RV Podcast - Stories From The Road podcast - Page 3

June 22, 2026 Eleven Hands at a Campfire - and What They Tell Us About the RV Market

The RV industry is chasing the wrong generation. While manufacturers court 30-somethings with outdoor TVs and influencer campaigns, the buyers who are actually writing checks right now look nothing like the people in the ads.

Last week I sat around a campfire in Hocking Hills, Ohio with 88 members of our RVCommunity. I asked how many had bought a new RV in the past year. Eleven hands went up. A 12th would have, but he was out on a six-mile hike. He was turning 70.

That tells you everything the sales charts do not.

In this episode we dig into who is really driving the RV market right now, what experienced RVers actually want that manufacturers keep missing, the quiet but alarming shift happening in our national parks, and a dramatic rescue on the Appalachian Trail that is a reminder of exactly why preparation matters out there.

Read the companion blog post on RVing in the second half of life at RVLifestyle.com - link below.

Here is the complete episode, start to finish.

THE RV PODCAST - MONDAY NEWS EDITION Episode Air Date: Monday, June 23, 2026 - 6:00 AM Approx. Running Time: 25 Minutes Host: Mike Wendland

THE LAST GENERATION THAT KNOWS HOW TO TRAVEL ...and why the RV industry keeps ignoring them

OPEN

Last week I was sitting around a campfire in Hocking Hills, Ohio, with about 50 members of our RVCommunity.com.

I asked a simple question: how many of you have bought a brand new RV in the last year?

Eleven hands went up. A 12th would have, but he was out on a six-mile sunset hike - and he was turning 70 that summer.

This was happening while the RV industry is posting some of the worst wholesale shipment numbers in over a decade.

Which raises a question the people running this industry ought to be asking themselves: who exactly are they building RVs for?

Because I can tell you who is actually buying them. And they look nothing like the people in the ads.

OPENING

Good morning and welcome to the RV Podcast Monday News Edition. I'm Mike Wendland.

Eighteen Emmy Awards. Thirty-plus years covering everything from wars to the White House to consumer affairs. And for the past 15 years, living the RV lifestyle myself with my wife Jennifer in every type of rig you can imagine, coast to coast, all 48 contiguous states.

Today's show is a little different. Instead of leading with a breaking story, I want to start with something I witnessed firsthand that I believe tells you more about the real state of the RV market than any press release you will read this year.

And if you want to go deeper after you listen, I have been writing about this topic at RVLifestyle.com for the past several weeks. We have been exploring what it means to RV in the second half of life - the freedom, the community, the mindset, and yes, the ways the industry keeps getting it wrong. There is a link in the show notes. I think you will recognize yourself in it.

Here is what is happening on the road. And here is what the industry is getting wrong. Let's get into it.

LEAD STORY: THE LAST GENERATION THAT KNOWS HOW TO TRAVEL

The RV industry is having a rough year. A really rough year. And the numbers tell the story fast, so let me give them to you and move on, because the real story is not the numbers. The real story is who is still out there buying and camping while those numbers grind downward.

Wholesale shipments are down more than 13 percent through the first four months of 2026. Retail sales off 14 to 15 percent from last year. The industry's own forecast, just revised downward again this month, now projects this as one of the worst years for new RV sales in over a decade.

So who is still buying?

Here is what I can tell you from 15 years in this world and from what I saw last week in Hocking Hills. The people who are still writing checks for new RVs, right now, in the worst market in a decade, are the people the industry seems most determined to pretend do not exist.

Baby Boomers. Older Gen Xers. People who grew up reading paper maps. Making reservations by phone. Talking to strangers when they got lost. Fixing things with their hands. Navigating real uncertainty with nothing but experience and nerve.

According to industry research, Americans 50 and older remain the primary customer segment for RVs. Many are retirees fulfilling long-held travel dreams, and that population is still growing as the tail end of the baby boom ages into retirement. These are people with home equity, disposable income, and something even more valuable: the time and the confidence to actually use what they buy.

And yet when you look at the ads. When you watch the Go RVing campaigns. When you walk the floor of any major RV show and look at the marketing materials stacked at the booths. You see toned and trendy 30-year-olds doing yoga on the roof of a Class B. You see influencers with ring lights and perfect hair. What you do not see is the 68-year-old retired engineer who just dropped $95,000 on a new fifth wheel and is headed to Alaska.

That is a real blind spot. And I think it is costing the industry real money.

Here is what I saw at our Hocking Hills rally. Eighty-eight people, ranging from their 50s into their 80s. Riding bikes and e-bikes and scooters. Hiking up and down some of the most spectacular terrain in the Midwest. One of our members, a retired RV technician, got under a fellow member's trailer and repacked the wheel bearings on the spot. Another couple spent an afternoon giving scooter lessons to anyone who wanted to learn.

Nobody was stuck. Nobody was panicking. When something broke, someone fixed it. When someone needed help, someone helped them. These are people who grew up problem-solving before there was an app for it. And they brought every one of those skills out here.

I asked how many had bought a new RV in the past year. Eleven hands went up. Twelve if you count the man who was out on a six-mile hike at 70 years old.

This is happening while the industry chases 33-year-olds with solar panels and TikTok aesthetics.

I am not saying younger buyers are not important. They are the future and we need them. But the marketing case being made inside RV boardrooms right now, that the 50-plus buyer is yesterday's news, is demonstrably wrong. And in a market this soft, you cannot afford to ignore your most reliable customer.

I wrote about this at length over at RVLifestyle.com. It is part of an ongoing series we have been running on RVing in the second half of life. The link is in the show notes. If today's lead story speaks to you, that post will too.

STORY 2: WHO IS ACTUALLY DRIVING THE MARKET

The demographic picture of who owns and buys RVs is more complicated than the ads suggest, and it is worth understanding.

The median age of RV owners has come down in recent years. Younger buyers were absolutely part of the pandemic surge. Millennials and Gen Z now represent roughly 22 percent of RV owners - the same share as Baby Boomers - which tells you something about how quickly the demographics shifted during COVID.

But here is what the industry sometimes misses in that data. Younger buyers came in during a period of historically low interest rates, flush pandemic savings, and work-from-home flexibility. Those conditions no longer exist. The buyers who are proving most resilient in this market are the ones who are not dependent on 7 percent financing to make the purchase work.

Industry analyst Earl Hunter Jr., founder of The Unity Folks, put it bluntly in a recent trade publication outlook piece. He said the biggest trend in the RV industry right now is, simply, lack of growth. And that the industry has not figured out why emerging demographics and nontraditional consumers have little to no interest in the RV lifestyle.

That is a real problem worth solving. But while the industry works on reaching new audiences, there is a generation of experienced, well-capitalized, deeply motivated buyers out on the road right now who built this market and are still carrying it. They deserve a little more respect than a supporting role in someone else's marketing story.

STORY 3: WHAT EXPERIENCED RVers ACTUALLY WANT - AND WHAT MANUFACTURERS KEEP MISSING

I want to tell you one more thing from Hocking Hills, because I think it reveals something important about the disconnect between what the industry is building and what experienced RVers actually need.

During our campfire conversation, I asked people what features they most use in their current rigs. What do they love. What they would change.

Nobody mentioned outdoor TVs. Not one person. This is notable because outdoor entertainment has been one of the most aggressively marketed RV features of the last several years. Manufacturers have been loading up rigs with outdoor TVs, outdoor kitchens, outdoor speakers. The assumption is that RVers want to recreate the suburban living room experience outside.

Our members were out hiking six miles. They were packed into a campfire circle talking to each other. They were fixing each other's trailers. The last thing they wanted was a television.

What did they talk about wanting? Better towing stability. Improved service networks. Simpler systems that do not require a software update to turn on the hot water. Quality that lasts. And dealers who actually know the products they are selling.

These are people with decades of RV miles behind them. They know exactly what they need and exactly what they do not. When you have that kind of experience, you stop being impressed by features and start being impressed by reliability.

The industry could learn a lot by listening more carefully to the people who have been doing this the longest....

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