Here's how Covid-19 has lit a fire under this budding campground empire:
arren Meyer, hospitality entrepreneur, looks out with pity on his industry. “There are restaurants that are closing for good,” he says. “Airlines have to give up half their seats.” Relatively speaking, he’s prospering: as Memorial Day approached, a third of his 150 locations were gearing up to open, and he’s anticipating that he will break even this year, which counts as a big win for his decimated field in 2020.
The pandemic is a mortal threat to the travel industry, but not to RRM. Most of its visitors live within a gas tank’s drive of their destination. And to locked-down America, the great outdoors never looked so appetizing. At one of his Arizona camps, Meyer says, a hundred frustrated customers jumped over closed gates to use a park illegally. “A lot of government campgrounds were built with social distancing as the ethic,” Meyer says.
A government parks department hires environmental science graduates who collect full-time salaries and costly benefits. With rare exceptions, RRM hires retirees who live in their own RVs at a campground. A lot of them are couples who split up the chores. Most of them are on Medicare. They work part-time and start at minimum wage.
RRM took over a park in California suffering from a serious case of deferred maintenance. Government inspectors came in and condemned a deck with rotting wood. Meyer obediently had the deck removed. Then he was cited for removing the deck without a deck removal permit. “I thought I was going to jail,” he says.
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