This episode of MC Fireside Chats, hosted by Brian Searl (Founder & CEO of Insider Perks and Modern Campground), dove into a profound discussion on the accelerating pace of Artificial Intelligence (AI), its impact on the Outdoor Hospitality and Recreation Industry, and the importance of enhancing the guest experience in a rapidly changing world. The show featured recurring guests Kurtis Wilkins, Matt Whitermore, and Cara Csizmadia, and welcomed special guest Lizzy Bustamante.
Brian Searl kicked off the show, noting his return to the studio after extensive travel, including conferences like OHI and KOA, and acknowledged the demanding convention season. He quickly steered the conversation toward AI, referencing the new Gemini 3.0 model from Google, which he noted had significantly outperformed competitors like ChatGPT in nearly all benchmarks, describing its performance leap as "night and day". Searl highlighted mind-blowing use cases, such as the model's ability to solve a physics problem written on a napkin in the same handwriting.
Kurtis Wilkins, from RJourney (running about 50-60 locations, 43 branded RJourney, and Advanced Outdoor Management), shared his concerns about feeding business data into powerful models like Gemini, worrying that what is pushed into these models "is no longer yours, that's theirs". He stressed the necessity of disclosing this to stakeholders and ensuring they understand the data protection implications. Wilkins, who had attended OHI, emphasized that AI's primary role will be replacing repetitive tasks, offering an opportunity for companies to redirect time and focus on increasing the guest experience.
Matt Whitermore, Director of Market Expansion at Unhitched Management and Climb Capital (owning and operating 30 parks), agreed with the need for better guest experience, noting that AI is slowing job growth by replacing the need for entry-level roles like analysts, as one person with AI can do the job of many. He shared an eye-opening anecdote about a high-end transient park operator in the saturated Texas Hill Country who is "crushing it" by leveraging AI in marketing and revenue management on the back end, which frees him up to be a human on the front end. This operator has all five-star reviews and impressive revenue numbers.
Cara Csizmadia, President of the Canadian Camping and RV Association, related to the end-of-year burnout but joined the AI discussion by highlighting the generational shift in tool use, noting that her teenage children use ChatGPT over Google. She argued that completely blocking children from using AI tools in school creates a "weird dynamic" because future jobs will require the skill of effectively prompting AI. Csizmadia views the technological shift as an opportunity to maintain focus on the "human-ness" of the hospitality industry, using AI's efficiency to enhance human interactions.
Special guest Lizzy Bustamante, CEO of TillerXR (a virtual tour, GPS-powered platform), discussed how her company is leveraging AI to enhance their product. She envisions using conversational AI to automatically build a virtual tour from images and use image analysis to determine and pull in contextual data—like site information, object detection, and auto-tagging—speeding up the process which currently requires manual input from campground owners. Wilkins immediately saw the value, noting that having this virtual tour data accessible as an API endpoint into AI engines would be "incredibly useful to the consumer" for refining their RV pad rental search. Searl added that AI will soon be able to "watch" the virtual tour and property video for the consumer, finding the perfect match by analyzing every piece of data available.
The conversation then took a broader turn to discuss the US government's Genesis Mission, a new executive order signed by President Trump, which Searl compared to the Manhattan Project. The order focuses on using massive federal...
