How The Summer Of The RV Revved Outdoorsy’s Engines

^The RV marketplace Outdoorsy began the pandemic like many other travel-focused companies: watching cancellations pile up. “April 1—our lowest bookings day on record—was our worst nightmare,” says Jen Young, 47, the company’s cofounder and chief marketing officer.

That nightmare would soon turn into Outdoorsy’s greatest opportunity. As Americans got cabin fever and realized RVs, motorhomes and camper vans could solve the conundrum of “socially-distanced travel,” Young and her cofounder and life partner, Jeff Cavins (also the company’s CEO), focused their attention on search engine optimization. During what became the “summer of the RV,” Outdoorsy rose to the top of Google’s search results, logging more than 3.5 million visits to its website in June, more than double its traffic in June 2019.

These clicks translated into a booking per minute, Young says, as renters, many first-timers, began booking longer trips on shorter notice. Forbes expects the company’s sales 2020 sales to reach $62 million this year, up from last year’s $38 million.  

“I definitely did not ever forecast, ‘You know what we really need here, guys, is a global pandemic to drive our growth rate,’” Young says. “Never, ever, did I think that or surmise that.”

When Young and Cavins, 59, founded Outdoorsy in 2015 they simply wanted to solve a mismatch in the RV, motorhome and camper van market. By their count, some 17 million North American RVs sit unused more than 300 days of the year. Meanwhile, more than 70 million American households hike or camp at least once a year, but most won’t buy its own RV or motorhome. Young and Cavins’ solution: create the Airbnb of RVs.

To better understand the market they were getting into, the longtime corporate executives sold their houses and moved into a 27-foot Airstream trailer and Denali truck. “We didn’t want to be the tech founders of a company that just said, ‘yeah, we’ll throw up a website, we’ll get a great growth marketer, and we’ll just growth hack our way into building this business,’” Young recalls.

“I definitely did not ever forecast, ‘You know what we really need here, guys, is a global pandemic to drive our growth rate,’” says Outdoorsy cofounder Jen Young.

The information Young and Cavins got from visiting RV parks, talking to motorhome owners and spending time on the road was so helpful in Outdoorsy’s early days that the duo decided to replicate the trip for six weeks this summer as they altered their business. They moved into a 19-foot Winnebago Rebel, then drove from their headquarters in Austin, Texas across the American west into New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. “We had to know, what’s going on in national parks and state parks in terms of the rules for how you can use their bathrooms, or their facilities like pools or their kayaks that are available for rent,” Young says.

The RV business has changed with the influx of first-time renters and the Covid-era safety and hygiene precautions. “The summation of the trip that we did was this very significant list of all of the customers’ needs and issues around, ‘How do I drive it? How do I hitch a trailer? How do I know if my SUV in my house will pull the trailer?’” Young says. In anticipation of continued demand, she’s taking these consumer questions and using them to make a new product and marketing roadmap.

^While booms in the RV industry have long been cyclical—and the busts have historically foretold of a recession—Craig Kennison, a senior research analyst at RW Baird, shares Young’s bullish outlook. “We absolutely believe the pandemic has broadened the appeal of RVing. Many more people have participated this year and many of them will become life long RVers,” he says. While Kennison covers publicly-traded RV companies like Winnebago and focuses largely on vehicle sales (which, like Outdoorsy rentals, also hit highs this summer), he notes that “for the next five years, it can’t be anything but good news that people have tried it out.”

A self-contained unit that lets you move about the country without stepping into an airport or hotel sounds like a pandemic travel panacea, but it’s not cheap. On Outdoorsy, renters pay an average of $145 a day (or $127 for trips longer than six days). Add on the cost of parking at a campsite overnight, which generally costs $25 to $80 per night, but can go as high as $130 a night for a larger vehicle at a popular park, like Utah’s Zion National Park, during the peak season. Plus these vehicles get notoriously bad mileage per gallon: Tour-bus-like Class A motorhomes log an average of 7 to 13 miles per gallon, while smaller Class B vehicles get 18- to 25 miles per gallon.

Young is relieved to be entertaining questions about the bull case for RVs given how bleak things looked in March. Then, it wasn’t clear if national parks and outdoor spaces would reopen in 2020. Instead, as the pandemic has dragged on, she argues that they provide a short respite for people from the daily grind “surrounded by the evening sky or a sunrise or some trees.”

“I hope this doesn’t overstate it,” she says, “but frankly, I feel that Outdoorsy has played a really significant role in the recuperation of this country.”