In the world of business, where the quest for profits, sales growth and the next big thing is never ending, here’s something you don’t hear every day.
“I will die of old age before we’ve even cracked a fraction of this demand.”
That’s the market summary Outdoorsy Co-founder and CEO Jeff Cavins gave to PYMNTS’ Karen Webster on the status of his RV rental platform, which’s about to cross the billion-dollar bookings milestone in only its fifth year in business.
“It’s sensational. It’s a global cross-cultural phenomenon that is insatiable. There’s no way you can fulfill all this demand. There’s more demand for [RV and camper rentals] than there is for hotels and airlines,” Cavins said.
Put another way, this Silicon Valley dropout who turned the ‘trip of a lifetime’ into a hyper-growth startup said there are over 2 billion unique searches each year for ‘camper van rental’ versus only a small fraction of total rigs on the ground and an even smaller universe of those that are available to lease.
“So I say, wait a minute, 2.3 billion people want to do this, and there are 54 million of these things sitting in people’s garages and backyards,” Cavins said, noting that outdoor travel currently accounts for only about 11 percent of $11 trillion in annual global travel sales. Where travelers and RV owners used to connect online via Craigslist, Outdoorsy now offers a professionally managed, full-service global platform with over 200,000 vehicles in over 4,800 cities and 14 countries.
Like Airbnb, Only Different
Outdoorsy definitely resembles Airbnb, with favorite destinations, specialty vehicles (such as refurbished VW microbuses ) and lots of host profiles and travel pictures. And yet, Cavins said, they’re totally different.
“What we know about Airbnb, we have a lot of respect for those guys and they’ve done a great job, but they don’t have a lot of interest in the outdoors,” Cavins said, referring to Outdoorsy as the third dimension of the travel business, or what he likes to call the mobile hotel industry.
“There is no Airbnb in Grand Canyon National Park. There is no Hilton in Yosemite. There’s no Airbnb in Arches [National Park in Utah],” he said, noting that the average 8-day Outdoorsy RV rental was about 3.5 times the average Airbnb stay.
There’s also a demographic driver happening right now, he said, where younger Gen-Z and Millennial consumers want something different than marble hotel lobbies.
“They’re building their Instagram walls and they want to go see nature, but they want the accommodations of a hotel room,” he said. “The millennials love mobility. It’s all about mobility for them. That’s really what RVs are. They’re like the hotels on wheels.”
People Are Scared Of Cities
There are also the many lifestyle changes brought on by the pandemic that are causing tourists to hit the road, not least of which is a renewed desire for outdoor domestic travel in a country with 84 million acres to explore in 423 national parks. Cavins maintains that consumers have become fearful of cities and are shunning the tourist attractions, mass-market hotels and mass-market airlines that feed them. And as much as COVID is still very much a part of daily life that’s decimated most of the travel industry, it’s hard not to wonder how Outdoorsy will fare when the virus is gone.
“I get asked this question a lot, ‘After the pandemic, will there be a retrenchment?’ Will everybody be going back to Vegas again and the love affair with the RV will be over?’’ he said. “I keep going back to what Steve Jobs said, ‘Once the consumer knows they can have more they’ll never settle for less.’ So this is a new channel for travel. Yes, people will go back to Vegas and yes, they’ll go back to the Marriott, but they’re going to keep doing this too.”
At the same time, Cavins is quick to share his first-hand experience with the nation’s network of campgrounds, many of which are overcrowded, sub-standard and outdated.
“I know they’re there, but I haven’t found [a campground] that has a workout facility, like a fitness facility,” he said. “The industry needs to be hotel-ified. It needs food and beverage. It needs a fitness facility. It needs WiFi and a business center.”
Hotel-ification And The Mobile Hotel Economy
As much as Outdoorsy’s exponential growth is drawing attention, any discussion of it would be incomplete without mentioning the many “RV millionaires” that the platform has created. To hear Cavins glowingly tell the rags-to-riches stories of Outdoorsy “rent-trepreneurs“ who have gone from no job and one old camper to a 100+ unit business that’s doing multiple millions of dollars in bookings is, as he calls it, “the great American story.”
“We’re not constrained by what’s happening with the RV industry because these things have been sitting in people’s driveways and garages for years,” he said. “Right now, we can’t keep up with the demand. Demand is not the problem. The problem is the supply. It’s getting the supply [of RVs] up.”
Aside from opportunities like sprucing up campgrounds, Cavins is looking at other niche tourism markets, like auto racing and concerts, and said he expects to make some announcements around partnerships campground and possibly other ventures later this year.
“Lesa Kennedy, the CEO of NASCAR, told me, ‘I have 12 NASCAR tracks and run the equivalent of 12 Super Bowls every weekend and there’s nowhere for anybody to sleep. I need your platform for my customers,’” he said. “Plus, there’s also 32 million people that go to music festivals every year and they’re usually in the middle of nowhere, there’s no hotels.”
And that’s just in the United States.
“Outdoorsy is all over the world now,” he said. “We’re in New Zealand. We’re in Australia. And we’ll be going live in South Korea and Japan at the end of 2021,” he said, stressing the truly global opportunity that exists to put travelers at the wheel of their very own hotel-on-wheels.
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