RV Clubs
Will an RV club membership help you? Part 1--Two big groups
By Russ and Tina DeMaris
Aug 24, 2009, 12:50

Many new to the world of RVing wonder if they will find help by joining an RV club. Perhaps the collective experience and wisdom of club members will help them avoid pitfalls and at the same time, have more fun in the new lifestyle. RV clubs can be all those things--but there can also be some that are full of frustration.

You can broadly classify RV in several ways. There are national RV clubs with "chapters" and groups across the country that appeal to a broad range of interests. There are smaller groups and clubs that appeal to folks living in a given area or region. "Brand" clubs support their particular RV's maker; while other clubs focus on RV types--say motorhomes versus truck campers. All have their place.

In this story, we'll talk about two of the larger "clubs" if you will, first. In the future we'll address smaller organizations and specilities.

One RV club that gets plenty of advertising is the Good Sam Club. They bill themselves as being the "World's largest RV community." Originally a member-owned and driven group, the club has been "bought out" by an mega corporation who owns not only the club, but Camping World stores, Coast to Coast camping resorts, a host of magazines (including Motorhome, Trailer Life, and Woodalls), and offers RV tow insurance through its Affinity Road and Travel Club.

Good Sam offers new members a discount $19 membership. For that, members get a free subscription to the club magazine, Highways, and become eligible for a 10% discount at a lot of participating RV parks and campgrounds; a similar discount is offered by some RV part suppliers. But, as any member (or former member) will tell you, that they also qualify for HUGE amounts of "junk mail," where the "club" and its affiliates attempt to upsell you on all sorts of "related" memberships, insurance, credit cards, and heaven-knows-what's-next. Some affectionately refer to the club as the "Good Spam Club."

Years back, the house organ, Highways magazine, was almost worth the price of the membership. Each month presented a plethora of articles of real interest to RVers, both newbies and old hands. We'll print our disclaimer here: Yes, we too, wrote for Highways, and some of her sister-publications. We worked in the heyday of the magazine, but times have changed. We have no axe to grind, but frankly speaking, many RVers (and not just ourselves) have seen a serious decline in both the size and content of 'the book,' but a shift toward narrow-ranged, mostly staff-written content, and far more space given to advertising.

There are other ways to get discounts on campground fees. The Internet provides a fast, inexpensive route to information you'll find useful in your RVing life. Maybe it's worth popping $20 for a one-year membership to see if what Sam offers is worth it. But be advised, you'll still be getting plenty of mail, long after that membership has expired. By the way, you DON'T have to be a Good Sam member to take advantage of the club's emergency RV road service.

A second major player in the RV club world is the Escapee's Club. While focussed on the needs of those who live in their RVs exclusively ("fulltimers"), the club also attracts RVers who live in "regular" homes but enjoy RVing. The club produces a bi-monthly magazine (which we have written for from time to time), and it is a thick, useful journal with features that will appeal to any RVer.

Since the group is dedicated to supporting fulltime RVers, you'll find it manages a number of special members parks around the country. "Dry" camping in an Escapees park runs $5 a night, while hookup sites in some parks are as low as $12 a night. Some parks offer leases, or even deeded lots.

Membership fees are a bit steeper, with Escapees, newbies paying $70 for their first year of membership, and $60 a year thereafter. But we'd be remiss if we didn't add that the whole "look and feel" of the club is far more oriented to the members. While both Good Sam and Escapees clubs have "chapters" who support members, the Escapees takes it even farther with individual interest groups. Check out the whole picture www.escapees.com.

Interestingly, both these groups provide a range of information for RVers on the web, much of it accessible to non-members.

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