Committee Meetings Kick Off RVs Move America Week – RVBusiness – Breaking RV Industry News
WASHINGTON – Hosted by the RV Industry Association (RVIA) at the Mayflower Hotel, RVs Move America Week is the annual conference in which industry volunteers help set the agenda for the association going forward. The first full day of included no less than 10 committee meetings, with more on tap today before giving way to Advocacy Day on Wednesday. What follows are meeting reports from the chairs of a handful of those respective committees from the first day:
Go RVing Coalition
Mike Regan, Owner/Partner, Crestview RV Center – Georgetown
Renee Jones, Vice President of Marketing, THOR Industries Inc.
Regan: As I was sitting here watching this interaction with the people in this room, what really struck me was that five years ago or seven years ago, we would be talking about radio spots, TV spots, magazines. That didn’t even come up. I mean, we talked about a new TV spot, but for the most part, we’re going to be watching it on YouTube, and we’re talking about influencers and things like that. There’s a generation gap between me and some of these other people on this coalition, but that’s our future for the industry. That’s what really struck me, is that Go RVing is on the forefront of the change is coming.
Jones: I think what was exciting about the meeting today is really the start of the conversations about how we as an industry can maximize AI to benefit all of us. The technology is moving so quickly that it is really important that Go RVing have experts that are on staff in order to help guide us through that.
I think the one thing that we have to figure out as a group is figuring out what metrics we should utilize to gauge success so that we all win across the industry.
Regan: The message to the industry is that the team at Go RVing are rock stars, and we have some rock stars in what we believe is the next generation of AI and influencers. And that’s kind of where I was going when I was sitting there watching. This is it’s not your father’s Oldsmobile.
Standards Steering Committee
Chairman Dave Mihalick
Vice President Vehicle Safety & Regulatory Compliance, THOR Industries Inc.
We changed the structure for the meeting this year a little bit. We had each of the chairs of the seven technical subcommittee (Electrical, Fire & Life Safety, Heating, Plumbing, Regulatory & Safety Compliance, RV-C, Vehicular Components) report on all the work that their committees have been doing this past year. That was a little bit different. Got the exposure to all those subcommittee chairs to speak at those meetings, a little more participation, which was ultimately a good thing, is I think that the meeting ran a lot better today than it has in a long time.
The big topic that went on in the meeting was the 2026 edition of the NFPA 1192, which is being reorganized. It was an undertaking that we took on as the industry to do that, and with that comes a lot of detailed editorial work to our 1192 handbook that the RVIA publishes, which are basically all the enforcement positions. There was a bunch of handbook updates that needed to be voted on and reviewed today. That’s just step one. There’s going to be another couple waves of that happening before that actually goes into effect at the end of next year for the whole industry. But we’re doing all the work year ahead of time to get ready for that to happen.
This is all normal stuff. It happens every time we update the code book. There’s just a little bit more work this time because of the reorganization. You’re going to find that the code book numbers have changed because some of the chapters, we’ve moved items around to make it flow better and prepare for future growth and that kind of stuff. It just really, that hadn’t been done for … well, I mean, I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and we had never done that in the 20 years I was here. So, it was time for it to be cleaned up, looked at, reorganized and laid out better. Tim Schlabach, who works for me, I gave him that task and he did the lion’s share, the heavy lifting of doing that one in that regards.
We also talked about the grounding monitor interrupter (GMI) coming and the industry education surrounding that. I think there’s several committees that are talking about it this week. It’s definitely going to be covered in the RVIA Board of Directors meeting. We’ll get to see what we want to do. I mean, that’s new technology that’s coming that we need to make everybody aware of.
As far as other big items, educating owners how to use our products was another topic for discussion that we brought up in new business. I think that one of the things to focus on us doing that, we’ve steered away from that. I think we can do a better job of that, and we will get there.
One other thing worth mentioning is Mark Howlett (of Truma) has served his tenure and Todd Lozier at Forest River is taking over as the chairman for the RV-C technical subcommittee. and got the RVC committee.
Aftermarket Committee
Chairman John Tinghitella
President, RV Designer
We are an active group. We’ve expanded our scope in recent years. We’re trying to be true to our charter, which is provide a superior outcome for consumers and their parts and accessories experience, and in so doing, we’ve broadened the scope of who we are. Historically, we’ve been a very, very good group in terms of trade connections, and that’s wonderful – that’s never going away. But in recent years, we’ve expanded our purview to include the consumer, which is really important. I’ve said this countless times, at the end of the day, the only customer who matters in our entire experience is the person who walks into a dealership – or clicks a button – and plunks down money to buy our aftermarket products. That is crucial, so we’re trying to build this committee and our efforts to respect that reality.
Other key takeaways are that the annual conference, which is our signature event that we put on every August, is – similar to what I just said – expanding its scope. We’re calling it Conference 2.0, and we are including in our conference, as guest attendees this year, eight selected dealerships from around the country and – some local to Texas where the conference is going to be – to provide an incremental voice that we haven’t maybe had before. This is a carefully curated list of dealerships that we’re honored to have, and they will participate in the conference as full conference members. Even though they’re not RVIA members, they will be invited and treated as guests, and we’re very, very thankful for that. That’s kind of a big deal for us. We think we need to expand the conference to include that conversation, because at the end of the day, they’re the ones who talk to the consumers directly. They are the tip of the spear when it comes to the aftermarket buying experience.
Public Relations
Chairman Trey Miller
Vice President of Marketing, Jayco Inc.
We had really good discussion today. Everybody contributed, and the key takeaways that I heard was we really need to be focusing our efforts on talking about the positives that an RV brings to the enjoyment of the great outdoors and all the different things you can do with that RV.
I think that was big because all too often when we talk about PR, we talk about more of that whack-a-mole of here’s the negative, or here’s different things that we need to address because somebody that has an issue probably speaks a lot louder and more vocal than somebody who’s having a great experience. So, how do we really focus our efforts on highlighting those positive experiences?
The other takeaway being that RVIA, Go RVing, the PR committee in general, all have worked very hard to provide tools and different methods to allow the membership to go out and properly communicate a lot of this, understand the demographics of who’s camping, who’s RVing, understand exactly what their intentions are. So, I think there’s a lot of benefit to the work that’s being done and there’s a lot of resources for all the different membership to take advantage of.
