Planes are grounded. Hotels shut. After a spring spent cooped-up, many Americans are renting recreational vehicles to get away. Here’s a guide. …
For R.T. Rybak and his wife, Megan O’Hara of Minneapolis, the spring and summer calendar was packed with travel plans. They were all ready to fly to the Norwegian Arctic, then visit their children in the Bay Area, detour down to the Channel Islands near Santa Barbara and finally swing through Yosemite with the educational travel group Road Scholar – the last two spots ticking off numbers 16 and 17 on their bucket-list quest to visit all 62 of America’s national parks.
“When the pandemic hit, we had to cancel,” said Rybak, CEO of the Minneapolis Foundation, which supports civic initiatives in the city where he served 12 years as mayor. But as a spring of hunkering down wore on, he began searching for ways to travel confidently again once state and local authorities gave residents the green light.
‘The folks that are renting these RVs are pro athletes, celebrities—we’ve had 10 or 15 billionaires this year.’
His prime concern was safety. “[We] felt stuck because even if we were isolated in a car and brought our own food, we would still have the challenge of what to do in a hotel,” he said, a common sentiment among quarantiners yearning to be free.
Only 14 percent of travelers feel safe taking a domestic flight, and 17 percent feel safe at a hotel or resort according to a late-April survey by MMGY Global for the U.S. Travel Association.
The couple ultimately decided that when they can again venture into the world, they’ll do so in a nostalgic way they’d “never” considered: aboard an RV.
This story by Matthew Kronsberg originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Note that there is a pay wall, and you must be a subscriber to read the entire piece.
During his research, Rybak signed up with Outdoorsy, a peer-to-peer RV rental platform which is to recreational vehicles what Airbnb is to homes.
