The Covid-19 pandemic has taken things that seemed to be fleeting fads, like telecommuting or wearing a mask, and morphed them into part of the new normal. Paul Kacir, founder and CEO of RVnGO, said the same is true in the world of leisure.
RVnGO is a website that offers peer-to-peer RV rentals (like AirBnB for RVs) and Kacir said after a major bump in traffic during the first year of the pandemic in 2020, bookings have continued to flood in.
The business is based in Scottsdale and currently employs about 25 people.
“People decided that renting RVs or RVing was almost as important as N95 masks and toilet paper, kind of ranked number three at that time,” he said of the opening months of the pandemic. “Our business and our website exploded, we are up now about, it's really hard to keep track of, but maybe 75 to 90x in organic traffic since Covid hit.”
Kacir said in the months since the pandemic took hold, the company has seen its bookings increase dramatically, jumping 16 times in 2020 and doubling that again in 2021.
“It's been the same hockey stick shape now for two years,” he said. “It's just kind of growing like crazy.”
Standing out from competition
There is a spate of competitors in the RV rental market, including longtime incumbent Cruise America and other peer-to-peer rental sites such as RVShare and Outdoorsy.
Kacir said RVnGO stands apart from competitors because its platform is free to use, it does not charge any fees to guests or hosts during rental transactions. Instead, Kacir said, RVnGO makes its money by selling insurance to users during the checkout process.
The RVnGO platform requires both hosts who rent out their vehicles and guests willing to get behind the wheel. Kacir said guests tend to be younger people, including young families or young adults looking to try something new.
The platform's hosts, who Kacir said can range from an individual renting our their own vehicle to a small business offering up a fleet of RVs. The business growth during recent months has allowed the company to expand its services for these small businesses on the platform by offering resource planning tools, maintenance management tool and more.
“We've finally gotten really to the vision of the company five years ago where the software is a complete business solution, everything somebody needs to run their RV rental business, whether they have a fleet of one RV or a fleet of 100,” he said.
Kacir started RVnGO back in 2015 and the company won in the consumer category at Arizona's Venture Madness in 2019. Kacir worked as an attorney prior to starting RVnGO, including as a vice president and general counsel at First Solar. He said this career move was unexpected, but well-received.
“If you asked me five years ago, if I'd be running a peer-to-peer RV insurance company, I'd say you're crazy. But now looking at it where I am right now, it just seems perfect.”
