An RV park is not one business. It is a hospitality operation, a landlord, a utility provider, a small retailer, and often a vehicle fleet operator, sitting on land that is desirable precisely because it is wooded, waterfront or low. Carriers underwrite it on three things owners rarely lead with: the split between transient guests and long-term residents, the amenity list, and how the people doing the work are classified. Site count barely matters. A park insured on a generic property package for a business it stopped being three seasons ago is the standard version of the problem.
Inside a hundred-mile circle of Statesboro, Georgia, campgrounds and RV parks sit on the Ogeechee and Canoochee, along the Savannah River, around Lake Sinclair and the reservoir systems inland, on the barrier-island approaches at Tybee, Richmond Hill, Midway and Darien, near Brunswick and the Golden Isles, and up the Beaufort and Hilton Head corridor in South Carolina. Most are family-owned, several are second-generation, and a meaningful number have added long-term sites, park models or workforce spaces since 2020 without anyone revisiting the insurance.
These are also good all-lines accounts by nature. Property, income, liability, auto, comp, crime, cyber and umbrella all live in one program, which is exactly the case for having one agent read all of it together instead of four people each holding a piece.
Ask a carrier what they need before quoting a campground and the first substantive question is almost always some version of: what percentage of your sites are occupied more than thirty days?
| Occupancy pattern | How it is underwritten | What it brings with it |
|---|---|---|
| Overnight and weekly transient | Hospitality / recreation risk | Guest injury frequency, amenity exposure, seasonal income swings |
| Monthly and seasonal renters | Mixed hospitality / habitational | Tenancy questions, longer-term structures, more personal property on site |
| Long-term residents, park models, workforce housing | Habitational / landlord risk | Landlord-tenant law, eviction exposure, permanent structures, different carrier appetite |
| Youth camp or organized children's programming | Separate class entirely | Abuse and molestation exposure, supervision standards, background screening |
| Seasonal storage of guest units | Adds a bailment | Care, custody or control — a storage exposure GL does not answer |
Many carriers write one end of this table and not the other, and some cap the share of long-term sites they will accept outright. The habitational end shares its exposure profile with the one described in our guide to apartment and habitational property insurance; the transient end has more in common with short-term and vacation rental risk. Most Southeast parks are somewhere in between and moving.
Owners tend to schedule the bathhouse, the store and the office, then stop. The larger and more frequently damaged category is site infrastructure:
On the wind and water side, a Southeast campground is exposed twice. Named-storm deductibles are typically a percentage of insured values rather than a flat amount, and flood is excluded from standard commercial property and must be placed separately — a live issue for any park chosen for its river frontage. If the park is coastal, the market structure described in our page on coastal commercial property in Georgia and South Carolina applies directly.
Business income deserves specific attention because the seasonality cuts both ways. A park closed in February loses little; the same closure in June or during a fall football or festival weekend can be most of the year. And reopening is not instantaneous — reservations move elsewhere and come back slowly — which is the argument for an extended period of indemnity rather than a limit that stops the day the bathhouse is finished.
The frequency claims are unglamorous and constant: falls on gravel, wet bathhouse floors, unlit paths, tent stakes and guy lines, pool and waterfront incidents, playground equipment, dog bites between guests, and burns from fire rings. The severity claims are narrower and predictable:
Campgrounds run on a small permanent crew plus camp hosts — often retirees who receive a free site, utilities, sometimes a stipend, in exchange for cleaning bathhouses, checking guests in, mowing and handling after-hours calls. Whether that arrangement creates an employment relationship for workers' compensation purposes depends on state law and the specific facts, and it should be confirmed with your carrier and counsel in the state where the park sits rather than assumed.
What is not ambiguous is the exposure. Hosts are frequently older, work alone and unsupervised, and perform precisely the tasks that generate falls, lifting injuries and cart and mower accidents. Two instructions, both practical:
Seasonal hiring also raises ordinary employment exposure — hiring, scheduling, discipline and termination of a rotating staff is the profile employment practices liability exists for — and a small office handling cash and reservations is a textbook employee dishonesty profile.
Bookings, guest records, card payments and gate access all run through software. That makes a campground a cyber exposure in two directions at once: a breach of guest payment data with notification obligations and card-brand consequences, and a ransomware or outage event that stops reservations and gate entry during the season. The relevant question for a seasonal business is not only the liability limit — it is whether the policy includes business interruption for a systems outage and how quickly it responds.
Bettr Coverage is an independent commercial insurance agency serving Georgia and the wider Southeast. Campgrounds and RV parks are a class where the policy and the business drift apart quietly — long-term sites get added, a cart fleet grows, a dock goes in, a store starts selling beer — and nobody circles back. On a review we reconcile the actual occupancy mix against what the carrier was told, schedule the site infrastructure that is usually missing, check whether every cart and vehicle is on a policy, look hard at how hosts are treated for comp, and confirm the named-storm and flood terms would survive the event they were bought for. One agency, one relationship, every line read together — and when the park has bulkhead, road or bathhouse work going out for public bid, the surety side runs through BettrBonds.
Send your declarations pages, a site count split by transient versus long-term, and your amenity list. We'll tell you what is scheduled, what is not, and where the occupancy mix has outgrown the carrier.
Get a free coverage reviewProperty on buildings and site infrastructure, general liability sized for a transient public, business income with an extended period, and comp covering everyone who works — then liquor, auto, abuse, cyber, flood and umbrella depending on what the park actually does.
Generally no. GL responds to your legal liability, not to guest property damage as such — and if you take custody of a unit for storage or move it, the care-custody-or-control exclusion applies and a separate arrangement is needed.
Treat it as a live question, not a settled one. A host receiving a site, utilities or a stipend for work may be an employee under state law. Disclose the arrangement at application and document the classification.
Significantly. Falling limbs are the catastrophic-injury exposure at campgrounds, and carriers want a documented inspection and maintenance program with dated records, including post-storm walk-throughs before sites reopen.
Usually, if the park is on a river, lake or low ground — which is most of them. Flood is excluded from standard commercial property and placed separately, and site infrastructure may be treated differently from buildings.
It is the single biggest factor. Transient parks are hospitality risks; long-term and park-model sites push toward habitational and landlord underwriting. Many carriers write one and not the other, or cap the long-term percentage.
No useful average exists. Insured values, wind and flood terms, occupancy mix, amenities, payroll treatment and loss history drive it — two parks with the same site count can be multiples apart.
For general information only. Not legal advice and not a quote or contract of insurance. Whether a camp host, volunteer or seasonal worker is an employee for workers' compensation purposes is determined by state law and the specific facts of the arrangement; confirm with your carrier and counsel in the state where the park is located. Landlord-tenant, eviction and long-term occupancy rules for RV parks differ by state and municipality and change over time. Policy form language varies by carrier and edition — care, custody and control, abuse and molestation, watercraft, named-storm and land-improvement provisions must be read on the forms actually attached to your policy. Coverage subject to policy terms, conditions, exclusions and carrier appetite.