Outdoorsy Takes Page From Airbnb Playbook As It Expands RV Ecosystem

Growing 4,000 percent over the course of a year sounds like it would be unquestionably good news for any firm, but for RV rental platform Outdoorsy that big number was mostly a testament to what a strange year 2020 was.

“When you look at that 4,000 percent, a lot of that is by virtue of the fact that the trough was really a trough,” Outdoorsy CEO Jeff Cavins told PYMNTS. “Like most people in travel, bookings early on had almost completely disappeared.”

But unlike most travel businesses, Outdoorsy saw customers coming back in greater numbers than the company had ever seen before as spring 2020 gave way to summer, and consumers were looking to get on the road again. RVs, campers, trailers and the like offered the unique opportunity to travel someplace new with a guarantee of personal lodgings completely under one’s own control.

The pandemic ultimately ended up providing more tailwind than headwind for Outdoorsy, pushing awareness of the brand ahead about three years of where it otherwise would have been, he said.

And now, Cavins told PYMNTS, fresh off its first fundraising round in almost three years and flush with $120 million in new capital, Outdoorsy is expanding its marketplace — in terms of where it operates, what it offers and the range of products and services it provides.

Insuring an Incredibly Complex Field

Insurance injects a layer of complexity into the market for a peer-to-peer (P2P) RV rental platform like Outdoorsy, Cavins explained, because every RV policy in every state contains a little-known clause that bans the policy holder from using their RV for commercial purposes. Because Outdoorsy insures every RV rented out via its platform with its own policy, which makes it the first (and likely only) payor in the event of an accident, most insurance companies will look the other way when a consumer has a single RV listed on Outdoorsy.

However, as customers make money on the platform and invest in more and more vehicles to place on it, insurance companies are much less forgiving.

“They can see the fact that you suddenly have five, 10, 15 — we even have people on the platform with over 200 RVs — and insurance companies can see that is clearly a commercial operation and tell the policy holder that they can’t insure them any longer,” Cavins said.

As a result, Outdoorsy’s new Roamly insurance product that the company designed was launched and now offers to take on this specific problem for vehicle owners on the platform — essentially an insurance product for commercial vehicles that excludes the no commercial activity clause and generally comes at a lower price.

And developing that product for launch in foreign markets is a key priority for the funds the company just raised, he said. RVs and camper vans are hugely popular in Europe among consumers, but P2P rentals have been difficult to scale because the European insurance landscape is so complex there is no product on the market for owners or renters.

He said the goal is to go live with the Roamly insurance product in Europe in the hopes that an easier to use, more accessible insurance product will ignite the P2P rental market in a place where it has struggled to gain footing.

A Market on the Move

Outdoorsy has had a better than solid run in 2021 so far, with 145 percent year-on-year growth, a fat fundraising round behind it and a lot of ambition to take on what’s next. There will be headwinds — gas prices are ticking up, the inventory of new RVs is at historic lows and having enough supply on the platform is an issue at times.

But today’s slowdown in supply is tomorrow’s boom of listings on Outdoorsy as consumers who purchased RVs find they need something to do with them for the vast majority of days that they don’t use them and they simply sit idly in driveways depreciating, he said.

Outdoorsy also offers a turnkey consignment service in which owners can outsource everything to the company — bookings, drop-offs, cleaning, maintenance — and reduce the stress and burden of ownership while also creating a revenue generator instead.

“There was just a stat that said 15 million RVs are now owned by millennials,” Cavins said. “And just think: Five years ago, it was rare to see a millennial buying an RV. We think that somehow Outdoorsy had a role in that because we’ve introduced a whole new generation to RV travel and ownership as a revenue generation possibility.”