There's a certain irony to living in one of the most outdoors-adjacent cities in America and spending most of your time stuck in traffic. Los Angeles sits within a few hours of some of the country's most spectacular wilderness, yet millions of residents rarely make it out there. Dometic thinks it knows why — and it's doing something about it.
The outdoor tech company launched a new campaign on April 14 that cuts through every excuse Angelenos have ever made about getting outside. Through April 24, Dometic is offering a limited number of completely free, fully equipped 36-hour getaways to Joshua Tree, no gear, no planning, and no campsite reservations required. Everything is handled. All participants have to do is show up.
The Rig, The Gear, The Food — All of It Covered
This isn't a gift card or a discount code. Dometic is putting people behind the wheel of premium off-road vehicles sourced from Lexus, Toyota, and Ford, each one already loaded with the company's full lineup of outdoor equipment. That means sleeping systems, portable power, cooking setups, and hydration gear are all in the truck before participants even touch the ignition.
The company also stocked each vehicle's CFX5 electric cooler with chef-prepared meals. That detail matters more than it might seem at first glance. One of the quiet frustrations of camping for a lot of people isn't the sleeping on the ground or the lack of Wi-Fi — it's the food. Either you're eating sad granola bars or you're spending the week before a trip meal prepping like you're training for a competition. Dometic removed that problem entirely.
A reserved campsite at Joshua Tree comes with each trip, along with a curated activity guide and access to around-the-clock support throughout the getaway. The experience is designed to function as a complete package, meaning someone who has never camped a day in their life could theoretically do this without a single moment of confusion.
Why Los Angeles, and Why Now
The choice of Los Angeles as the launch city wasn't random. The city consistently ranks among the most congested in the entire country, with the average driver losing roughly 83 hours to traffic every year. That number — 83 hours — is more than two full work weeks spent sitting in a car going nowhere. It's a figure that puts the tension between city life and the outdoors into sharp relief.
Dometic is leaning into that tension directly. The pitch isn't just "come try our gear." It's more pointed than that. The campaign is called "This Way Out," and the name doesn't need much explanation for anyone who has merged onto the 405 at 6 p.m. on a Friday and questioned their life choices.
Los Angeles also happens to be surrounded by the kind of terrain that outdoor enthusiasts dream about. Joshua Tree National Park, where these trips are headed, is roughly two and a half hours from the city. It's a landscape unlike almost anything else in North America — massive granite formations, ancient Joshua trees stretching across the desert floor, and some of the darkest skies in Southern California once the sun goes down. For people who have driven past the park signs on the way somewhere else for years, this program functions as a direct invitation to finally stop.
Removing the Real Barriers to Getting Outside
The outdoor industry has spent years grappling with a complicated reality. Interest in outdoor activities surged dramatically in the wake of the pandemic, but sustained participation hasn't followed at the same rate. The reasons people cite for not getting outside more often tend to cluster around the same themes: gear is expensive, planning takes time, and the logistics of a trip can feel overwhelming when you're already busy.
Dometic's response to that challenge is essentially to eliminate every item on that list at once. The gear barrier disappears because the vehicle comes fully loaded. The planning barrier disappears because the route, the campsite, and the itinerary are already set. The logistics barrier disappears because there's a support line available throughout the trip if anything goes sideways.
What the company is testing, in effect, is whether access and ease are truly the missing ingredients for people who want to spend more time outdoors but keep finding reasons not to. The hypothesis seems to be yes — that there's a large group of people who are one frictionless experience away from becoming regular outdoor enthusiasts.
A Shift in How Outdoor Brands Connect With Consumers
The "This Way Out" campaign fits into a broader pattern that's been developing across the outdoor and adventure space over the past several years. Brands that once focused primarily on showcasing products — the specs, the materials, the performance data — have been moving toward creating experiences that let consumers feel what those products can do in real conditions.
Dometic's approach takes that shift about as far as it can go. There's no product presentation here, no booth at a trade show, no ambassador posting from a mountaintop. The brand is simply putting its full range of gear into real vehicles and handing the keys to real people for a real trip. The product does the talking by being used, not by being described.
That kind of experiential marketing is harder to execute and harder to scale than a traditional campaign, which is part of why it tends to make an impression when it's done well. The limited scope of the program — 17 trips total — means the reach is deliberately small. But the experiences themselves, and the stories that come from them, carry a different kind of weight than an advertisement ever could.
How to Get a Spot
The 17 available trips are being allocated through an online entry system, and the campaign window closes April 24. Anyone in the Los Angeles area who wants to throw their name in can find everything they need at dometic.com/thiswayout.
Given the setup — free truck, free gear, free food, free campsite, two nights in Joshua Tree — the bigger question might be why anyone would hesitate.
