Any long term future for carvanning?
I used to caravan with my parents in the 60s and 70s. They were members of the caravan club and as I recall used a mixture of CC and private sites. In those days families made up a large part of the demographic, whereas nowadays the typical demographic of a CC site is much older. Usually mature couples with the occasional grandchild on board.
There is no denying that times are undeniably tougher now with far less disposable income about and caravans have undeniably become much more of a luxury item nowadays, worlds apart from the simpler and less expensive models of years gone by.
Many of the people in the CC have lived in a time of better prosperity and enjoyed things like indexed linked pensions and virtually full employment opportunities. Those are things that the younger generations are unlikely to experience within their lifetimes. They simply won't have the levels of income that many of us enjoyed and indeed took for granted.
There is also a change in youth culture that must not be overlooked. Whilst many of us were thrilled to be exploring sites with our parents all those years ago, to many kids nowadays, the idea of being stuck in a field with a bunch of much older people, would be their idea of hell. A toilet block and a bin area just isn't going to cut it for most of today's kids, which probably rules out 80% of all caravan sites.
Whilst caravanning seems extremely popular now, do many people see that as the older generations (50 plus) cease to be caravanners in the future, the numbers that replace them will be far diminished, both on grounds of cost and changes in our culture?