September 23, 2025 – This is an opinion piece, because apparently, even in a downpour, someone has to point out the emperor’s soggy new clothes.
Ah, the Elkhart RV Open House: where the Midwest’s recreational vehicle elite gather to pat each other on the back, sip coffee, and pretend the sky isn’t falling on their tin-can empire. This year’s 2025 edition kicked off Monday in classic fashion—dripping wet, with dark clouds rolling in Sunday night and torrential downpours turning the Forest River display into a (metaphorical) impromptu mud-wrestling pit.
Because nothing says “luxury travel” like sloshing through ankle-deep puddles to ogle the latest fifth-wheel with a built-in shoe rack.
But fear not, dear reader! The rain mercifully paused around lunchtime, allowing the sales reps to dry off their clipboards and resume their symphony of hype. “Even with the weather, it’s been a record Monday,” beamed Avenger travel trailer sales manager Spencer Kaylor, as if a few soggy orders could erase the industry’s broader monsoon of misery.
General Manager Kevin McArt, overseeing a fleet of Forest River brands, gushed about his top pick: the R-Pod UnMapped, a towable “sweet spot” between 5,000 and 6,000 pounds, complete with gimmicks like the “Bar 2 Table concept” and “Trail Gate.” How innovative—because what every struggling family needs is a trailer that moonlights as a pop-up pub.
Over at Cedar Creek, Product and Sales Manager Tim Cress urged visitors to “hone in” on two “unbelievable” updates: the 413FWC fifth-wheel with its bath-and-a-half that’s supposedly bigger than a New York apartment (hyperbole much?), and the 383FB, featuring a mudroom to keep your “mess” from invading the kitchen.
Tall ceilings! Washer-dryer combo! It’s almost enough to make you forget that RV retail sales cratered to 356,518 units in 2024—a dismal 6.9% drop from 2023’s already anemic 383,344, according to Statistical Surveys Inc. That’s 26,826 fewer dreams-on-wheels hitting the road, folks.
And wholesale shipments?
A measly 333,733 units built last year, barely enough to keep the assembly lines from rusting over. We’re talking levels not seen since the Great Recession, with retail on track for its lowest since 2015.
Motorized RVs? Down 26.5% in early 2024 shipments alone. Pop-ups? A 70% nosedive. Yet here we are, in 2025, with insiders projecting a “slight climb” to 337,000 shipments by year-end—like calling a limp handshake a firm grip.
Travel Lite RV’s Nick Eppert was “enthusiastic” about the “early dealer turnout,” hawking four-year warranties on truck campers and hoping to “rebuild” a base that fled faster than rats from a sinking Winnebago.
Tony Sines, president of Tony’s RVs in Ohio, an exclusive Gulf Stream dealer, placed orders for 10th-anniversary Retro trailers—because nothing screams fiscal responsibility like dropping cash on “enhanced exteriors” when interest rates are choking the life out of the average buyer’s wallet.
Gates fling open from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. today and Wednesday, then mercifully close early Thursday at 3 p.m. (For the full parade of self-congratulatory fluff).
Thousands descend on this soggy spectacle—dealers footing bills, manufacturers shelling out for booths, catering, and those glossy brochures touting “unique features” that sound suspiciously like excuses for why your $50,000 trailer leaks.
And who foots the bill? You do, Joe Camper.
Every time you sign on the dotted line for that overbuilt behemoth, a sliver of your hard-earned cash—call it the “Open House Tax”—trickles up to fund these back-slapping bashes. With average new RV prices hovering around $40,000 to $50,000 (down a bit from pandemic highs, sure, but still a gut-punch amid 7% inflation), that means padding the expense accounts of the very execs preaching “innovation” while their market share evaporates.
It’s almost poetic: As the industry hemorrhages jobs (down from pandemic peaks, with the $140 billion economic footprint looking more like a muddy bootprint these days), the insiders huddle in Elkhart to toast “hype” and “orders,” blissfully unaware—or perhaps willfully blind—that the real record being set is for delusion.
If this is the path to recovery, pass the ponchos. The rest of us are just trying to stay dry.
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