How Seasonal Staffing Challenges Affect RV Park Operations

October 10, 2026 · RV park investing, explained

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Most people underwriting an RV park for the first time think of staffing the way they'd think of staffing a small apartment complex: one manager, maybe a part-time helper, done. RV parks and outdoor hospitality properties run more like small hotels with a hard seasonal pulse. A park that needs three people in January might need ten in July. That gap between the mental model (real estate) and the reality (hospitality with a labor curve) is where most of the confusion about seasonal staffing comes from.

"You just hire more people for the busy season and let them go after"

This is true in the broadest sense, but it skips the hard part. Finding seasonal workers who can check guests in, clean sites and bathhouses, handle maintenance calls, and deal with an unhappy camper at 9pm is not the same as finding warm bodies for a retail shift. Many parks are in rural or resort-adjacent areas with thin labor pools. The applicants who are available often lack hospitality experience, and the ones with experience often have other seasonal options (ski resorts, beach towns, agriculture) bidding for the same labor. The kernel of truth is real: staffing levels should flex with occupancy. The miss is assuming that flexing is easy or cheap to execute well.

"Staffing costs are a minor line item compared to the mortgage and taxes"

Payroll is usually one of the two or three largest operating expenses on an RV park P&L, often in the range of 20% to 35% of total operating costs depending on amenity level and whether the park is staffed year round or seasonally. A park with a pool, a store, and daily housekeeping on cabins will run higher than a bare-bones monthly-stay park. When a park has to pay overtime to cover gaps, hire temp agency staff at a premium, or offer signing bonuses to compete for seasonal workers, that line item moves fast. Investors who model staffing as a flat percentage without stress-testing a bad hiring season are underwriting on hope.

"A good general manager can run the park alone during the slow months"

Shoulder season does need fewer hands, but "alone" is rarely accurate once you count maintenance, grounds, and emergency coverage. The bigger issue is what happens when that one key manager quits, gets sick, or burns out from carrying too much. Parks that lean on a single irreplaceable person are fragile. When that person leaves mid-season, service quality drops immediately: slower check-ins, delayed maintenance, dirty bathhouses, unanswered phones. Those problems show up in online reviews within days, and reviews drive bookings for months after. The correction isn't that you need a huge staff in the off-season. It's that you need documented processes so the operation doesn't depend entirely on one person's memory and goodwill.

What actually matters instead

The real question for an investor or operator isn't "how many people do we need in July" but "how exposed are we to staffing volatility, and what does that cost when things go wrong." A few things worth checking before you buy, and worth managing closely if you already own:

• Turnover rate and source of labor. Ask how the current operator fills seasonal roles. Local labor pool, H-2B visa workers, workamper programs, or a staffing agency all have different cost and reliability profiles.
• Labor cost as a percent of revenue across seasons. Look at it month by month, not as an annual average. A park that looks fine on paper can have a brutal July-August labor crunch that eats margin.
• Documented SOPs. Check-in scripts, cleaning checklists, maintenance schedules, and emergency protocols should exist in writing. If they live only in the manager's head, that's a risk you're buying along with the property.
• Review trends during past peak seasons. A spike in complaints about cleanliness or slow service in June or July of prior years is often a staffing problem, not a facilities problem.
• Housing for workampers or seasonal staff. Parks that offer on-site RV hookups for staff in exchange for reduced wages often have more staffing stability than parks that rely entirely on local hires commuting in.

None of this means staffing makes RV parks a bad investment. It means labor is a real operating variable, closer to what you'd expect in a hotel or campground business than in a typical rental property, and it needs to be underwritten and managed as one. Parks that handle this well tend to have lower staff turnover, better guest reviews, and steadier NOI through the season. Parks that treat staffing as an afterthought tend to show it in the numbers and in the reviews at the same time. At Invest With Zac, this kind of operational detail is exactly what we dig into before treating a park as passive, because the label "passive income" only holds up if someone is actively managing the labor side well.