RV Weekly

Nearly 10 years ago, the Committee of Excellence conducted a study to see how happy RV consumers were with their overall RV recreational experience of buying, owning and using an RV. What the study revealed was astonishing — nearly 25 percent of RV consumers would never purchase again and would tell their friends that buying and owning an RV was a bad experience.

Over the years additional studies have been conducted to make sure the report was not an anomaly, and the results were very similar. To address the issue, five areas were identified that consumers complain the most about. Task forces were assembled to figure out the best ways to address the five major complaints of consumers. The reality is all five areas center around a single problem – RVs breaking down and not getting fixed quickly.

How upset would you be if you bought a car and within the first week of owning it, something broke on it? When you returned the vehicle to have the problem fixed, they told you it could be anywhere from a several weeks to three months to fix the problem. Would you buy from that dealership again? Would you buy that brand again? Heck, if you didn’t really need the vehicle, would you even bother owning one? The contributing factors to this problem are so diverse that it has taken several years and countless hours donated by a host of really bright volunteers just to figure out a plan to fix why RVs break so often and why they can’t be fixed in a timely manner.

All of these problems center around one thing — money. The push in the industry has been to bring down the cost of RVs so they are affordable to a larger number of consumers. More consumers able to buy RVs equates to increased sales. Everybody makes more money. The problem is that the infrastructure to support the increased sales was never developed and lowering the per-unit cost came at the expense of quality. The pool of consumers is so great that 25 percent attrition was acceptable. It is a classic case of volume over margin.

This race to the bottom line has affected the entire RV distribution chain from supplier, to manufacturer, to dealer. Competition to lower price has impacted everyone in the industry, forcing them to cut costs and consequently, quality, just to stay in business. There are a number of manufacturers and dealers whose primary business niche centers around producing and selling the lowest-priced RVs. They have mastered this business model and have no incentive to change because they are making money. If 25 percent of their customers are unhappy, that’s acceptable, because unhappy customers’ checks cash just as easily as happy customers’ checks do once a contract has been signed.

The only way this will change is if there is a public relations fall out and the money disappears. This is on the horizon because consumer demographics are changing. Generation Y tolerated the headaches of RVs breaking, but subsequent generations are not as tolerant. When this happens (and it will soon), good businesses will suffer alongside the low-cost, volume RV manufacturers, suppliers and dealers.

This is why the task force’s work is so vital to the industry. As an industry, we must change the way we approach everything when it comes to making and selling RVs. If we have the foresight to implement the task force’s recommendations, we can avoid the looming PR nightmare and continue to grow.

There will be resistance by some in the industry because they have a good thing going with inexpensive, poor-quality products and poor customer service, but we cannot let them define our industry’s future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Previous Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.