Feb. 18—Rhonda Seybert's alpaca farm, Humming Desert Alpacas in Algodones, was on the rocks.
It was early 2022, and the coronavirus pandemic had slowed the once-steady stream of visitors who had come to purchase alpaca fiber products from her store. She was struggling to stay afloat.
She and her husband were starting to have conversations about shutting down the farm.
A fellow alpaca breeder had a better suggestion: Sign up for Harvest Hosts, a network of businesses and organizations that host recreational vehicles on their property at no cost to the businesses and a small annual fee for travelers. Seybert applied to participate and was approved three weeks later.
"After about three minutes of going live on the site, I had five requests to stay," she said.
Seybert estimates Harvest Hosts visitors now account for about 80% of the purchases from her store, and she credits the program with saving her business.
Area business owners who are part of the Harvest Hosts network speak highly of the program, which Kaktus Brewing Co. owner Dana Koller described as "basically the Airbnb for RVers."
Koller and others said the program has brought in extra business and given them the opportunity to meet a wide range of interesting people from all over the country and even overseas.
"It's been a blessing for us," Seybert said.
RVers pay about $100 a year and can stay at more than 5,000 locations in North America, said Harvest Hosts CEO Joel Holland.
Harvest Hosts asks guests to make a purchase of around $30 to support their hosts.
"That becomes pretty meaningful to these small businesses that are struggling with inflation," he said.
Seybert said each of her guests gets a tour of the alpaca farm and is invited to visit the shop. Most people spend at least $30, but no one is required to buy.
"We don't even bring it up," she said.
The majority of host locations are restaurants, wineries, family farms and similar businesses, but Holland said there are also a number of churches that allow RVers to stay on their property in exchange for a contribution to their ministry.
As of December, there were 106 host sites in New Mexico, he said.
Koller said Harvest Hosts reached out to his business in Bernalillo about three years ago. The brewery is located off a frontage road for Interstate 25, which he said makes it a natural fit for RVers. It has space for just one RV, but the program has been so good for the business it hopes to find space for a second, he added.
Harvest Hosts has been "a nice economic boost" for the brewery, Koller said. "It brings in an extra table virtually every night."
The average ticket price at the brewery is just $21, "but it certainly adds up when you add an extra 30 people walking through the door every month," he said.
People coming from out of town are also more likely to buy merchandise than locals, he noted.
Doug Osborn, general manager of the Bathtub Row Brewing Co-op in Los Alamos, said a brewer mentioned he had signed the business up for Harvest Hosts on his last day on the job several years ago. Osborn had never heard of it.
"Two days later, a Winnebago shows up with three college students from Stanford," Osborn said. Since then, multiple visitors have arrived each week, especially in the summer months.
While Seybert and Koller were enthusiastic about the program's financial benefits, that is less important to Osborn.
"We're not really concerned about the money," he said. "We'd rather just be good hosts for the state of New Mexico."
The majority of guests are touring New Mexico for the first time, Osborn said, adding the brewery's staff has a lot of fun telling them about the best places to visit.
A majority of guests at the three businesses are people who are full-time RVers traveling around the country. Some visitors are those who started working remotely from their RVs at the beginning of the pandemic, including a doctor who took virtual appointments with patients from her driveway, Seybert said.
Other visitors to her farm include a family from Israel who rented an RV in New York and had been traveling through the United States and a woman who shipped her RV from Germany and had been on the road for 18 months.
"We get to meet so many interesting people from all over the world," Seybert said.
Osborn said the number of tourists to Los Alamos has increased dramatically since the release of Christopher Nolan's blockbuster Oppenheimer in the summer, bringing scores of people up the hill to see where the action took place.
"You can literally hit Oppenheimer's house with a rock from our back door," he said.
The business owners said their number of guests is lower in the winter, but they are heavily booked in the summer.
"We usually have one almost every single day," Koller said.
Seybert said she has people scheduled through June. Some of those guests might get the chance to watch a baby alpaca being born, as there are currently 10 pregnancies on her farm.
Holland said Harvest Hosts saw a surge of participants during the pandemic, when traveling by car or RV became the safest way to travel. Since then, he said, the business has remained strong.
"When the world shuts down and travel gets taken away from you in a minute, it gives you a new appreciation for it," he said.
