Maddi Bourgerie on RV Travel, National Parks, and Making Outdoor Adventure More Accessible
By Julie Thompson
For Maddi Bourgerie, travel has never simply been about reaching a destination. It is about the moment a place changes your perspective.
Spend even a little time talking with Bourgerie, and that distinction becomes clear. She speaks about travel with the enthusiasm of someone who is still genuinely surprised by what she finds along the way—even after building a career around the industry.
Bourgerie, a public relations and communications consultant, passionate travel writer, and Vice President of Marketing at RVshare, can trace that philosophy back to childhood. At about seven years old, she traveled to Roatán, Honduras, where her grandparents had retired. She remembers the excitement of getting her first passport, the sense of adventure when going somewhere totally new and, especially, experiences with local people whose daily lives looked very different from her own.
“It was just really a feeling of pure freedom and exhilaration of seeing this opposite life to what I experienced back in the United States,” Bourgerie recalled. “That same soul-stirring sensation is what I’ve always wanted to re-experience over and over again through travel.”
That childhood experience seems to have given Bourgerie something more lasting than a love of vacations. It gave her a particular way of looking at travel: as an exchange, an invitation to become curious about a place and the people connected to it. It is a perspective that has followed her through an increasingly influential career in travel communications.
Today, Bourgerie has built much of that career around helping other people discover some version of that feeling for themselves.
Turning a love of travel into a career
Bourgerie did not initially plan a career in travel. Armed with a public relations degree, she considered several directions before professional connections led her to HomeAway, now Vrbo. It was there that two interests—communications and travel—began to merge.
“Travel is definitely my first love, but public relations and storytelling is how I’ve kind of found my way back to it professionally,” she said.
There is something fitting about the fact that Bourgerie describes the path as something she found rather than something she meticulously mapped out. Her own career has unfolded a little like the kind of travel she values most: through curiosity, unexpected turns and a willingness to follow an opportunity when it appears.
Her career eventually brought her deeper into domestic travel and the RV industry, where the possibilities of outdoor recreation expanded her own definition of adventure. Bourgerie said she had not been an RV traveler before joining RVshare and once considered herself merely “outdoor adjacent.” RV travel introduced her to a much broader landscape of national parks, monuments and public lands—and to the idea that transformative experiences might be surprisingly close to home.
“You don’t have to go that far to have an incredible experience that just kind of opens your eyes to a whole different life,” she said. Much of the storytelling that resonates, she added, comes from “hidden gems or off-the-beaten-path locations” and showing people that remarkable experiences can exist “even in your own backyard.”
That idea has become more than a marketing message for Bourgerie. It is one of the ways she thinks about expanding who gets to see themselves as a traveler. The trip does not have to begin with a plane ticket, weeks away from work, or a complicated itinerary. Sometimes it begins by looking differently at the places already within reach.
That message matters at a time when enthusiasm for national parks remains enormous. The National Park Service recorded more than 323 million recreation visits in 2025, across 406 reporting park units. Those visits included more than 2.5 million RV camping overnights in NPS campgrounds.
For organizations working in the public lands space, those numbers present both an opportunity and a challenge: How do you inspire people to get outside while also broadening their understanding of where they can go?
It is a question that sits naturally at the intersection of Bourgerie’s work and ours at Western National Parks. Both involve introducing people to places they may not yet know, helping them understand what makes those places meaningful and, ultimately, giving them the confidence to experience them for themselves.
Looking beyond the biggest names
One answer is to expand the map.
Bourgerie described an RVshare campaign that offered less-crowded alternatives to famous national parks, directing attention toward places travelers might otherwise overlook. Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park in Colorado particularly surprised her.
The larger idea is one that resonates strongly in the public lands community: A meaningful national park trip does not have to begin at one of the handful of destinations everyone already knows.
And Bourgerie’s enthusiasm for discovering those places feels personal. She is not merely interested in identifying a less crowded alternative because it makes a useful travel tip. She is interested in the moment when someone realizes, I had no idea this place was here.
That sense of discovery is particularly relevant across the National Park System, where famous destinations are only part of the story. National monuments, historic sites, recreation areas, preserves, and less-visited parks offer their own extraordinary landscapes and histories, often without the crowds associated with marquee destinations.
RVshare’s own travel research underscores just how closely RV travel and public lands intersect. In its Top Travel Trends for 2025, RVshare reported that 67% of surveyed travelers identified an RV as an appealing accommodation option for a national park or scenic area trip. In 2026, 87% of surveyed travelers responded that they were likely to choose an RV over other accommodation options for a trip to a national park.
And interest in RV travel extends far beyond longtime RV owners. A 2026 RV Industry Association survey found that 74 million Americans planned to go RVing within the following year, with younger travelers showing particularly strong interest in renting as an entry point into the experience.
That “entry point” may be one of the most important pieces of Bourgerie’s philosophy.
Making the First Adventure Feel Possible
For someone who has never traveled by RV, the barriers can feel substantial. How do you drive a vehicle that large? How do hookups work? What happens at the campground?
Bourgerie does not dismiss those concerns. Instead, she advocates making the first experience smaller and easier.
One option on RVshare is delivery: an RV owner brings the vehicle to the campsite and sets it up before the traveler arrives. “You truly just show up to experience it,” Bourgerie said. “There’s different levels of RV travel, and this is definitely level one and where you should start if you’ve never done it before.”
That distinction dismantles a common misconception that an RV adventure must immediately mean driving across the country for weeks. Many rentals she sees are instead three-to-five-day trips, with the RV serving as a home base for exploring the outdoors.
It is a practical solution, but it also says something about the way Bourgerie approaches travel more broadly. Rather than telling hesitant travelers simply to be adventurous, she is interested in understanding what is preventing them from going in the first place—and finding ways to lower that hurdle.
Fear of driving an RV? Have one delivered.
Not enough time for a cross-country road trip? Stay nearby for a long weekend.
Not sure you are an “outdoors person”? Start somewhere comfortable and see how it feels.
The goal is not necessarily to turn every traveler into a lifelong RVer. It is to make saying yes to the first experience easier.
That matters because access is not always about physical distance. Sometimes the first barrier between someone and a public-land experience is the belief that the experience is not meant for them—or that they need more knowledge, more equipment, or more confidence before they can begin.
Bourgerie’s work pushes gently against that idea.
And sometimes, that first "yes" leads somewhere unforgettable.
Bourgerie remembers an RV trip to Big Bend National Park when an approaching storm led a ranger to recommend a hike in the Chisos Basin. The rain moved through, the desert came alive, and the clouds spilled over the mountains like a waterfall. That night, the skies cleared.
“You could see the galaxies with your bare eye,” she recalled. “I’d just never seen the stars of the night sky like that before.”
Bourgerie’s passion for these incredible places and the experiences they hold is palpable. Years later, she can still remember the clouds moving over the mountains, the desert after the rain, and the feeling of looking into a night sky unlike any she had seen before.
That ability to notice a place deeply and then communicate why it mattered is part of what makes Bourgerie such a compelling voice in travel.
It was another iteration of the feeling she discovered as a child thousands of miles away: wonder, curiosity, and the realization that stepping into a new place can change the way we see the world.
Public lands offer countless opportunities for those moments. Our collective challenge and opportunity is to help more people recognize that they belong in those places, that an adventure can begin close to home, and that getting outside does not require already knowing exactly what you are doing.
Sometimes, it just requires a manageable first step.
And perhaps that is why Bourgerie feels so naturally at home in this work. She is an accomplished communications leader and travel expert, but the person underneath those titles still sounds remarkably like the one who discovered the exhilaration of experiencing a completely new place for the first time. She still wants to know what is around the next corner. She still lights up when she talks about an overlooked park, a brilliant night sky, or the experience that convinced a first-time traveler to try something new. And then, almost immediately, she wants to bring somebody else along.
That generosity is such an important element in the travel and public lands community. Bourgerie and RVshare are not just telling people where to go. They are helping travelers imagine themselves there. This serves as an important reminder that a lifelong relationship with travel, national parks, and public lands often begins with something very small: curiosity, encouragement and someone saying, in one way or another, you can do this, too.
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