An Interview with Candice Georgiadis
A clear trend is traveling in tight-knit pods of close family members and friends so we can take trips that allow us to stay somewhat socially distanced, together. This bodes very well for the RV and rental home markets but has also pushed prices way up, and made reservations highly competitive. I expect that companies that help travelers create these types of intimate group experiences will do quite well.
As part of my series about “developments in the travel industry over the next five years”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Petersen, Arvie Founder & CEO.
Mark Petersen is an avid RV enthusiast, camp travel expert and business veteran with a substantial background in both the Fortune 500 corporate world and in private business ownership. Mark currently resides in Charlotte, NC with his wife Julie who are reinventing their new lives as “empty nesters” now that their kids are off at college.
Mark has been an avid camper since he was ten years old and has visited campgrounds of nearly every type and description all across the US. Mark is so passionate about RV camping that he spent the past two years developing Arvie, launching in fall 2021. Arvie is a game-changing new service platform that allows campers to find, compare, and book campsites far faster and easier than ever before possible — even in parks that were previously reported as being “Sold Out”.
Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I’ve been a camper, in some form or another, since I was ten years old. The sheer ability to get away from it all and enjoy nature has always been a key contributor to my overall happiness as well as my success as an entrepreneur.
As I immersed myself in the RV camping lifestyle, I quickly grew frustrated with the outdated and tedious “looking and booking” processes that came with it. That’s when I became passionate about finding a better way to find and book campsites. I spent the past few years researching and developing a new kind of service that gives RV enthusiasts back their precious time to enjoy the truly great parts of the RV lifestyle.
The result was Arvie — a breakthrough campsite search engine and booking platform that allows campers to search and instantly book hard-to-find campsites, particularly last-minute cancellations, from one centralized interface. With Arvie, I wanted to selfishly solve a personal problem, but in a way that could help others as well.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
That would have to be how the 2020 Covid shutdown directly led me to finally pursuing my obsession with a research file I had been compiling for a few years. I called it “Kamp Beacon” at the time. The core problem that I wanted to address was (and remains):
“Why is it so much harder to find an available campsite than a hotel room or private rental unit?!”
So I decided to contact a few friends in the tech and legal circles and dig into how this all might work. And once I got going, I just didn’t stop. We’re now a team of nearly twenty brilliant folks all playing different key roles in bringing Arvie to life. It’s an interesting time to be building something with a remote team, most of whom I’ve never actually met in person yet we all feel a true sense of camaraderie and purpose that connects us all. I would even call a few of them my true friends now.
Arvie will definitely be a testament to the power of Zoom, Slack and a few other online collaboration tools. Even just looking back a few years ago, I don’t see how this particular startup could have been conceived, built and launched in a completely decentralized environment. It truly is a great time to be an entrepreneur — especially one who is frequently on the road and off to the next campground.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
The funniest probably won’t make it to print, so I’ll go with a close runner-up.
It’s 1991. I’m twenty-three and four months into my first job as a commercial insurance sales rep. I leave very early Tuesday morning for a three-day trip that kicks off with an important breakfast meeting with a potential new client. I feel like I crush the meeting but get a strange vibe during my presentation. Then, I’m off to another appointment with someone else I’m meeting for the first time. I had to sit in the fairly crowded waiting room for ten minutes or so for that one and was surprised there wasn’t much of the usual light chat about the weather going on.
Then off to lunch with another client and I recall thinking that the waiter may have been looking at me a bit oddly. Later, I meet with Shirley, an existing client whom I know well and have a great rapport with and she asks about my big meeting that morning. As I start to answer, I cross my legs in the chair across from her desk, at which point I can tell something is wrong. She gazes down and across her desk, then at me. Two or three times she repeats this. It’s an agonizingly long moment of total confused silence right until she explodes into laughter as she points out my shoes are obviously mismatched — one black and one cordovan.
To this day, I still feel that the veteran sales rep who strongly advised me to keep business travel simple by owning “two identical belts and two identical pairs of shoes; one black, one cordovan” could have done a better job of discussing the potential pitfalls of that particular wardrobe strategy. Thanks a lot, Peter Mace.
The lessons learned were: (1) The devil is always in the details and (2) You better be able to laugh at yourself sometimes.
Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”? Can you share a story about that?
For me, this one always comes back to a combination of family and nature. Those are my two sure-fire ways to get to a better place mentally when I’m too stressed out. I’ve also started meditating regularly in the last two years, which has been a huge help for both stress relief and focus.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
This is an easy one. My wife Julie has hands down been my rock and inspiration for most of my professional career. She made the difficult decision to give up her own successful career when we started our family, and although I’ve not taken the most traditional career path, she has always believed in me and supported the choices I’ve made even when some may have seemed crazy to most outsiders. That journey has included moving away from places she loved, and to some places, she didn’t. But through it all, she has been the one to keep our family together regardless of where my career path took us all.
As brand new empty-nesters, we now spend a lot of time traveling in our RV to our favorite places together. After decades of me being away on business and the circus that is raising two incredible kids, we weren’t exactly sure what to expect but we both fell in love with being out on the road together, and are closer than ever now.
Thank you for that. Let’s jump to the core of our discussion. Can you share with our readers about the innovations that you are bringing to the travel and hospitality industries?
In the camping industry, there has never been a seamless way to search and book spots at campgrounds, across multiple booking platforms, in one centralized place — until Arvie. Our incredible team has developed the first-ever multi-platform online travel service dedicated to giving RV campers their best shot to get the spot. Together, we have created the ability to quickly search, then instantly book with just a single click at nearly 6,000 campgrounds in the US, including most State and National Parks.
Arvie’s breakthrough search engine technology, combined with our team of back-end agents, work together to help you find, compare and book the best campsite for your specific needs in lightning-fast time.
Arvie’s Sold Out Search feature can even find and book freshly canceled reservations at popular campgrounds that often require months of pre-planning to reserve.
Which “pain point” are you trying to address by introducing this innovation?
The camping community has long been grossly under-served in its ability to efficiently find, compare and book great campsites. Existing options are unnecessarily more complex, frustrating and time-consuming than the seamless way we find and book a hotel room or private rental unit. There isn’t currently a comparable hospitality search and booking solution such as Orbitz, Airbnb, or Travelocity that caters to campers.
The primary reason for this service gap is that — unlike for Hotels, Airlines, and short-term rental properties — the camping industry has no centralized place where campgrounds can send and share their real-time availability to prospective campers.
The reality is that campers can literally be required to go to 10–15 different campground websites just to find and book one great campsite. Additionally, the various booking platforms used by the campgrounds often have their own complex check-out processes to complete.
Antiquated booking platforms coupled with the pandemic-fueled surge in camping have made finding and reserving campsites more challenging than ever before. With Arvie, you can check real-time availability for your dates and equipment type at nearly 6,000 campgrounds across the US, and then instantly “One-Click Book” your spot.
The other pain point we’re addressing is what we call the “Sold Out Blues”. It’s so common these days for campgrounds to be completely sold out, but at the same time, almost every campground receives several cancellations daily. Those cancellations become available for a brief period of time until some lucky person, with the exact right timing, swoops in to book them. Sold Out Search is designed to reduce the luck component and give you your best shot to get the spot every time.
How do you envision that this might disrupt the status quo?
One of the things I love most about Arvie is that we’re not replacing anyone else out there who is also trying to serve campers but we are disrupting the campsite booking process to make campers’ lives easier. In fact, Arvie is essentially a free customer referral service to campgrounds and the online booking platforms they use because Arvie helps keep their listed properties booked, without any fee to them.
Our mission is simply to make all those disconnected pieces work better together and in one place for the camper.
To make that possible, Arvie is introducing three revolutionary innovations campers have never had access to before.
- Real-time Availability Search. For nearly 6,000 campgrounds across multiple booking platforms, presented to our members in a simple, but powerful user interface.
- “One-Click Booking.” This first-of-its-kind feature simplifies and speeds up the booking process by doing just what the name says it does. Plus, we never charge a booking fee. Arvie Members always pay the exact same price they would have paid directly on that campground’s website including membership discounts like Good Sam and AAA.
- “Sold Out Search with Insta-Book” will search for last-minute cancellations if your preferred location is sold out. Then either notify you or swoop in and immediately book it for you with our exclusive Insta-Book option, even while you sleep.
As you know, COVID19 changed the world as we know it. Can you share 5 examples of how travel and hospitality companies will be adjusting over the next five years to the new ways that consumers will prefer to travel?
- A clear trend is traveling in tight-knit pods of close family members and friends so we can take trips that allow us to stay somewhat socially distanced, together. This bodes very well for the RV and rental home markets but has also pushed prices way up, and made reservations highly competitive. I expect that companies that help travelers create these types of intimate group experiences will do quite well.
- Road trips are more popular than ever because they don’t require traveling with large groups on flights or cruises that can pose obvious health threats. Travel restrictions are also in constant flux so many are opting for trip alternatives that bring peace of mind such as exploring their own backyards or destinations that are only a drive away. This fear of crowds has also created widespread vacancies in hotels and an increase in short-term rental and outdoor lodging bookings which I predict will be a preferred option for many.
- With the ever-evolving pandemic restrictions, travelers are starting to seek expert guidance to avoid time and money lost on their next trip. Travel agents and concierges are now in high demand for their guidance on fluctuating travel policies. We’ve all learned that plans can quickly change so having an expert on your side to coordinate unexpected curveballs is becoming an invaluable service.
- Certainly, the facts point to outdoor events being far less transmissive of the virus compared to indoor events, so I expect hotels, restaurants, and other venues to leverage existing outdoor space or construct these areas to accommodate this new expectation from customers.
- Younger travelers are checking off their bucket list destinations earlier in life and exploring travel lifestyles typically reserved for retirement years. For instance, a recent RV Industry Association study found that 18-to-34-year-olds now make up 22 percent of the market. This signals that more traditional travel companies and destinations need to start catering to the younger crowd.
You are a “travel insider”. How would you describe your “perfect vacation experience”?
My travel style is somewhere between planned and spontaneous. For me, I love loading up the RV with my golf clubs, hooking up the Jeep, and taking off toward a beautiful rental home on a mountain, lake, or beach with a reservation that starts about 5 or 6 days before the day we take off. From there, I let the weather, traffic, sights and mood guide me to my destination, however that plays out. I’ve been using Arvie lately to help me successfully pull this type of trip off smoothly.
Can you share with our readers how you have used your success to bring goodness to the world?
I grew up in Tampa, Florida during the latter years of George Steinbrenner’s life. His generosity was legendary, but he was also adamant that truly charitable acts are those in which you seek no attention or return, other than what your heart gives you.
That said, I do have one remarkable charity that I helped found and remain an active board member called Matthew’s Helping Hands which serves families who deal with the unique challenges of raising a child with Autism and other severe developmental issues. I also tend to support the heartfelt efforts of others who are trying to impact the world positively. Generally speaking, I look for opportunities to help others who are trying hard to live the best life they can but got saddled with an unfair circumstance for whatever reason.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
I think if more people who have experienced success in business and life made a committed effort to mentor and support other young entrepreneurs, we could not only enrich young lives, but also motivate and empower them to solve real world problems in the future. I regularly mentor two young entrepreneurs, and it’s something I’m very passionate about. As a big believer in Karma, I try to help others avoid making the same mistakes I’ve already made and learned from. I also try to help them develop critical thinking and emotional intelligence skills as a way to be prepared to make the difficult decisions all entrepreneurs must face; particularly in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Follow Arvie on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn for all the latest updates.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Mark Petersen of Arvie: The Future of Travel in The Post Covid World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.