Village Welcome, friends! Harvest Hosts was just sold to Choice Hotels for about $130 million, and our inbox lit up with the same question from villagers everywhere: should I cancel my Harvest Hosts membership, or renew it?

We’ve been full-time RVers for six years and Harvest Hosts members the entire time, with 60+ stays under our belt. So yes, we have opinions. We sat down in a field at a Harvest Hosts farm (with Clydesdales running behind us and 122 RVs parked for our Barn Party) to break it all down.

What Did Choice Hotels Actually Buy?

Choice Hotels is the company behind Comfort, Quality, Sleep Inn, Radisson and more, with roughly 7,500 hotels in 49 countries. The deal was announced at the end of September and closed October 1, for about $130 million in cash. The seller was Stripes, the New York investment firm that had backed Harvest Hosts’ growth over the last few years.

Here’s the part a lot of folks didn’t know: it isn’t just Harvest Hosts. The whole family of brands came along in the deal:

• Harvest Hosts: overnight stays at wineries, breweries, farms, restaurants and more
• Boondockers Welcome: stays in fellow RVers’ driveways and fields
• Escapees RV Club: famous for mail forwarding and big rallies
• Campscanner: watches sold-out campgrounds and alerts you when a site opens up
• Brit Stops: the UK version, for our friends across the pond

Who’s Running Harvest Hosts Now?

This is the big one: same CEO, same team, same people answering the phone. Joel Holland is still leading Harvest Hosts. Everyone just became part of Choice Hotels. We know this firsthand, because we work with the Harvest Hosts team on our events. The same folks we were calling last week are still the ones calling and texting us this week.

Choice says it bought Harvest Hosts to grow it, and that its own hotel loyalty members already include a lot of RVers. To us, that means more money flowing into the Harvest Hosts world, run by a company that has been in the travel business for decades. If someone had to buy it, we’re glad it’s a travel company and not someone way off the beaten path.

How Harvest Hosts Works (and Why the $35 Isn’t Really a Cost)

If you’re new here: you pay an annual membership (plans start around $99 a year), and then there’s no nightly fee. You stay one night, usually with no hookups, at farms, wineries, breweries, distilleries, restaurants, even a hotel and some marinas. Some hosts let you stay extra nights or plug in for a small fee.

The expectation is that you support your host, and about $35 is the suggested spend. People ask us all the time, “Why would I spend $40 to dry camp in a field when I could pay $50 for full hookups?” Two reasons:

1. The experience. You don’t get Clydesdales trotting past your rig at a regular campground.

2. We were going to spend that money anyway. We do our Christmas, birthday and anniversary shopping at Harvest Hosts. Wine for our daughters-in-law, bourbon for our sons, something special from a little winery in Tennessee or Utah. It’s a gift with a story behind it, not a gift card. And if the host is a restaurant? We were going to eat dinner anyway. So we look at it this way: we pay the membership, and the stays feel free.

Boondockers Welcome: A Story That Warmed Our Hearts

Boondockers Welcome is Harvest Hosts’ close cousin. Instead of a winery, you’re parked in someone’s driveway or field, usually for free, and most hosts are RVers themselves. (Confession: Lisa’s still a little nervous to try it, but it’s on our list!)

Friends of ours stayed with an older couple whose camping days had ended because of the wife’s Alzheimer’s. She still loved sitting around a campfire, so her husband became a Boondockers Welcome host. When RVers stop by, he builds a fire, brings out drinks, and his wife gets to enjoy the camping life again with new friends. That’s the village spirit, right there.

Our Favorite Harvest Hosts Stays

Suttler Post Farm (the Clydesdale farm). Lisa spotted a new Harvest Hosts listing with Clydesdales, and with her love of horses, we had to stop. We became great friends with everyone there, they asked if we could bring a few campers out to the field, and four years later it’s our Barn Party with 122 RVs. You can read all about it in our 2026 Barn Party recap.

A winery in Portland, Tennessee. About 30 minutes north of Nashville, right off I-65. It’s perfect if you like wine and want to see Nashville without paying big-city campground rates, and it’s one of the hosts that allows multi-night stays.

A host who went all out for our RV Crawl. When six or seven of our rigs rolled in on an RV Crawl, the owner had mowed the whole field, set up games for the kids and a target-practice area, and joined us around the fire that night with his wife and friends.

We’ve also stayed at alpaca farms, distilleries, breweries and even a drive-in movie theater. Churches and marinas are still on our bucket list.

The One Stay That Didn’t Work Out

Honestly, we’ve never had a bad Harvest Hosts stay. We did have one that didn’t fit. On an RV Crawl with eight big rigs, a host told us he could hold all of us, because he’d had eight or nine RVs there before. They were smaller RVs, though, and ours were all 40 feet plus. Add a hot day and soft asphalt, and we were close to getting stuck. Nobody’s fault, just a mix-up about rig size. Everyone apologized, we moved on, and we promised to come back when it’s just us. Tip: when you book with a group, tell the host your rig lengths, not just the number of RVs.

Should You Cancel or Renew Harvest Hosts?

Here’s our take as business owners. Most people build a business to sell it someday or to pass it on to their kids. If someone offered us $130 million tomorrow? Sold. So we don’t fault anyone for taking the deal.

Will prices go up? Maybe. If the price doubles and we get four times the value, we’re all for it. If the price doubles and we get half of what we have now, that’s a problem. But right now, nobody has all the facts. Remember, most of us didn’t even know there was an investor behind Harvest Hosts until this news came out, and the experience never changed.

Our bottom line: if our membership were up next month, we would renew. That doesn’t mean you have to. It just means we’d give it four to six months and see how it plays out before making a knee-jerk decision.

Village Vote: Are You Renewing, Canceling or Waiting?

We want to hear from you! Are you renewing, canceling, or waiting to see what happens? And if you were thinking about joining Harvest Hosts, does this change your mind? Tell us why in the YouTube comments.

Want to learn more about the membership? Visit Harvest Hosts, and check out our take on which RV memberships are still worth it. Thinking about life on the road? Read Is Full-Time RV Living Still Worth It in 2026? And if you want to travel with the village, see the FindUsCamping RV Crawl page.

Heads up: we work with Harvest Hosts, and their team helped us grow our Barn Party. Our opinions are still 100% our own (Lisa makes sure of it).
— Jimmy & Lisa, FindUsCamping