According to AAA, this year’s Covid outbreak led wary Americans to cancel at least 150 million summer vacations. Within the camping industry, many RVers had to scramble to make new plans as campgrounds around the country cancelled reservations. Although most of those locations have since reopened to RVs and tenting families, many campgrounds still cancelled cabin and yurt reservations for the summer due to the difficulty of properly disinfecting after each renter. As states around the country see spikes in Covid numbers, those concerns are likely to remain, and it has led to a great deal of uncertainty about traveling in general. Which is why I would argue now is the time to buy a used or new RV.
Have bathroom and kitchen, will travel.
One of the best parts of traveling with an RV is knowing you will always have a bathroom and kitchen with you. This means you can avoid public restrooms at rest areas and restaurants, and thereby minimize your exposure to germs. And since you have a refrigerator and kitchen with you, you don’t even have to eat out. Before leaving on your trip, you can even add some water to the fresh-water tank so that you can use the sink for hand-washing. A fully-equipped camper enables you to self-isolate from others while being completely self-contained—except for fuel-ups, which can be managed with gloves, hand-washing, and hand sanitizer.
You gain flexibility to avoid Covid outbreak hotspots.
When you book a beach house rental or resort vacation, you are limited to going to that location, so if Covid resurges and travel restrictions are put in place in that area, your vacation plans are likely canceled. But with RVing, if you need to cancel your reservation (or if a reservation gets canceled on you), you can choose to find a new destination in a safer region. This is what we had to do for our 2020 summer plans after Maine issued pretty restrictive and specific travel declarations for out-of-state visitors. We were left with no choice but to cancel our trip there, and instead we plotted a spur-of-the-moment trip in our home state. Because we had a camper that we could take with us, it opened up a lot of different camping possibilities.
Stimulus money is burning a hole in your pocket.
If you were fortunate enough to still draw a normal paycheck amid the national Covid quarantine, then you may still have the government stimulus check burning a hole in your checking account. Depending on the size of your household’s check, that stimulus refund might be a nice down payment on a used RV.
Should you need a place to quarantine, you could do so in your camper.
The last reason is one you hope you never have to need, but in the event you or a family member should contract Covid, having a camper parked in your driveway could be a boon for everyone’s health and safety. The camper could easily be converted to a quarantine location for the sick family member, thereby isolating him or her from the rest of the family. Or if someone in the family works in a high-risk environment, such as a hospital or nursing home, the camper could also be a comfortable place for that individual to self-isolate from the rest of the family, which would help reduce exposing family members unnecessarily.
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So that’s why we think now is the best time to buy an RV. But what about you: Has Covid spurred you to shop for a camper?
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