RVs retaining their luster

With gasoline prices where they are, it wouldn’t seem to be the ideal time to hit the road in a 30-foot recreational vehicle that scores less than 10 miles to the gallon.

But Carl and Terry Haley know a bargain when they see one, which is why the Toluca Lake couple recently paid $16,000 for a used home-on-wheels.

“It was almost an impulse buy,” Carl recalled, one that had its origins, as so many impulse buys do, in a trip to Las Vegas.

“From the moment we saw it, we loved it,” the 41-year-old math teacher said of the 1997 Fleetwood Flair he and his partner acquired from friends they recently visited in Sin City. “We just saw ourselves taking vacations in this vehicle,” saving money not on gas but on hotel rooms and meals.

The Haleys are on to something. While shipments of all RVs -- a broad category that includes towable campers and “toy haulers” for transporting jet skis, dirt bikes etc. -- were down almost 13% in the first half of the year, shipments of motor homes were up more than 2%.

And RV rentals are up about 4% so far this summer, according to industry estimates.

“Summer vacation is sacred in this country, and people aren’t going to let $100 extra in gas expense stop them from going on vacation,” said Phil Ingrassia, a spokesman for the National RV Dealers Assn.

At El Monte RV, the nation’s No. 2 RV rental operation, rentals are up 4% this summer after slipping 4% last year.

Going into the 2007 travel season, “we were a little worried,” said Joe Laing, director of marketing at the Santa Fe Springs-based company. “But the price of gas doesn’t seem to have really affected people’s plans.”

In fact, El Monte’s customers are driving more this year. The average trip is up 10% to 110 miles a day.

California officials expect visitation at state parks and campgrounds to exceed last year’s record of 77 million visitors. Campsites for tenters or RV users will be scarce between now and Labor Day for those without reservations.

At Kampgrounds of America, business is up 3.3% so far this summer and advance bookings for August are up 22%.

“Everything on the coast from Mexico to the Mendocino coast is probably thoroughly booked for the rest of summer,” said Roy Stearns, a spokesman for the state parks department. “Our advice is to go inland and north.” Or to desert parks such as Anza-Borrego, if you can stand the heat.

The dollar’s weakness against the euro and the British pound, which increases the buying power of travelers from countries that use those currencies, has helped. Britons and Germans are avid RVers, according to Laing, who said that about half of El Monte’s business comes from foreign travelers. (Most of the company’s 50 U.S. locations have German-speaking staffers.)

“And the Europeans have absolutely no problem with our gas prices,” he added. Gasoline prices in Germany, for instance, topped the U.S. equivalent of $7 a gallon earlier this year.

Laing and others in the industry contend that, even with high gas prices, vacationing by RV can be economical, especially for families with kids. Meals can be cooked on board and lodging, of course, is included.

At El Monte RV, the average rental cost is $1,100 a week, although a 30-foot “slide out” motor home that sleeps eight costs about $2,100 a week during the late-summer peak season. A spot at an RV campground can run from $20 a night to well over $100 at upscale resorts (some of which actually have minimum RV size requirements).

The economics change considerably when it comes to buying an RV as opposed to renting. Thirty-footers average around $100,000, with luxury models priced well into the hundreds of thousands.

Despite the uptick in motor home sales, it’s been a tough year in the industry. A big reason: RV manufacturers, which did a lot of business supplying temporary housing to hurricane victims in 2005, built large numbers of towable RVs last year in anticipation of another strong storm season.

It didn’t happen, so shipments were cut way back this year while dealers worked through excess inventory. Riverside-based Fleetwood Enterprises Inc. closed a trailer plant in Rialto earlier this year.

And it is unclear how much profit dealers are making on their sales. Dealers contacted for this story wouldn’t discuss pricing, but when Mark Brownlee of Temecula was shopping for a motor home recently at an RV expo, he found bargains aplenty.

“They were dropping them $50,000 on their $250,000 units,” he said. “They were way down there.”

But analysts at Kelley Blue Book, the Irvine-based automotive information provider, said prices of used RVs were holding up well this summer.

“Even among the current economic turmoil, the RV industry has remained robust,” Kelley analysts reported. “The baby boomer generation has entered prime retirement age; therefore owning an RV is an alternate way of traveling on a lower budget.”

Even so, Brownlee, who owns a custom swimming pool business, ultimately decided to keep his wallet in his pocket.

“We decided it’s halfway through the summer and maybe we ought to wait to see what happens with the economy and the price of gas before we make that size of a purchase,” he said. “It might not be prudent right now.”

martin.zimmerman@latimes.com