I guess this is my version of Joe’s post about the private equity vultures who took over the youth hockey league. This one involves camping.

I have a political point, but first, some background: There’s a service called Harvest Hosts which basically connects people with RVs with places that would like to host them for free if they buy something from the place. Hosts include vineyards, farms, golf courses, etc. Those places sign up to host, and RVers sign up for Harvest Hosts for around $80/year. The app lets RVers find and communicate with the hosts. Harvest Hosts suggests that you spend at least $30 at the host, and they do some minor vetting of the RVers, too.

There’s more to the Harvest Host platform, but this is the basic service. It’s fairly popular among RVers, van lifers, and skoolie folks (people traveling in a converted school bus) who travel a lot. We subscribed for a while but found we didn’t use it enough to make it worth the subscription. They had another service called “Boondockers Welcome” that connected people who would let others park at their house for a night with campers. The one couple we met who encouraged us to look them up on Boondockers Welcome seemed insane, so we never used that.

At some point, Harvest Hosts was acquired by private equity (or maybe they were a PE play all along). In 2024, Harvest Hosts acquired Escapees, a RV club that plays a significant role in a lot of full-time RVer’s lives. They host events and have a mail forwarding service for full-timers (people with no fixed address). They also have a branch called Xcapees for Gen X RVers, which hosts events and also caters to the full-timers who work remotely. We met a couple who were very active in Escapees a couple of years ago, and the wife had a lot of good things to say about the organization.

Soon after Harvest Hosts acquired Escapees, the complaints came fast and furious. This reddit thread has gripes from Escapees members who say that Escapees is slowly bleeding staff and cancelling events.

A few days ago, Harvest Hosts was acquired by Choice Hotels. Choice, which owns the Quality and Comfort Inn brands among others, is a mediocre hotel chain — they’re my last “choice” chain if I need a hotel. I have no idea why a hotel chain would buy a company that is all about RVers. The kind of people who use Harvest Hosts, Boondockers Welcome and Escapees do it to avoid checking in to a hotel. Even if Choice offered them great rates, the rigs that most of these people own are too big to park in a crowded hotel parking lot. “Synergy,” the justification for a lot of acquisitions, is completely absent here. It’s probably anti-synergy: whatever a hotelier does to encourage use of their RV service will be limited by their desire to sell these folks something they don’t want, a night at a hotel.

There’s a lot of talk of how capitalism “builds” things — this acquisition does the opposite. It will destroy Escapees, a useful club that’s been around for decades, providing a valuable service to people who often don’t have a lot of money to spare. (A lot of full-timers mis-judge their retirements and end up hurting.) Harvest Hosts and Boondockers Welcome — which were always “nice to haves” not “must haves” — will probably also wither on the vine. The $130 million that Choice paid for this amalgamation of camping-related companies will end up with fire sales of Escapees and Harvest Hosts in a few years, at best, and closing of those properties, at worst.

I assume that some other RV club will be formed to take over the spot that Escapees had in the market, just as Escapees took the place of the Good Sam Club (still exists, not as popular as Escapees).

The problem here is that there’s so much dumb money floating around, and so few consequences for making a bad acquisition, that consumers are subject to a constant churn of once-decent services enshittifying themselves for the short-term benefit of some grifter who finds a way to make a quick buck. I don’t think there’s an easy political solution to this problem, but I’d be very interested in seeing a deep forensic audit of the claims that Harvest Hosts made about the acquisition, and I’d also like to see a limit to what Choice Hotels can write off when this acquisition inevitably fails. Our lack of real regulation allows this kind of nonsense to occur far too often.