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Newsletter
Dear Members, I hope that everyone is still holding up well and managing to keep positive as we continue to navigate through the pandemic. It is nice to see that everyone is doing their part and we are able to keep the virus numbers relatively low in Canada. Stay the course and we will get through this. The summer seems to be zipping by as the RV industry tries to keep up with the demand from consumers. We have seen a surge in sales and are attracting many new consumers into the lifestyle. This is not surprising, as a recent poll by Research Co. found that less than a third of Canadians are willing to take a flight anywhere whether it's to another continent, to another province, or within their own province. Consumers still view RV travel as a safer alternative. Data derived from Go RVing Canada’s website validates our findings. In July, overall page views were up over 20% and visits to dealers’ sites were up 14%. As well, the trip planner feature saw a gain of 47%. Even more importantly, organic traffic to the site increase by 28%. This is great because we had reduced our paid advertising and still saw huge gains to dealer sites, the affordability calculator and campground listing searches. Our recent new unit sales statistics also support this with over 32% growth in June over the same period last year. Both motorized and towables saw a significant increase. While Dealers are busy selling, renting and servicing RVs, the RVDA of Canada continues our advocacy and government relations work to achieve our strategic goal of proactively advocating policy that will benefit RV Dealers across Canada. One of our annual endeavours is the participation in the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance pre-budget consultations process. This year’s recommendations were as follows: Recommendation 1: Introduce a short-term GST/HST holiday on RV sales across Canada. Recommendation 2: Reintroduce the Canada Secured Credit Facility to increase lending capaci ty in the industry and support RV and automobile dealers.
