Camping World Rumors, Packed National Parks & The RV Reality Check

Mike Wendland (0:02): Good morning. Good morning, and happy Memorial Day weekend. Welcome to the RV Lifestyle Podcast news edition. I'm Mike Wendland, and it is Monday, Labor Day twenty twenty six. We hope wherever you are, you're able to pause and think about what this holiday really means.

Mike Wendland (0:19): Yeah. We caught the unofficial start of summer, but it's really a time to remember all of those men and women who sacrificed so much so we can be so free. Alright. We are gonna dig into some of the stories that matter to you as an RV traveler, as an RV owner, or somebody just thinking about jumping into this lifestyle. And before we get into today's stories, a quick reminder, all the links and the sources for everything we cover today are in the show notes at rvpodcast.com.

Mike Wendland (0:49): We do the research so you don't have to, but we always want you to read the original sources and draw your own conclusions. I'm a journalist, and I've always been told to source my material. And that's the way I've been trained, and that's what I'm doing for you. So it's all there in the show notes for this, and you find that at rvpodcast.com. Alright.

Mike Wendland (1:09): Let's get into it. Is Camping World in trouble, and what does that mean for you? Now I wanna start today with a story that landed on my radar this week, and I will be honest with you here. My skeptical antenna went up the moment I read the headline. It was a post on X, formerly Twitter, from a username Roger claiming that Camping World, the nation's largest RV dealer chain, is headed towards chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Mike Wendland (1:35): He cited $3,500,000,000 in what he called unpayable debt, and he pointed to the very real and very fresh bankruptcy filing by West Marine, the country's largest boating supply retailer, as a sign of things to come. Now here's what made this post more than just random social media noise. Marcus Lemonis himself responded. Lemonis, the cofounder of Camping World, the former CEO, the guy you know from CNBC's The Prophet, fired back on x with just two words, totally false. And then a second post, false.

Mike Wendland (2:12): Do your research. And look. When the cofounder of a publicly traded company feels compelled to respond to a random guy on social media, that raises its own set of questions. Either the post struck a nerve because it was dangerously wrong or because it was uncomfortably close to something that could be true. Probably, maybe a little of both.

Mike Wendland (2:36): So let me give you the actual picture because the reality here is more complicated than either Camping World is going bankrupt or everything's fine. Move along. Here's what we know from Camping World's own SEC filings. The company posted a net loss of nearly $90,000,000 in 2025 in the most recent quarter, quarter one of twenty twenty six. Revenue fell more than 4% year over year, and the net loss widened.

Mike Wendland (3:03): The stock, which once traded near $45 a share back in late twenty twenty one, has dropped roughly 86%. It's trading near COVID era lows, and the company has suspended its dividend redirecting that cash towards paying down debt instead. And the stock carries a 21% short interest, meaning a significant chunk of Wall Street's betting it goes lower, and that's the bear case, and it's real. Now here's the fair counterpoint. Camping World says it improved its net debt leverage ratio from 8.1 times earnings to 5.7 times by end of twenty twenty five, and they did pay down an additional $50,000,000 in long term debt so far in 2026.

Mike Wendland (3:50): Cash on hand stands at about $200,000,000, and management is reaffirming full year guidance of $2.75 to $325,000,000 in adjusted revenues. Now that's not nothing, and Camping World has actually been gaining market share even as the overall RV market has contracted. So is it going bankrupt? Well, based on publicly available information, the answer appears to be no, not imminently. But is it a company under real financial pressure in a difficult industry environment?

Mike Wendland (4:23): Absolutely. Yes. And that brings me to the part of the story that I think actually matters to you as an RV owner and enthusiast. The West Marine bankruptcy is not just a boating story. West Marine filed chapter 11 on May 17, and their own court filings are blunt about why they cited declines in consumer discretionary spending significantly elevated diesel prices, inflationary conditions, and global supply chain disruptions along with the tariff environment that has compressed margins and created a challenging and uncertain operating environment.

Mike Wendland (5:01): That's a description of the headwinds facing all outdoor recreation retail businesses broadly, not just boats. Now the parallel that that ex user Roger, whoever he was, was drawing between West and Camping World is not crazy. Both are large outdoor recreation retailers that rode a pandemic era demand wave. Both carry significant debt loads, and both are navigating the same consumer spending slowdown. The difference, at least on paper, is that Camping World is publicly traded with required transparency and has been actively paying down debt and still maintains $200,000,000 in cash.

Mike Wendland (5:43): Now my takeaway, and I wanna be clear, this is just my read. It's not financial advice, is this. Camping World is not West Marine, but the underlying pressures on both companies are very real, and they reflect something bigger happening in the RV and outdoor recreation market. High interest rates have made RV financing brutal. Consumers are pulling back on big ticket discretionary purchases, and tariffs on steel, aluminum, and imported components are squeezing manufacturer and dealer margins alike.

Mike Wendland (6:16): For you as an RV shopper or an owner, what this means practically is that the dealer landscape may keep shifting. We may be seeing more consolidation, more dealer closures, more pressure on service departments trying to do more with less, and that's worth watching. As for Camping World specifically, Marcus Lemonis says the bankruptcy talk is totally false, and the company's own numbers offer some support for that, but the financial pressure is real, and the scrutiny is deserved. I'll keep watching this one for you, and we'll bring you updates as things develop. Story two, the KOA CEO just told the RV industry something important if anyone was listening.

Mike Wendland (7:02): Now I wanna give you a story that we used to call in the journalism business burying the lead, meaning that the biggest and the most significant facts in the story are buried way down behind a bunch of word salad that obscure it. Well, that's just what the CEO of KOA, Campgrounds of America, the largest campground network in North America, did last week when she stood in front of 1,400 RV industry executives in Elkhart, Indiana and delivered what amounted to a quiet alarm bell. Here's the line she actually buried. Between 58% of people who own an RV didn't use it at all last year, and she said that may be a conservative estimate. She called it a participation gap.

Mike Wendland (7:48): Read that again. Nearly one in 10 RV owners didn't take a single trip. The broader picture, camping participation is down. More people are camping than ever, 52,000,000 campers in 2025, but they're camping less often. In 2019, about 12% of camping households camped just once a year.

Mike Wendland (8:11): By 2025, that number had jumped to 34%. Two thirds of all campers now camp just once or twice a year. KOA CEO Toby O'Rourke then sounded a very loud alarm bell. Quote, if people are not using their product, they're not inclined to upgrade or purchase another one. And that's the real headline.

Mike Wendland (8:34): It's not a participation gap. It's a purchase gap, a dealer revenue gap, an industry sustainability problem dressed up in conference room language. Her diagnosis, people aren't dropping out because they've lost interest. They love camping. They just can't afford to do it as often, or they can't find the time or both.

Mike Wendland (8:54): Now here's my 2¢. We're seeing Camping World struggling. We saw West Marine file bankruptcy. We see campground prices still high while short term bookings are softening. And now the CEO of the biggest campground brand in the country is standing up in Elkhart telling the industry that a meaningful slice of its own customers have an RV sitting in the driveway going nowhere.

Mike Wendland (9:19): That is a connected set of dots, folks, and it points to the same thing. The outdoor recreation boom has cooled, and the industry needs to catch up to that reality. You know, one of the things I keep hearing from RVers right now, and honestly, we feel it too, is that between fuel costs and just the general price of everything, people are being a lot more careful about when they hit the road and how far they are gonna go. And then I get it. It adds up fast fuel, campground fees, food, activities.

Mike Wendland (9:50): Before you know, a long weekend costs more than a week used to cost. Here's the thing, though. A lot of RVers are cutting back on trips that they could actually afford because they don't really know what a trip is gonna cost until they're already home and looking at the credit card bill. And that is exactly why we built the RV budget planner. It's a web app in our RV trip planning center.

Mike Wendland (10:15): You'll find it at rvlifestyle.com/budget. You put in your route, your fuel cost, your campground fees, your food, and activity budget, and it'll give you a real number before you even hook up in the driveway. It's not a rough guess. It's an actual plan. Jennifer and I have found that when we know the real number going in, we can take more trips, not fewer because the uncertainty is gone.

Mike Wendland (10:38): One time purchase, no subscription, cost you $9.99. Rvlifestyle.com/budget. The link's also in the show notes. Alright. Back to the news.

Mike Wendland (10:49): Story three. Yosemite is in trouble, and it's not just the vandals. Here's a story that should make every one of us who loves national parks genuinely angry and a little worried about what this summer holds. Yosemite is getting hammered, and the current memorial weekend crowds are not going to help. Vandalism has been hitting the park with increasing frequency.

Mike Wendland (11:11): Back in January, somebody spray painted graffiti across the boulder, a door, and an informational sign near the iconic Bridevale Fall Trail. It's all tagged with the word yeti. One regular park goer told reporters he sees something like it every couple of months now. It's not that uncommon, he said, to see graffiti in the park and a lot of trash as well. That quote alone tells you that something has shifted, and the vandalism problem is colliding with a crowd problem this summer that park staff have been warning about for months.

Mike Wendland (11:43): The federal government eliminated Yosemite's entry reservation system in 2026 following an April 25 order from interior secretary Doug Burgham directing national parks to stay open and accessible. Park staff saw this coming. A March 26 survey found that 85% of verified park employees opposed that decision predicting it would lead to angry, disappointed visitors taking out frustrations on frontline workers. It looks like they might have been right. On the first major weekend in May, the Camp 4 overflow parking lot at Yosemite was choked for hours.

Mike Wendland (12:21): Cars circling endlessly, squeezed between trees and rocks and into the dirt on both sides of the road. Staff said that they expected to get significantly worse when June arrives, and Yosemite is not alone. Arches And Glacier National Parks also dropped that reservation system this year, and conservation groups have described the move as choosing chaos over conservation. Now I understand the argument for open access. These are public lands.

Mike Wendland (12:49): They belong to all of us. But the hard truth is this. When you flood an understaffed park with unlimited visitors, some of those visitors are gonna spray paint boulders and leave trash on the trails. More feet on the ground with fewer rangers to watch over things is a combination that does not end well for the parks or for the experience of the millions of good faith visitors who just wanna see Half Dome. Yosemite is on your list this summer, and it should be on your list at some point in your RV travels, plan carefully.

Mike Wendland (13:21): Go early in the morning. Use the shuttles. Avoid weekends if you can, and as always, leave it better than you found it. These places, we're just borrowing them. Steuif War, why camping may be the best anecdote to a lonely world.

Mike Wendland (13:39): I wanna close this shortened podcast today with something that goes beyond RVs and the industry numbers and gets at the real reason most of us do this. In fact, it's being played out right now all across the country on this Memorial Day weekend, the start of the summer. USA Today ran a story a while back that I keep coming back to. Its headline, if I'm paraphrasing it here, said something like, campers say they make four new friends on every trip. Four per trip.

Mike Wendland (14:10): Now think about that for a second in the context of the world that we're living in right now, where a lot of people say they feel more disconnected than ever. According to Campspot's 2026 travel trend outlook, 75% of travelers say they wish for a stronger sense of community, and they blame the deficit on work life imbalance, not enough shared experiences, and too much screen time. Campgrounds, it turns out, are solving that problem in a way nothing else quite does. In that same report, 85% of campers said they regularly meet new people while camping. More than half said it's easy to strike up a conversation, and 92 said they have proactively offered help to somebody at a campground.

Mike Wendland (14:55): Ninety two percent. When was the last time you saw a number like that for anything? A Michigan grandmother named Susan Christiansen put it better than any data point could. She said, on a typical day, many of us get home from work, walk in our house, and close out the world. When we go camping, we do just the opposite.

Mike Wendland (15:14): We sit outside our tents and our campers. We wave at walkers going by. We might stop to admire somebody's dog or strike up a conversation at the fishing dock. It's so easy to invite your camp neighbor over for a cup of coffee or to share a campfire. Jennifer and I have been saying this for fifteen years now and half a million miles.

Mike Wendland (15:35): The RV and camping community is unlike any other. People look out for each other. They share firewood and jumper cables and cold drinks and life stories with complete strangers, and those strangers become friends. That's not a trend. That's that's not a data point.

Mike Wendland (15:54): That's what this lifestyle is. So keep that in mind the next time somebody asks you why you do the RV lifestyle. And that's the RV lifestyle podcast news edition for this Memorial Day Monday. As always, all sources and links for today's stories are in the show notes at rvpodcast.com, and I encourage you to read them yourself and make your own judgments. And by the way, if you have a story tip or a question or something you wanna dig into, reach out to me at RV Podcast dot com.

Mike Wendland (16:25): Just click the contact button up at the top, and I read everything. Before I let you go, though, a lot of you have been writing in after these news episode podcasts with questions like, where do I actually find good dispersed camping, or how do I get a reservation at a new park before it fills up, or what's the best rig for the Gulf Coast in August? These conversations are happening every single day inside our community, our private community, rvcommunity.com. And that's where Jen and I are personally active. We're in there answering questions every day, sharing what we're doing and talking to people who are actually living this, making friends, that connection that the RV lifestyle allows.

Mike Wendland (17:09): We're not just dreaming about it. So I just wanna invite you. If if you want real answers from people who've actually done this, full timers, weekenders, new RVers, seasoned veterans, come find us. Just go check it out. Rvcommunity.com.

Mike Wendland (17:26): And that's the news edition for this week. New episode coming up Wednesday. Stories from the road. Jennifer will be joining me, and we'll see you then. So safe travels and happy trails.