Selection Criteria

I concur JackB. I'm currently planning a vacation from our home in Oregon to the Midwest. My maternal side of the family is from North Dakota and I've been hoping to explore the area my mother "escaped" from (her words) during the dust bowl. I have spent much time researching parks and CG's and see that due to the oil fracking industry any park with water and power is often nearly filled with these oil workers. I hold nothing against them and their families, but I would not VACATION at a park that has multiple reviews mentioning these long term residents.Given the choice, I think dry camping is a better vacation option.

 

Western, I believe what was said was tongue in cheek. He is a great moderator here on this site. I believe that, in this instance, you are too quick to judge.

 

With all due respect you've completely twisted and misinterpreted my comments. I was simply noting for RickB that if he didn't like parks with lots of long term residents he would probably want to avoid private RV parks. I've been the one throughout this thread who has argued that there's nothing particularly wrong with having long term residents. My wife and I typically use private RV parks for more than 80% of our stays.

As for my observation that there are many long-term residents at lots of RV parks throughout the country, I stand by my comments. My wife and I travel extensively and we rarely come across parks that don't have lots of working people just like the ones Jack B describes. We're at a KOA in Nashville at the moment and probably half the sites are occupied by people other than tourists and vacationers.

I understand that most parks in your part of the country (MT) aren't year round, so, of course, they can't have true long term residents. But, in fact, more and more working folks are staying in RVs year round in locations which many of us wouldn't think suitable for RVs in the winter. If you doubt this, spend a little time reading some of the Facebook RV group posts. Many "non-traditional RVers" appear to use social media to learn about RVing rather than forums like these.

As for comments about the risk of traveling without reservations, my wife and I never travel without at least having a reservation for that night. Again, I was making an observation based on actual situations where we have seen multiple RVers turned away from parks because they didn't have reservations.

 

Sometimes during our longer vacations we plan a night here and there at an RV Park. Laundry is one reason, but there are times we want to make use of other luxuries like wifi. So I'm not anti RV Parks. My post a couple days ago where I gave an example of how vacation campers and long term residents don't always mix well is often solved by having these two groups placed in separate sections of the park. My wife and I will always be vacationers. I've been told in no uncertain terms that we will never be full-timers (gotta stay close to the grandkids). We have learned to vacation camp from after Labor Day until mid November and then after Spring Break until Memorial Day. We camp peacefully in half empty state campgrounds. So, no offense intended toward full-timers or RV Parks.

 

On a tangent, imo the days of being able to travel, just pull into a park and camp with no reservations are mostly over. There are fewer parks and more campers. Boomers are camping! While I prefer out of the way, off the beaten path campgrounds with lots of privacy and possibly fewer services, even these once mostly empty places are now packed. Planning for an extended trip now begins early and schedules are locked in firmly based on reservations.

 

Of all the Admins, Janet seems to get dragged into all these prickly topics. But as she happens to be here, I'll ask.
Does RVPR require campgrounds to subtract permanents from their site tally when giving a profile of their park? Defining permanent residents as Park Models and trailers on blocks with skirting, and often decks and un-licensed. And frequently owned and rented by the park.

 

No. The number of sites currently noted on a park listing is either member submitted or info as noted on a parks website. What I am 'hearing' here however is that reviewers and those using reviews might like a way to know what percentage of sites are long term. I'm not sure that this is something we would be able to accurately present but we can do some head scratching about various possibilities.

 

IMO Jack B's description of "permanents" is too restrictive. We rarely see park models at any parks we frequent and even skirting isn't all that common in warmer areas. As an example, we are currently at an excellent park in Montgomery AL (waiting for the rain to stop in TX) and it is pretty obvious that there are a lot of "long term" residents, where that is defined as "one month or longer." However, there are no park models, no skirting, and all the sites look nice.

How do I know they are long term? It's just a "sixth sense" having been on the road full-time for 5 years. I can look at the daily inflow/outflow of people and the mid-week vacancy rate and get a reasonably good sense of how many RVs are here on a long-term basis. Tonight, there's hardly an empty site (football weekend) but I'll wager that ~half these RVs will be sitting here a couple of weeks from now.

 

One of the problems with trying to make such estimates is that for many parks the data will change over the course of the year and estimates made by different people at different times may be very misleading.

I'll use the example of the park at which we spend the winter, a park in Port Aransas TX. During the Dec-Mar period almost all the sites are occupied by RVers renting on a monthly basis which, I guess would make them long-term in many people's estimation. There are ~2-3 park models out of ~400 sites, but there are ~50 sets of wooden steps and maybe ~25 with skirts.

However, in the June-Sept timeframe the park is >90% occupied by vacationers mostly from San Antonio and Austin. Typical rental period is ~1 week which would not count as long term.

If we start to characterize parks, how would you classify this one? If you call this a snowbird park inhabited by long term residents you might discourage families from coming in the summer when the nature of the park is very different.

I realize I have chosen a particularly difficult example, but that's the problem with simplistic solutions to complex problems; they get messed up when dealing with the difficult cases.

 

docj...not to beat-a-dead-horse but let me try this one. Have you never been to an rv park with some sort of "draw", like a lake, and seen sites occupied by empty trailers so that the owners can come out on the weekends? We were at a park this summer that offered two lovely lakes for fishing, small boating, swimming. There were 22 trailers occupying the premium sites at the lake edge. They are only used during the summer, for weekends and then maybe a two week vacation, but sit there all year long. Paying rent, of course. I spoke to one guy who said his family has had this spot for years, his Dad passed it onto him. These renters have a summer home, and should not have their site counted in the tally of available sites for travelers.
(This is very common in Wisconsin, as people escape the city. Watch out for the golf carts.)

 

Jack, how do you suggest the number of actually available sites be determined? And by whom? As said, the current site counts are submitted by the members or taken from the parks website. And then there's the problem of the "moving target" number over the seasons, as Joel noted.

 

I agree that this situation exists at lots of "destination parks" but I have no idea how you would account for it in RVPR reviews. As far as the park is concerned these sites are for rent; the fact that they are seasonal rentals doesn't make them any less "real." The same sort of situation occurs at our winter park where "prime sites" like the one we occupy are not available to newcomers or short term renters.

 

To even further complicate the issue, there's the membership parks such as the club owned Escapees parks, and the associated co-op parks. Members own or lease some or all of the sites, and how many are available for short term rental can change daily when sites are added or removed from a rental pool as owners/lessees come and go. I think Jack makes a valid point, but I don't see a workable way of accurately reporting the numbers without opening a can of complex, confusing worms.

 

To add my two cents. I really don't care if a park has a lot long term users or is full of vacationers. To me what counts more is the condition of the park. I live on the west coast of Canada and I can guarantee that 99% of the private parks here fill up for four or five of the winter months. There are some that look more like a hobo camp than an RV Park. Junky old units with tarps covering the roofs etc and there are some that look like they are a summer vacation park. It's all in how the operator allows the users to be. Does it really matter what your neighbor does during the day? Not to me 'cause I'm usually out doing something as well. Is getting up early and starting your vehicle for work any different than doing the same thing except spending the day with your rig on the road headed to your next destination? Do vacation trippers not own any of those noisy diesels that sound just like those that typify "Oil Patch" workers?

Those operators that allow their parks to become a messy jumble are most likely to be ones that do not enforce any rules or care about the quality of their guests stay either. Those are the ones I would like to know about when I plan my trips. I would hope that posters continue making observations about the condition of the user's units.

Darrell

 

So, I need to offer a remedy, if I'm going to complain about permanent residents. The answer can only be part of:
"Own this Campground? Claim it and Unlock Features"
When owners are able to interact, they should also have access to their profile in order to update essential info and make helpful additions like directions and secondary phone numbers. I'm sure they will also want to add any new or improved amenities in response to reviews.
Make all the fields of their profile available to them including: "sites". Change it to "Available Sites" and ask that sites that will never be available be excluded from their amended tally. Or, make it two fields: Total Sites and Available Sites. This could be very telling.
But only the owner could do it.

 

I think that's a great suggestion, Jack! Maybe "Short Term Sites" might be an alternate designation to avoid confusing "Available Sites" with "Open sites" that would be part of the reservation process. There would still be a problem with the "moving target" parks of course.