Over the past several months not a day has gone by without a news story highlighting how RVs have become the ideal way to travel this summer. During this time, the RV Industry Association’s PR team has been proactively managing press inquiries from dozens and dozens of local and national outlets, pushing out positive messages portraying RVs as the way to travel in a responsible and socially distant way, while also having control over your environment and how you interact with people around you. The freedom and control afforded by our industry is unmatched in comparison to other travel and vacation options.
The Association’s PR team working in conjunction with our PR partners, have directly placed 97 stories in the past 100 days garnering hundreds of millions of impressions. This, in addition to the exciting launch of Go RVing’s Go On A Real Vacation campaign has strengthened our industry’s push to become the go-to summer travel option. In fact, the press coverage we’re experiencing now may be one of the most consistent runs of positive media about the RV industry ever seen. From the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Bloomberg to CNBC, CNN, Consumer Reports, and Fox News, the story of surging sales and unmatched interest from first-time RVers is reaching millions of American households across the country.
It’s a message that resonates with audiences so much so that Mad Money’s Jim Crammer opened his recent segment with Winnebago Industries CEO Mike Happe saying RVs have two themes that he likes: freedom and control.
When it became clear that RVs were the way that people wanted to travel this summer, the Association’s research team partnered with Ipsos to dig deeper into consumer sentiment around travel as a result of the pandemic. The results showed an astounding figure of 46 million Americans planning to take an RV trip in the next year—a statistic that has been cited by news outlets on a daily basis since being released.
Many of those 46 million Americans have been racing to RV dealerships, rental sites, and campgrounds according to the hundreds of local television, radio, and newspaper stories across the country. These stories are a result of the efforts of the RV Industry Association as well as our industry partners, the RV Dealers Association and the National Association for RV Parks and Campgrounds, who have been working to share stories of record sales and a surge campsite bookings.
As we move through the summer into the fall, the RV Industry Association, along with our industry partners, will continue to proactively manage the message about RV sales and travel to maintain the unprecedented positive press, keeping consumers interested in joining the millions of active RVers across the country.
