year’s record of 77 million visitors. Campsites for tenters or RV users will be scarce between now and Labor Day for those without reservations. At Kampgrounds of America, business is up 3.3 percent summer, and advance bookings for August are up 22 percent.
“Everything on the coast from Mexico to the Mendocino coast is probably thoroughly booked for the rest of summer,” said Roy Stearns, a spokesman for the state parks department.
The dollar’s weakness against the euro and the British pound, which increases the buying power of travelers from countries that use those currencies, has helped. Britons and Germans are avid RVers, according to Laing, who said about half of El Monte’s business comes from foreign travelers. (Most of the company’s 50 U.S. locations have German-speaking staff.) “And the Europeans have absolutely no problem with our gas prices,” he added. Gasoline prices in Germany, for instance, topped the U.S. equivalent of $7 a gallon earlier this year.
Laing and others in the industry contend that, even with high gas prices, vacationing by RV can be economical, especially for families with kids. Meals can be cooked on board and lodging, of course, is included.
At El Monte RV, the average rental cost is $1,100 a week, although a 30-foot “slide out” motor home that sleeps eight costs about $2,100 a week. A spot at an RV campground can run anywhere for $20 or $30 a night to well over $100 a night at upscale resorts (some of which have minimum RV size requirements).
The economics change considerably when it comes to buying an RV as opposed to renting. Thirty-footers average around $100,000, with luxury models priced well into the hundreds of thousands.
Despite the uptick in motor home sales, it’s been a tough year in the industry. A big reason: RV manufacturers, which did a lot of business supplying temporary housing to hurricane victims in 2005, built large numbers of towable RVs last year in anticipation of another strong storm season.
It didn’t happen, so shipments were cut way back this year while dealers work through excess inventory.
And it’s not clear how much profit dealers are making on their sales. Dealers contacted for this story wouldn’t discuss pricing, but when Mark Brownlee of Temecula, Calif., was shopping for a motor home recently at an RV expo, he found bargains aplenty.
“They were dropping them $50,000 on their $250,000 units,” he said. “They were way down there.”
Analysts at Kelley Blue Book, the automotive information provider, said prices of used RVs are holding up well this summer.
“Even among the current economic turmoil, the RV industry has remained robust,” Kelley analysts reported. “The baby boomer generation has entered prime retirement age; therefore owning an RV is an alternate way of traveling on a lower budget.”
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