ELKHART, Ind. – The 2026 Power Breakfast Showcased five industry representatives to provide the status of their projects and initiatives. The panel included Phil Ingrassia with the RVDA, Renee Jones of Thor Industries for the RVIA Go RVing campaign, Craig Kirby, president and CEO of the RVIA, Mike Regan of Crestview RV for Go RVing and Casey Tubman from Newmar Corp. for the RVTI. Rick Kessler, publisher of RVBusiness, acted as moderator.
When asked how the RVIA Go RVing Campaign will not operate in a vacuum and how it can dovetail with OEMs, dealers and partner promotions, Regan responded.
“Our goals are to make their advertising more effective,” he said. “Secondly we are working to better align our advertising with seasons such as RV show season, holidays and camping season. National awareness of the camping is what we want most. But most importantly this is not a top down approach. We need input from our OEM partners. Dealers must have input on campaign strategy, targeting and messaging.”
Jones spoke to how the Go RVing campaign will report to dealers and other member groups.
“Historically the data delivered has caused more questions than answers,” she said. “Through that lens we created and strategic task force. We reviewed the objectives and the and completely clarified and rewrote them through the lens of OEMs and dealers. In this way we hope there are less quadtones and more value to the data that is delivered.”
She added that there will be a scorecard delivered for those receiving the information to better understand the ROI of contributions.
“This transparency will help you understand our end goals and what all are doing. Secondly this will include trend data and travel data. There will be a forward looking dashboard that will help all to understand what is going on and how to be more nimble to make changes faster.”
A weekly e-mail will review insights to members and monitoring category health.
Ingrassia added that this year Go RVing will be sharing assets with dealers such as digital assets and images that dealers can use for their local markets. These are assets that are royalty free.
“We are seeing more competition than ever before,” added Kirby. “Cruise lines, hotels, resorts, Air BNBs, theme parks, and countless other vacation opportunities. So it is really important that Go RVing keeps consumers top of mind for camping. Consumers are taking a very long time to make a buying decision so we are staying in front of them. Our research has shown that we have gotten younger and more diverse camping as well.”
The RV Technical Institute (RVTI) provided some measure of its success.
“We have about 8,000 RV Technicians certified at this point in time,” shared Tubman. “That is double what it was six years ago. Another point is that those 8,000 are spread out to 1400 various dealerships and businesses. There is over 800 businesses out there helping us to train these technicians as well.”
He said when it comes to getting the techs past Level One certification to Level Two it is daunting because these people are working full time and have other family obligations.
“In order to get them into Level Two, we are going to break down the into sections to make it flow more lifestyle to help them do it more in sections and increments. We are hoping to grow that 8,000 to 16,000 more quickly,” he concluded.
Ingrassia spoke to the accessibility of RVTI partner training.
“RVTI has done a great job of making training accessible,” he stated. “Dealers can also design training digitally with RVTI. There is online accessibility training for them so they can do it from there dealership. We can also send trainers out to the dealerships.”
There is a Spanish speaking initiative for training being looked at as well with a pilot program as 20% of the workforce is Hispanic.
