Harvest Hosts Aid Agritourism

In the past year our family has reaffirmed our love for camping. So much that we’ve recently upped our game from a mid-90s pop-up to a full travel trailer. As a planner, I spent the winter extensively researching everything about recreational vehicles, from general maintenance to new places to visit. As June is National Camping Month, it makes sense to discuss the connection between camping and agritourism.

While researching new places to visit I came across a website called Harvest Hosts. Turns out that a number of the top YouTube RV’ing personalities like Keep Your Daydream and Changing Lanes rave about Harvest Hosts as place to stay. Getaway Couple even has a blog post entitled the Complete Guide to Harvest Hosts.

What Is Harvest Hosts?

What is Harvest Hosts? Essentially, it is overnight camping at over 2000 wineries, breweries, farms, and more. There’s a relatively low annual fee that allows you to camp at any of the service’s locations for free. This is a great deal as not only does many of these locations have beautiful settings, they also offer activities (i.e. visiting a winery/brewery, golf, or museums).

Personally, it is unlikely that my family will be staying at a Harvest Host. (My wife has a relentless addiction to fishing.) But it is possible that one could be an overnight stop to our eventual destination. But for several thousands of others, these are exciting overnight stays for their summertime jaunts.

Harvest Hosts Locations

Harvest Hosts Locations, www.harvesthosts.com

Why is this Important to Agritourism and Your Community?

In my recent post What is Agritourism I discussed the importance of agritourism on local economies of rural towns. Harvest Hosts is just another tool in the agritourism development toolbox. Many visits to your local farms, wineries, and breweries near your community are only for a few hours. This is a limited time to capture any tourism-related dollars that these visitors provide.

However, if your agritourism destinations are utilizing something like Harvest Hosts to keep visitors overnight, the likelihood of visitors spending more in your community grows significantly. Overnight stays are more likely to purchase gas, groceries, food, or other goods while in the vicinity than those that are stopping in for a few hours.

Get Started

Your local agritourism destinations would of course need to be open to the idea and have the space to accommodate the RVs. They’d also have to go through the approval process to become a Harvest Host. But the process doesn’t seem to onerous and it is actually great marketing tool for their business.

If you want to help your local agritourism destinations, and in turn your local economy, it’s a good idea to promote the use of services like Harvest Hosts.