Conner Rusch · August 27, 2026

RVDA Convention & Expo 2026: a dealer’s planning guide

The six education tracks, how to choose between them, and what to actually ask a vendor on the floor.

The RVDA Convention & Expo brings RV dealers together in Las Vegas each November for education sessions, the vendor expo and the association’s own programming. Dates, registration and the official schedule live at rvda.org — this is not that. This is what we would tell a dealer deciding how to spend the days.

The six education tracks

Vendor Training +Plus workshops are sorted into six tracks. Knowing them before you arrive is most of the planning.

  • AI — what the tools do in a dealership, as opposed to what they do in a demo.
  • Business Innovation (Sales & F&I) — deal structure, process and the desk.
  • Dealer/GM — the operator track: staffing, margin, multi-store.
  • Digital Marketing/BDC — traffic, websites, lead handling and follow-up.
  • Fixed Operations — service and parts, the half of the business that pays the bills.
  • RV Rental — a different economic model with a different set of problems.

How to choose between sessions

Choose against your own numbers rather than the titles. Before you go, pull two figures: unique sales leads per month, and unit page views per lead. If the second is high, your traffic is fine and the website is the constraint — spend the hour in Digital Marketing/BDC. If lead volume is healthy but nothing closes, the constraint is downstream and Business Innovation is the better use of it.

What to ask on the expo floor

Every vendor will show you a demo site, and a demo site is built to look good. Ask for the things a demo cannot fake.

  • Three live customer URLs, not demo sites — then run them through PageSpeed Insights on your phone while you stand there.
  • What happens to every existing URL when you migrate. The only right answer is a redirect for each one.
  • How long a price change across forty units takes, and who does it.
  • What happens when your CRM is unreachable at the moment a lead arrives.
  • Who owns your domain if you leave.
Our session
We are presenting The Website that’s Tripling Leads in the Digital Marketing/BDC track — on getting more out of the ad budget you already have. Details on the session page.

Session times and rooms are assigned by RVDA and published in their program and in RV Executive Today. Check rvda.org for the official schedule and registration.

C
Director of Operations, Wheeler Advertising

Conner Rusch is Director of Operations at Wheeler Advertising, where he leads the team behind the Scout dealer website platform. He started the project after hearing the same thing from RV dealers over and over — the traffic was there, the leads were not. Scout now runs across 60+ rooftops, and RV News interviewed him about it in May 2026. He is presenting in the Digital Marketing/BDC track at the 2026 RVDA Vendor Training +Plus Workshops.

Questions

Quick answers

When and where is the RVDA Convention & Expo?+

Las Vegas, in November. RVDA publishes the exact dates, venue, registration and the full session schedule at rvda.org. We do not reproduce it here, because a copied schedule is wrong the first time it changes.

What are Vendor Training +Plus workshops?+

Sessions run by vendors rather than by the association, sorted into six tracks and listed in the printed program alongside RVDA’s own education. Each is submitted with a description and learning objectives ahead of the show, which is how they reach the program and RV Executive Today.

Is this the official RVDA schedule?+

No. This is our own planning guide, written for the dealers we work with. RVDA owns the schedule and publishes it at rvda.org.

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