What does the next layer look like, and who designs it?

I drove up to Crosby last fall on a Tuesday afternoon. Part of the reason was a meeting. Part of the reason was just to walk the streets and look. What I noticed was simple. The trail parking was modest but real. The downtown had charm. And several of the places I would have stopped were closed. Not closed forever. Closed on a Tuesday in October, because the demand engine is not consistent enough yet to keep the doors open every day of the week.

That observation sits at the heart of what this piece is about.

The original trail was a civic act. John Schaubach and the founders did not set out to build a tourism economy. They set out to give their community a reason to believe in itself again. The paved trail was a workforce recruitment tool. Turning contaminated mine land into a place worth visiting was an act of reinterpretation before any of us had the vocabulary for it.

The next chapter is also a civic act. It is just bigger.

What’s been built, what’s still being built

Drive into Crosby on a Saturday in July. The trailhead is full. Riders are unloading bikes, checking tire pressure, pulling on gloves. The energy is real.

Now drive down Main Street.

There is more here than there used to be. The Cuyuna Lakes region has organized itself. The chamber, local operators, the trail crew, and county leaders have built real infrastructure and real momentum. Spend a few minutes on cuyunalakes.com and you can see a region that is taking itself seriously.

The question is not whether momentum exists. It does. The question is whether the region is ready to take the next step. From a collection of weekend stopovers to a destination that holds people. From a trail economy to a connection economy. From a great ride to a place worth coming back to for reasons that have nothing to do with the bike.

That step does not happen by accident. It happens by intentionality. By leaders, business owners, and community members coming together to decide, with clear eyes and a long horizon, what they want this place to become in ten and twenty years. And then aligning around it.

That is the gap. Not a gap of effort. A gap of orchestration.

The third place question

Before we get to any data, hold a question in your head.

What is it that makes a place feel like a place?

Part 1 borrowed Bergstrom’s framing that Cuyuna’s first transformation was an act of reinterpretation. The mine pits became swimming lakes. The red dirt became the riding surface. The industrial past was not erased. It was layered with new meaning. That reinterpretation built the first set of associations the region carries today.

The next reinterpretation is harder, because it is not about land. It is about social infrastructure.

Urban sociology gives us a useful frame. The home is the first place. Work is the second. The third place is everywhere else. The coffee shop where the regulars know each other. The brewery where strangers strike up conversations. The park where the same dogs meet on the same mornings. The diner where the waitress remembers your order.

Third places are not amenities. They are the social infrastructure of belonging. They are what make a town feel like a town and a destination feel like a destination. They are the places where memories get made, and they are the reason people stay an extra hour, and an extra night.

A region’s destination economy is built on third places, even if no one calls them that.

The trail at Cuyuna is a peak moment. The descent that gets your heart up. The view at the lookout. The sweep of pine and water that you carry home with you. Peak moments are real and they matter. But research on memory tells us that peak moments alone are not what people remember most. What sticks is the peak and the end. How a place sends you off shapes whether you come back.

Right now, Cuyuna’s peak is the trail. The end, for too many visitors, is a gas station and a drive home.

The question for the region is not how to build more trails. The trails are extraordinary. The question is what happens between the peak and the end. What is the third place that holds people for an hour after the ride? What is the dinner that turns a day trip into an overnight? What is the moment that interrupts the routine of leaving?

That is the work that still remains.

(Image Credit: @AaronWHautala and cityofcrosby.com)

What the behavioral data is whispering

The Placer.ai data is one signal. Imperfect, like all data, but useful when read with care.

The trailing twelve months ending March 2026 show 365,500 out-of-market visitors to Crosby, down about 1.9% from the prior year. The hourly pattern is relatively flat from late morning to early evening. Visitors are present during the day. They are not, by and large, staying into the night.

Where they go when they are not on the trail tells the rest of the story.

The most-visited destinations in Crosby are gas stations and a hospital. The first trail-adjacent hospitality venue captures roughly 18% of the traffic the convenience stores see. Liquor stores are indexing high enough to suggest visitors are buying alcohol to take with them rather than consuming it in a place that serves food. Full-service dining and drinking establishments come in well below what the visitor base would suggest is possible.

That pattern is not a verdict on the businesses that exist. There are places to eat. There is a brewery. There is a Main Street that anyone who has visited will tell you has charm. The pattern is a question. Why is more of this demand not being captured?

Some of it is structural. When I visited on a Tuesday last fall, a number of places were closed. The demand engine is not consistent enough to justify staying open all the time. That creates a feedback loop. Inconsistent hours discourage visitors from planning around dining. Limited dining keeps stays short. Short stays keep demand inconsistent.

Breaking that loop is not a marketing problem. It is an orchestration problem. It requires a coordinated decision among operators, the region, and capital partners to underwrite the next layer of the visitor experience together. No single business can carry that on its own.

(Image Credit: cityofcrosby.com)

The overnight question

How do you turn a day visitor into an overnight one?

This is one of the hardest questions in destination development, and it is the one Cuyuna will have to answer in some form if the trajectory is going to bend.

The accommodation supply tells us where things stand. Roughly 106 active short-term rentals are generating an average of about $21,800 per listing per year, at occupancy near 36%. Supply grew about 31% year over year, which means residents and investors are adding inventory faster than demand is filling it. There is no hotel of meaningful scale in the immediate trail area.

Research published in Scientific Reports in 2024 found that accommodation supply is the primary lever for overnight conversion. Each additional bed contributes a small but compounding lift. Cultural and natural amenities add another layer on top. The same research surfaced something harder to hear. Communities that are heavily oriented around day trips, with abundant parking and convenience infrastructure, can actually suppress overnight conversion. The signals tell visitors this is a place you pass through.

That is not a criticism of Cuyuna. It is an observation about how places get optimized over time. The first wave of investment built what was needed for the day trip. The next wave is a different kind of investment. It is about the room someone wants to come back to, the breakfast that makes Sunday worth staying for, the third place that gives an evening a reason.

The Minnesota Design Team’s 2024 visit through CREDI surfaced this as a regional priority. The next move depends on the community taskforces that are forming to advance the work. That is exactly right. Data points the direction. Vision and capital have to come from the people who live there.

The destination is between acts.

The tension nobody wants to talk about

Part 1 surfaced the income canyon as the central tension of Cuyuna’s next chapter. Here is how that tension actually shows up.

Average household income for a Cuyuna trail visitor sits around $103,000. The largest single visitor segment earns between $100,000 and $125,000. Crosby’s median household income is just over $51,000. Minnesota’s statewide median is closer to $96,000.

These numbers do not tell us that visitors are good and residents are bad, or that one matters more than the other. They tell us that a region is being repriced by its own success. Visitors come. They fall in love with the place. And many of them ask the natural next question. Could I have a piece of this? A vacation home. A cabin to rent out. An investment in the community we just discovered.

That is not a villain story. That is a free market responding to demand. It is what makes this country work. But it creates a tension that every successful recreation community in America is now trying to navigate.

The All-Transactions House Price Index for Crow Wing County is up roughly 73% from 2019 to 2025. Some of that is a COVID effect still working through the system. Some is structural. The Crow Wing County Workforce Housing Study found about half of renter households were cost-burdened. Headwaters Economics has documented that renters in recreation-dependent counties spend about 23% of their wages on housing, compared to 19% elsewhere.

The housing market is the outcome, not the problem.

The deeper question is one every region will have to answer for itself. How do we balance attainable housing for the workforce that delivers the guest experience with the visitor revenue that funds the local economy? What do we regulate? What do we leave alone? How do we welcome investment without pricing out the people who make the destination work?

This article is not going to pretend to have those answers. The honest position is that they have to be worked out, locally, by the people who live with the consequences. Zoning, land use, regulation, incentive, taxation, partnership. None of these tools is a silver bullet. All of them belong on the table.

What this article is saying is that this conversation has to be elevated. It belongs inside the regional vision, not in a footnote to it. Because the visitor economy is moving faster than the planning system, and the gap is widening.

A product, or a place?

Here is a hypothesis worth testing.

Read through enough TripAdvisor reviews of the Cuyuna Country State Recreation Area and a pattern emerges. The language is overwhelmingly functional. Trail quality. Flow. Difficulty. Riding conditions. Words like community, belong, home, culture, and people show up rarely if at all.

Visitors are experiencing the product. They may not yet feel connected to the place.

This is consistent with the broader behavioral pattern. A concentrated visitor base from a single metro area. A ride-and-leave spending rhythm. Minimal engagement beyond the trail, the bike shop, and the gas station.

What does this suggest?

It suggests that Cuyuna’s associations are still mostly functional. Great trails. Good flow. Worth the drive. Those associations are real, and they are earned. But functional associations are also fragile. They are easily substituted. If a closer trail system opens, or a newer one, the functional need gets met somewhere else.

What holds people across years and seasons is identity-level association. The feeling that a place reflects who they are, not just what they do there. That kind of association is not built by accident. It is built by orchestration. The peak moment, the third place, the small kindness from a local, the meal that became the story they told their kids on the drive home. Memories are sequenced. They are not random.

The work is to design that sequence.

This is where the conversation about social infrastructure, dining culture, gathering spaces, and authentic local programming stops being about amenities and starts being about economic strategy. The two are not separate. The third place is the engine.

What we can learn from places that have walked this road

Bentonville comes up in every trail-town conversation. The Walton Family Foundation’s investment, hundreds of millions across trails, museums, and hospitality, makes the comparison imperfect for any region without that capital base. That asymmetry is real. It deserves to be named.

But the structural lesson is replicable.

Bentonville did not just add trails. It built identity-level reasons to stay. Crystal Bridges Museum created a category of association, art and culture and sophistication, that complemented the riding and made the place feel like more than a destination for one demographic doing one thing. The cycling industry generates an estimated $411 million in annual economic impact across Northwest Arkansas. Event impact roughly doubled between 2023 and 2024.

Oakridge, Oregon offers a closer analog. A timber town that pivoted to mountain biking. Mountain bikers spend $2.5 to $5 million annually. Overnight visitors spend roughly $124 per day. The Mountain Bike Oregon festival became the engine because it required overnight stays and gave people reasons to be there beyond a single ride. Oakridge has not reached Bentonville’s scale, and the limit appears to be accommodation supply and the absence of identity-level amenities.

The pattern beneath both stories is the same. Places get economically stronger when they build multiple, mutually reinforcing reasons for people to stay, spend, and identify. The reasons compound. They do not have to be world-class museums. They can be a food culture. A festival. A gathering space. A character that the place wears comfortably.

Cuyuna already has the foundation. The Mountain Bike Festival is a starting point. The natural endowments are extraordinary. The region’s character, the lakes, the towns, the heritage of what was reclaimed from mine pits, is the kind of authentic story most destinations would invent if they could.

The question is what comes next, and who gets to decide.

The questions worth elevating

This is not a prescription. It is a list of the questions a regional vision conversation will probably need to wrestle with.

The first is about overnight capacity, and what kind. The 106 short-term rentals at 36% occupancy are a floor, not a ceiling. The question is whether the next increment of accommodation will be more of the same, or whether it will be a purpose-built layer of hospitality that signals to visitors that this is a place to stay, not just pass through. Boutique hotel. Outdoor hospitality property. Well-designed basecamp concept. The form matters less than the signal.

The second is about the visitor experience between the trail and the drive home. The dining and gathering infrastructure that exists is real but inconsistent. What would it take to support the operators who are here, fill the gaps, and make the evening worth staying for? This is partly capital and partly coordination. It is not solved by one new restaurant. It is solved by a region deciding it is going to invest in the third place together.

The third is about governance. A volunteer trail association, a small bike crew, and a couple of DNR staff have built something remarkable. Whether the institutional framework can carry the next stage at the current scale is a worthwhile question for the region to examine. A named regional leader, a clear timeline, and committed funding for the next phase would change the conversation with capital partners almost immediately.

The fourth is about housing and balance. Not how to stop the recreation premium, which is not really stoppable, but how to plan for it. How to keep workforce housing in the equation. How to use the tools that local government actually has, zoning, incentives, public-private partnership, in ways that match the scale of what is happening. And how to acknowledge, honestly, that this is a national challenge being lived out locally.

The fifth is about feeder market diversity. More than 60% of out-of-market visitors come from the Twin Cities. That concentration is a strength today and a risk tomorrow. Duluth, Fargo, Rochester, and the Iowa and Wisconsin corridors all represent expansion potential. Each requires its own understanding, not an assumption that what works for Twin Cities riders will translate.

None of these questions has a single right answer. All of them deserve to be on the table at the same time.

The work that remains

The people who built Cuyuna did something remarkable. They took land that had been abandoned, contaminated, and written off and turned it into something hundreds of thousands of people now choose to visit each year. They did it through grassroots effort, volunteer labor, and belief in a place that most of the state had forgotten.

That work is not diminished by what this analysis raises. It is honored by taking it seriously enough to ask the harder questions.

The trails were the foundation. They proved the demand. They put the Cuyuna Range on the map.

Trails alone do not build a destination economy. They build a day-trip economy. And a day-trip economy, left unaddressed, will eventually reprice the community, thin out the workforce, and concentrate the returns among fewer operators while the place that made it all possible holds the infrastructure costs.

The first chapter of the Cuyuna story was a civic act. A small group of people decided their community deserved a future and built the infrastructure to make that future possible. The next chapter has to be a civic act too. The forces that success set in motion are already reshaping this place. The only real question is whether the community designs the next layer of infrastructure with the same intentionality the first one was built with.

Part 3 will look at what that design process could actually look like. The frameworks. The partnerships. The capital. The kind of regional vision conversation that turns a list of questions into a plan.

The foundation is there. The community that turned the Pit of All Evil into a place hundreds of thousands of people choose to visit is not a community that lacks the capacity for hard things.

It just needs to decide what comes next, together, with intentionality, and with the long horizon this place deserves.

Matt Small is Director at RVi Planning + Landscape Architecture and publisher of Spark at Ignite Wild. This is Part 2 of The Cuyuna Paradigm, a three-part series examining how communities convert outdoor recreation investment into lasting economic and community value.

References

AirROI. (2026). Crosby, Minnesota Airbnb data 2026: STR report and statistics. https://www.airroi.com/report/world/united-states/minnesota/crosby

Crow Wing County Housing and Redevelopment Authority. (2020). Crow Wing County workforce housing study.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED). All-transactions house price index for Crow Wing County, MN. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS27035A

Headwaters Economics. (2020). Housing affordability in recreation counties. https://headwaterseconomics.org/economic-development/equity/housing-affordability-recreation-counties/

Headwaters Economics. The impacts of mountain bike tourism in Oakridge, Oregon. https://headwaterseconomics.org/trail/104-or-mtn-bike-tourism-oakridge/

Placer.ai. Market Overview, Visitor Demographics, Market Demographics, Trade Area, Demand, and Property Variance reports for Cuyuna Trails and Crosby, MN. April 1, 2025 to March 31, 2026.

Scotti, F., Flori, A., Secchi, P., Arena, M., & Azzone, G. (2024). Exploring drivers of overnight stays and same-day visits in the tourism sector. Scientific Reports, 14, Article 9840.

Souza, K. (2025, March 27). Bentonville’s economic impact from events doubled from 2023. Talk Business & Politics.

TripAdvisor. (2026). Cuyuna Country State Recreation Area reviews.

Trust for Public Land. (2025). Economic benefits of mountain biking.

Wang, C., Zhang, J., Cao, J., & Hu, H. (2022). The relationship between place attachment and tourist loyalty: A meta-analysis. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 50, 310-319.

The Cuyuna Paradigm series is grounded in publicly available data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Placer.ai, AirROI, FRED, the Minnesota Design Team, Headwaters Economics, and published reporting from the Star Tribune and other sources. Comparable community analysis draws on published economic impact studies from the Trust for Public Land, Headwaters Economics, and the Outdoor Industry Association.

That is the part of the Cuyuna story most people never hear. The narrative that has traveled, the one that shows up in cycling media and economic development presentations and conference keynotes, is a story about a mining town that reinvented itself through world-class singletrack. And that story is true. But it starts in the wrong place.

(Photo Credit: cuyuna.com)

Before the trails

My path to Cuyuna didn’t start with the trails, but rather to meet with a local resident that wants to build a better community. It didn’t take long before I was intrigued by the legacy of Cuyuna. In describing my interest in the region, a work connection shared his story. But his story starts more than a century ago. He lives out west now, but he grew up here. He remembers visiting his grandparents in Ironton as a boy, when the mines were still running. His grandfather had come to the range in the 1920s for the work, and stayed for a life. Family gatherings, Sunday dinners, the particular sounds and smells of a mining town that knew exactly what it was. He still feels a passion for the region as it holds a special place still.

The Cuyuna Range sits in central Minnesota, southwest of the Mesabi, and was one of the state’s three major iron ranges. Mining began in 1907. The region’s magnesium-rich ore deposits were critical for hardening steel, which made Cuyuna strategically important during both World Wars. Towns grew up around the open pits and rail lines: Crosby, Ironton, Cuyuna, Deerwood. At its peak in the mid-1950s, the range supported thousands of jobs and a dense web of working-class community life. Then the economics shifted. More accessible ore sources made the Cuyuna deposits less competitive, and the mines wound down slowly over the following decades. The last closed around 1984. What remained was the land, the infrastructure, and the people who had built their lives around an industry that was gone.

What the mines left behind

The real story of today started in 1998, in a conference room in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where a group of Cuyuna-area residents were challenged by a Blandin Leadership session to identify a community need and act on it. What they identified had nothing to do with mountain bikes. They identified two problems: the abandoned mine land had become a site of illegal dumping, trespassing, and underage activity. And the region was struggling to recruit the next generation of healthcare workers, teachers, and skilled tradespeople after mining collapsed in the early 1980s.

John Schaubach, one of the founding members of what would become the Cuyuna Lakes Trail Association, put it plainly: the plan for a paved trail was for it to allow the mine land to represent what was best about the community, rather than letting the trespassing and illegal activities define it. Jenny Smith described the landscape they were trying to reclaim. The area had acquired nicknames like “Hell’s Half Acre” and the “Pit of All Evil.” The DNR was concerned that citizens would feel unsafe entering the recreation area.

The original intent was civic, not recreational. The trail was a workforce recruitment tool. The logic was simple and human: if we cannot offer the amenities that make a place worth living in, we cannot compete for the people we need. Doctors, nurses, teachers. People in their thirties and forties making life-cycle migration decisions. The paved trail was never about attracting tourists. It was about giving residents and prospective residents a reason to believe in the future of the Cuyuna Range.

(Photo Credit: cuyuna.com)

What they built

The Cuyuna Lakes Trail Association was formally established as a 501(c)(3) in 2000. But the first major work was not trail construction. It was land acquisition. The former mine and railroad land was held in “undivided interest,” a form of fractional ownership by multiple absentee parties that legally blocked any public recreation development. From 1998 to 2002, CLTA volunteers worked on behalf of the State of Minnesota to resolve these ownership issues, ultimately securing more than 2,000 acres within what would become the Cuyuna Country State Recreation Area.

The first infrastructure was funded by a $2.1 million federal Transportation Enhancement Act appropriation championed by Congressman James Oberstar. That money financed the first five miles of paved trail within the recreation area. The mountain bike trails came later, drawing on a combination of DNR capital improvement funds, Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board grants, and private fundraising.

When the first purpose-built singletrack opened in June 2011, it drew 15,552 cyclists in its inaugural year. The trail system expanded rapidly through the decade, growing from roughly 30 miles at opening to more than 70 miles by 2020. By 2021, the system recorded 119,000 mountain bike visits. Total recreation area visitation across all uses exceeded 400,000 by 2023.

To put that growth in perspective: the mountain bike system alone grew roughly 665% in a decade. A community of 2,300 residents was hosting a visitor population that outnumbered it by orders of magnitude.

The people who made it work

Bergstrom (2017) documented the Cuyuna transformation as a scholarly case study in re-envisioning former extractive sites. What he found was that success was not primarily a function of capital or geography. It was a function of civic persistence. The CLTA navigated a complex web of land ownership, state regulation, environmental remediation, and community skepticism over a period of years before a single trail was rideable. The DNR’s initial concern about safety on land with unmarked mine shafts and unstable slopes was not unfounded. The fact that the project moved forward anyway is a testament to a specific group of people who believed in a specific vision for their community.

Bergstrom’s earlier work (2015) placed Cuyuna within the broader context of community-driven mining heritage, arguing that the region’s identity transformation was rooted in a conscious decision to reinterpret the extractive landscape rather than erase it. The mine pits became swimming lakes. The red dirt became the riding surface. The industrial past was not hidden but reimagined. That reinterpretation is itself an act of association-building, taking something that carried negative meaning and layering new meaning on top of it.

Today, the Cuyuna Lakes Mountain Bike Crew provides primary trail stewardship, supported by only two paid DNR staff. The CLTA continues its advocacy and fundraising role. CREDI, the Cuyuna Regional Economic Development organization, serves seven cities across the range: Crosby, Cuyuna, Deerwood, Emily, Ironton, Riverton, and Trommald.

The COVID asterisk

The 2021 peak of 119,000 mountain bike visits almost certainly reflects pandemic-era demand inflation. The Outdoor Industry Association has documented a national decline in core outdoor participants following the pandemic surge. People who flooded into outdoor recreation as an alternative to indoor life did not all become permanent participants.

This matters for how we read the subsequent decline. By 2022, mountain bike visits had dropped to approximately 100,000, roughly 16% below the peak. Placer.ai variance data for the trailing twelve months ending March 2026 shows continued erosion, with the core summer riding season experiencing the most severe drops compared to prior-year benchmarks. Shoulder season shows large percentage gains, but on small absolute numbers, likely driven by weather anomalies rather than structural demand shifts.

Cuyuna is normalizing from an artificially elevated peak. That is different from structural failure.

The trail system was deliberately built. What followed was not. The businesses, the lodging supply, the local governance structures that grew up around Cuyuna’s success were organic responses to demand. That is how most rural recreation transformations unfold, and it worked well enough during the growth phase.

But organic infrastructure has a ceiling. When demand normalizes, there is no designed second layer to deepen the visitor relationship, extend the stay, broaden the spending capture, or hold the workforce that makes any of it function. What looks like a correction is also a diagnostic.

The behavioral data tells us exactly where that ceiling is. That is where Part 2 begins.

Who is coming

The Placer.ai trade area data reveals a visitor origin profile overwhelmingly dependent on a single metropolitan area. The Minneapolis-St. Paul metro accounts for more than 60% of trail traffic. Beyond the Twin Cities, the drop-off is steep. Brainerd provides a local baseline at 5.4%. Duluth, despite being only 90 minutes away with its own strong outdoor identity, ranks tenth. Fargo and Rochester do not appear in the top ten.

This concentration creates a strategic vulnerability. Cuyuna is functionally a satellite recreation asset for one metro area. If Twin Cities riders find new alternatives, reduce their travel frequency, or simply age out of the sport, there are no secondary markets with sufficient volume to offset the loss.

The income canyon

The people coming to ride earn roughly twice what the people living in town earn. That gap does not just affect who can afford lunch. It shapes what businesses are viable, what housing costs, and what the community feels like to the people who live there year-round.

The visitor economy and the resident economy are running on different tracks. The distance between those tracks is the central tension of Cuyuna’s next chapter.

The inflection point

The people who built Cuyuna did something that most communities talk about and few accomplish. They took contaminated, abandoned land and turned it into something hundreds of thousands of people choose to visit. They did it through grassroots effort, volunteer labor, civic persistence, and belief in a place that the rest of the state had forgotten.

But the system they built was designed for a different problem. It was designed to give a post-mining community a reason to believe again. It was not designed to manage the economic, social, and structural pressures that come with hosting a visitor population that dwarfs the resident base and earns twice the local median.

Demand outgrew the model.

The next installment looks at what the behavioral data actually shows: where visitor spending lands, where it does not, and what the gap between the trailhead and Main Street tells us about what the next chapter costs and who pays for it.

The forces that success set in motion are already reshaping this place. The only real question is whether the community builds the next layer of infrastructure before those forces make the decision for them.

Matt Small is Director at RVi Planning + Landscape Architecture and publisher of Spark at Ignite Wild. This is Part 2 of The Cuyuna Paradigm, a three-part series examining how communities convert outdoor recreation investment into lasting economic and community value.

But the part that matters most is not the moment itself.

It is what the moment becomes after it is over.

Tourism researchers have spent the better part of two decades studying this. Kim, Ritchie, and McCormick (2012) developed the first rigorous scale for measuring what they called memorable tourism experiences, identifying the specific destination attributes that determine whether a visit leaves a lasting mark or fades within a week. Their finding was clear: the factors that make a tourism experience memorable are not the same factors that make it satisfying in the moment. Novelty, local culture, social interaction, involvement, knowledge, and meaningfulness all play a role in whether a visit encodes into long-term memory. But the critical insight is that satisfaction and memorability are different constructs. A visitor can be perfectly satisfied and forget the place entirely.

That distinction matters for anyone trying to build a place people return to.

Because experience is the event. Memory is what remains. And what remains is what shapes behavior. When is the last time you wanted to repeat something when it is associated with a bad memory?

The ladder no one talks about

There is a progression that connects a physical place to the economic outcomes communities and developers actually care about. It looks like this:

Amenity gets attention. It is what we see and what gets built. A trail, a city park, a pool and lounge, a spa courtyard. This is the thing you can point at, the line item in a capital budget. Amenities are necessary. They are the entry point. But they are not the product.

Experience shapes the visit. The weather was perfect as the sun set. The meal was perfect. The view one of a kind. And after the meal a wine and whiskey pairing under the dark night sky. This is just one example of the type of end-to-end destination planners optimize for, and it is important. But it happens in real time and then it is over. An what happens before and after this experience matters.

Memory determines what sticks. Not everything from a visit survives when we return home. What gets stored is selective, reconstructed, and disproportionately shaped by moments of peak emotion and by whatever happened at the end. Kim, Woo, and Uysal (2018) demonstrated that the tourism experiences most likely to persist in memory are those that generate a sense of attachment to the place itself. The visit does not just happen at a location. It bonds to a location.

Associations organize meaning. Once a memory forms, it does not sit alone. It connects to other memories, other ideas, other feelings about the kind of person who goes to a place like that. A 2026 Harvard Business Review study by Vriens and colleagues found that spontaneous associations, the unprompted thoughts people carry about a brand, predicted future spending behavior more reliably than traditional satisfaction measures. Each additional positive association correlated with an 18% increase in spending. Each negative association correlated with a 12% decrease. The study measured pharmacy customers, not trail riders, downtown visitors, or resort guests. But the mechanism transfers. What people spontaneously think about your place predicts what they will do next. The perfect dinner, the stars in the dark sky, fade away if the return to their room is not perfect as well. If the room doesn’t match the dinner experience we are creating the wrong associations. Or if the journey back to their room was less than ideal it impacts the associations, the memory, and their impression of the experience.

Identity makes it personally relevant. The deepest associations are not just positive. They are self-referential. This is the kind of place someone like me goes. This reflects who I am. This is where I belong. Wang and colleagues (2022) conducted a meta-analysis of place attachment research and found a consistent link between how strongly visitors attach their identity to a destination and how likely they are to return, recommend, and spend. The connection is not abstract. It is behavioral. How many times have you caught yourself window shopping for homes on a vacation, and returning to memories you created from this special place?

Behavior is what markets and operators actually measure. Return visits. Length of stay. Per-visit spending. Word of mouth. Willingness to pay a premium. These are the outcomes that show up in lodging tax receipts and restaurant revenue and housing demand. Zhang and colleagues (2014) synthesized 66 independent studies and found that destination image, the composite mental picture visitors hold of a place, significantly predicts both loyalty and future behavioral intention. A follow-up meta-analysis by Zhang, Xu, Leung, and Cai (2021) confirmed the relationship across 86 studies.

If you want to change spending behavior, you have to change what sticks.

What you remember is not what happened

Memory is not a recording. It is a reconstruction.

When people think back on a place they have visited, they are not replaying it as it happened. They are reactivating fragments. A feeling at arrival. A moment on a trail. A conversation over lunch. A point of friction they did not expect. These fragments reassemble into something that feels like a complete memory but is actually a curated highlight reel shaped by salience, emotion, and repetition.

The memorable tourism experience research confirms this. Kim, Ritchie, and McCormick (2012) found that experiences scoring high on novelty, emotional involvement, and local cultural engagement were far more likely to be retained and recalled. Experiences that were pleasant but routine, a fine meal, adequate lodging, a clean restroom, tended to fade. The things that stick are the things that surprised, moved, or connected.

This has a practical consequence that most destination planners overlook. Friction matters.

Imagine a rider who drives two and a half hours to a trail system. The trails are excellent. The flow is world-class. But the signage on the way in was confusing. The only lunch option was a gas station sandwich. There was no place afterward that asked them to sit, linger, or feel like the town was glad they came. The ride was great. The memory is mixed. And the next time a friend asks where to go, the recommendation comes with a caveat.

That caveat is the friction encoding into the association layer. And the research suggests it carries disproportionate weight. Negative associations do not simply cancel out positive ones. They undermine the coherence of the identity network that would otherwise drive loyalty (Vriens et al., 2026).

Why association density changes the economics

Here is where the framework stops being theoretical and starts being operational.

A destination with a single strong association, let’s say, great trails, has one reason for people to come. If a closer or newer trail system opens, that association is easily substituted. The functional need gets met elsewhere. Loyalty evaporates.

A destination with multiple, mutually reinforcing associations has something different. Great trails, plus a food culture worth talking about, plus a gathering space that feels like it belongs to someone, plus a sense that this community knows who it is and is glad you showed up. Those associations do not just add up. They connect to each other. Vriens and colleagues (2026) call this “connectedness,” the degree to which associations co-activate in a person’s mind. Connected associations are more durable and more predictive of spending than isolated ones.

This is what Bentonville, Arkansas figured out. The Walton Family Foundation invested hundreds of millions into trail infrastructure, and that investment was real and foundational. But what made Bentonville a destination rather than a day trip was the addition of Crystal Bridges Museum, a world-class dining scene, and a cultural identity that gave visitors a story to tell about themselves. The cycling industry generated $411 million in total economic impact across Northwest Arkansas (Trust for Public Land, 2025). Event economic impact doubled between 2023 and 2024 (Talk Business, 2025). Those numbers did not come from trails alone. They came from the density and connectedness of the associations visitors carried home.

Bentonville had advantages most places will never have. But the structural pattern, multiple associations tightly interconnected, is replicable. It just takes longer and requires more intentional sequencing. That is actually the harder and more interesting problem.

The meaning gap

There is a gap in how most communities think about place-based economic development. On one side of the gap sits the capital investment: the trail, the park, the streetscape, the amenity. On the other side sits the economic outcome: the lodging tax, the restaurant revenue, the housing demand, the job creation.

The gap between them is the memory layer. It is the set of associations that visitors carry home, the mental residue that determines whether they come back, how much they spend, and what they tell other people. Most planning processes skip this layer entirely. They build the amenity and measure the outcome and wonder why the numbers do not add up.

The research says the numbers do not add up because the associations are thin, or disconnected, or contaminated by friction. A destination can have world-class physical assets and still underperform economically if the memory structure it creates in visitors’ minds is shallow, functional, and easily substituted.

That is not a branding problem. It is not a marketing problem. It is a structural problem in how the destination is built, programmed, and experienced from arrival to departure.

What this looks like in the real world

In the next two installments of this series, I am going to apply this framework to a real place.

The Cuyuna Country State Recreation Area in north-central Minnesota is one of the most remarkable rural recreation transformation stories in the Upper Midwest. A community that took land abandoned by the mining industry, contaminated and written off, and turned it into a destination that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. The grassroots effort behind that transformation is genuinely extraordinary.

But the behavioral data tells a more complicated story. A story about what happens when a destination builds a world-class amenity without building the memory infrastructure around it. A story about who captures value and who does not. A story about the gap between the visitors who arrive and the community that hosts them.

The data involves gas station traffic, unmet restaurant demand, income disparities, overnight conversion rates, and the language visitors use when they describe the place. It is specific, sometimes uncomfortable, and grounded in what people actually do rather than what surveys say they prefer.

That is Part Two and Part Three.

For now, the takeaway is this.

Experience is a fine word for a brochure. Associations are what show up in your revenue.

People do not come back because they had an experience. They come back because a place attached itself to something they now believe about themselves, their time, or what is worth returning for.

This is part one of a three-part series on the economics of place meaning. Parts two and three examine the Cuyuna region, the data behind the day-tripper problem, and what Act Two of a trail economy actually has to look like.

References

Kim, J.-H., Ritchie, J. R. B., & McCormick, B. (2012). The antecedents of memorable tourism experiences: The development of a scale to measure the destination attributes associated with memorable experiences. Tourism Management, 44, 34-45.

Kim, H., Woo, E., & Uysal, M. (2018). The influence of tourism experience and well-being on place attachment. Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, 10, 149-158.

Wang, C., Zhang, J., Cao, J., & Hu, H. (2022). The relationship between place attachment and tourist loyalty: A meta-analysis. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 50, 310-319.

Zhang, H., Fu, X., Cai, L. A., & Lu, L. (2014). Destination image and tourist loyalty: A meta-analysis. Tourism Management, 40, 213-223.

Zhang, H., Xu, F., Leung, H. H., & Cai, L. A. (2021). Destination image and tourist behavioural intentions: A meta-analysis. Tourism Management, 83, 104278.

Vriens, M., Verhulst, R., Eggers, F., Narasimhan, S., & Condon, E. (2026, April 8). New research on how brand associations drive customer spending. Harvard Business Review.

Trust for Public Land. (2025). Economic benefits of mountain biking.

Souza, K. (2025, March 27). Bentonville’s economic impact from events doubled from 2023. Talk Business & Politics.

In this series, I use “destination” with specific intent. A destination is any place that generates demand because of the experiences it offers, experiences rooted in site-specific characteristics that cannot be copied or manufactured anywhere else. A specific landscape, a local culture, a history, or a pattern of human behavior that simply does not exist in another location. It could be a resort, a forgotten downtown, a campground that becomes the only spot within three hours where families stay three nights instead of one, or a seasonal event that brings a community to life. What makes it a destination is not just what was built. It is why people show up, how they behave when they get there, and whether that behavior can be measured and sustained.

Starting with the wrong question

In the business of building destinations, whether it is real estate development or public places, we almost always start with feasibility and narrative. We run the proforma. We commission the market study. We build the brand story. We design the place.

But we often forget to ask a fundamental question.

Why will people show up here, specifically, and keep showing up?

That question is incomplete on its own. It is not just “why will people show up.” It is a deeper set of questions that most processes skip entirely. Who are the primary users? What experiences do they need and desire? What does site and community context offer that makes these experiences unique? Who are the adjacent residents? Who are the stakeholders who will support it, fund it, regulate it, and live next to it? What do they need, not in the abstract, but in the daily reality of time, cost, convenience, and habit? What matters to them enough that they will change their behavior? And when needs compete, as they always do, how do we make the tradeoffs explicit instead of accidental?

That is the behavioral ground truth. It is the foundation we need to explore possibilities through the lens of actual people and arrive at strategic pillars that better inform feasibility and strategic narrative.

It is important to note that Brand Strategists and Planners conduct essential research when looking for validation. They run intercept surveys, community engagement, and stakeholder interviews. Those tools matter, especially when navigating community trust and local context.

But surveys tend to pull a certain kind of response. People answer with ideals. They answer like voters. They answer like they are being graded. You learn what sounds good. You do not always learn what people will actually do when it is raining, when parking is inconvenient, when the price is higher than expected, when their kids are tired, when their schedule is tight, or when a competing option is easier.

If you do not pair stated preference with behavioral evidence, you can build a concept that reads well and still fails to perform. We validate supply before we validate behavior. This is a problem I see repeatedly on a regular basis.

The Feasibility Trap

Capital is not getting looser. It is getting sharper.

In the last decade, it was common to see projects move forward on a story, a comp set, and a feasibility study that said, “it can work.” That door is closing. Debt and equity both want stronger indicators of demand. They want more sophisticated de-risking. They want to see the demand engine before they underwrite the supply.

This shift is not just happening in private capital. It is happening in public projects too. Public agencies are operating under rising scrutiny. Bond measures face higher skepticism. Grant programs are more competitive. City councils are under pressure to justify how tax dollars create measurable benefits. Parks directors and economic development leaders are being asked to show outcomes, not just intentions. In that environment, a plan that sounds good is not enough. It must hold up under public questioning, media attention, and the lived experience of residents who will judge the project long after the ribbon cutting.

So the trap is not that studies are bad. The trap is sequence and missing evidence. Think of a construct where we have a two-lane road. Lane 1 is the standard supply-side demand engine, the old way of constructing a story line that says this can work. Lane 2 moves in parallel to lane 1, going in the same direction, but applies behavioral demand indicators and strategies.

Most Lane 1 work, whether called feasibility, market analysis, or economic impact, is built to answer supply-side questions. What can be built here? What does the market “support” based on comps and benchmarks? What unit count, ADR, occupancy, lease rate, or absorption rate is plausible? What leakage exists, and what square footage could be absorbed?

Those are necessary questions. They are also insufficient, because a destination is not a static supply problem. It is a behavioral system.

Lane 2 is what decision-makers increasingly ask for, even when they do not use this language. Who is this for, specifically? What do they do today, without this project? What is the evidence they will change behavior for this experience, in this place, at this price, with this friction? What happens in a downturn, when discretionary behavior tightens?

This is not a war between Lane 1 and Lane 2. It is a gap in knowledge understanding how Lane 2 insights can better inform Lane 1 data.

And that gap is exactly where projects stall. Not because capital is indifferent, but because capital is demanding better proof. Not because public leaders do not want investment, but because they need stronger evidence to defend it.

The goal is not to pick a lane. The goal is to merge them. Lane 1 tells you whether the project can be structured. Lane 2 tells you whether it will perform. You need both to build real insight. You need both to get funded. You need both to survive the next cycle.

The $2.4 billion lesson

If this still feels theoretical, there is a clear example of what happens when the supply-side story gets ahead of the behavioral reality. And then what happens when someone finally gets it right.

Revel Atlantic City opened in 2012 as a luxury resort built on a confident thesis: create a sophisticated lifestyle destination for an affluent urban customer seeking a coastal escape. On paper, it made sense. Atlantic City was an established gambling market. The Northeast has money. The building was ambitious. The brand was coherent. The narrative had the language investors want to hear.

But Atlantic City’s demand engine was not built around the luxury resort story. It was a casino behavior engine, built on volume, day-trippers, boardwalk flow, and high-frequency gamblers. A market where friction matters, where convenience matters, where the path people take from street to spend is the business model.

Revel designed for the resort story instead of the casino behavior.

It required people to behave differently than the market’s core customers had been behaving for decades. An arrival sequence that made access less intuitive. An introverted building posture in a market where the boardwalk is not scenery, it is a feeder system. A smoking ban in a market where certain segments stay longer, spend more, and resist friction. Premium pricing in a market sustained by volume and repeat visits.

None of these choices are wrong in the abstract. They are wrong when they are misaligned with the dominant behaviors that pay the bills.

Atlantic City had already tested the behavioral response to a smoking ban in 2008. Casino revenues dropped 19.5% in the first week. The ban was repealed in eleven days. Revel ignored this data entirely.

Revel’s story assumed a customer that should exist. The market’s behavior signaled a customer that already did exist. The building chose the first and ignored the second.

Revel filed for bankruptcy within its first year and permanently closed after two. The building was not the problem. The mismatch was.

But here is where the story gets instructive.

The property was purchased for $82 million, about three cents on the dollar, sat dark for years, and went through a brief zombie phase before new ownership did something simple and decisive: they stopped fighting the market and started listening to it.

They put “Casino” back in the name. They allowed smoking. They streamlined access and flow. They finished hundreds of hotel rooms that Revel had left as concrete shells. They invested $270 million over several years to complete what the original vision never could. They even replaced the exterior signage in 2025 to erase the last traces of the old brand.

Today Ocean Casino Resort is consistently the third highest grossing property in Atlantic City, trailing only Borgata and Hard Rock.

The building did not change. The behavioral alignment did.

Revel was a $2.4 billion bet that people would change who they were to fit a building. Ocean succeeded because it changed the building to fit who the people actually are.

That is the Feasibility Trap at full scale, and its antidote, sitting on the same piece of land.

Leading with behavior: the Bentonville model

Now look at the opposite pattern.

Bentonville, Arkansas did not look like a predictable destination economy twenty years ago. No tourism infrastructure. No comp set that would have made a standard playbook feel safe. And here is the part that matters most for this conversation: there was no formal feasibility study. No top-down analysis that projected what would happen. No 200-page document telling the state legislature that mountain bike trails in the Ozarks would transform a regional economy.

It all started on a hunch, and a five-mile single-track trail in 2007.

(image credit @oztrailsoffroad)

The Walton family and a group of local advocates built the first section of what would become the Slaughter Pen trail network. It was not a master plan. It was a test. They wanted to see if people would ride it and what would happen when they did.

The behavioral response was immediate. The trail became a local obsession. Riders showed up daily. A ritual formed. By 2010, the five miles had grown to seventeen and the network was stretching south into downtown Bentonville. The behavioral evidence, not a proforma, was the green light. That observed response is what gave the Walton Family Foundation the confidence to invest over $74 million into expanding the regional trail network.

They used behavior demand, not top-down economic modeling to build the case for success and prove demand.

Bentonville benefited from unusually large philanthropic capital. That scale of private investment is not available everywhere. But most communities have some form of anchor. A major employer. A state university. A medical center. A military installation. The anchor creates the conditions. What Bentonville got right was not just having fuel. It was knowing how to leverage the fuel with a spark to create a demand engine.

Northwest Arkansas is home to three Fortune 500 headquarters: Walmart, Tyson Foods, and JB Hunt. They needed to recruit and retain high-skill talent. People with options. People who choose where to live based on daily experience and quality of place, not just the job offer.

The insight was not “trails are a nice amenity.” The insight was that for a certain workforce, outdoor recreation is not decoration. It is lifestyle infrastructure. It is identity. It shapes where people choose to settle, raise families, and build careers. They did not discover this in a feasibility study. They discovered it by watching what happened around five miles of dirt.

So they scaled for that behavior. Not as a tourism add-on, but as a daily system. Today the region has over 500 miles of mountain bike trails integrated into the fabric of the community, connected to schools, offices, and downtowns. A 46-mile greenway links seven-cities across the region. A $600 credit toward a mountain bike for new residents signals a deep commitment to a specific lifestyle identity.

The validation came after, not before. A 2018 study by the Walton Family Foundation and PeopleForBikes quantified what behavior had already proven. Cycling generates $137 million in annual economic benefits across the region. Population grew from roughly 11,000 to over 60,000. Real estate values appreciated more than 150%. Homes near paved trails sell for more than $6,300 above comparable homes further away. Nearly a third of residents say trail access was extremely important in choosing where to live. The U.S. National Mountain Biking Team relocated its headquarters there.

No proforma predicted this. No feasibility study modeled it. But neither was it an accident. Bentonville started with a behavioral hypothesis, tested it on a small scale, observed the response, and then invested at scale based on what people actually did. That is not the standard playbook. But it is a model for what the standard playbook is missing.

Most communities spend their energy chasing capital. Almost none invest in understanding the demand drivers that create sustainable demand engines based on how people actually behave.

The warning inside the success

Bentonville’s success also contains the trap.

When a place becomes a headline, other communities copy the visible parts. They build trail systems because trails worked in Northwest Arkansas. They replicate supply and expect demand to follow.

Sometimes they get a real amenity and a better quality of life. That matters. But a destination economy is a different claim. Destination behavior has thresholds. It has flow patterns. It has substitution dynamics and friction points. It has a reality that does not care about your renderings.

A trail system typically needs 13 to 18 miles of connected singletrack to function as a regional destination. It needs more than 30 miles to drive multi-night stays and the ancillary spending that comes with them. Communities investing millions in disconnected systems that never reach the scale or cohesion required to shift regional behavior may never become the draw the economic study predicted. The recreational value can still be real. The destination economy impact often is not.

Copying supply without understanding demand is a part of the Feasibility Trap.

We see similar pattern-chasing in outdoor hospitality and glamping. Markets surge, headlines follow, developers race to land. But the COVID-era boom has fully normalized. Metrics in 2025 for outdoor hospitality have returned to pre-pandemic baselines. Capital is increasingly selective about what it funds, because capital has learned what the market punishes: commodity projects dressed up as experience. The projects attracting institutional investment now are the ones that demonstrate behavioral alignment with a specific traveler psychographic and lifestyle experiences. Not just a tent count on a scenic hillside.

That selectivity is not a barrier. It is a signal. The market is telling us it wants better proof.

Bridging the gap: completing the investment thesis

So what does this mean for the developer sitting across from a family office? Or the economic development director trying to attract a partner? Or the parks director defending a major investment to a skeptical board? Or the city manager walking into a council meeting where the question will be “how do we know this works?”

It means Lane 1 is necessary and Lane 2 is unavoidable.

Feasibility and economic studies provide a structure capital recognizes. They quantify supply, risk, and financial mechanics. Public agencies need them to demonstrate due diligence. Those tools establish the financial floor.

But behavioral demand evidence is what turns that structure into something investable and defensible. It is what allows you to answer the questions behind the questions. Who is this for? What do they do today? What will they stop doing to do this instead? What has to be true for behavior to repeat? What breaks the demand? What is the proof, not the promise?

For the developer, this means your pitch deck answers Lane 2 questions before they are asked. When you can demonstrate who the project is for, how they behave today, and what evidence supports the demand thesis, you are no longer one of a hundred supply-side pitches in an investor’s inbox. You are the project that proved its demand story.

For the city manager or economic development director, this means the next RFP for any amenity study, any downtown plan, any recreation master plan should require a behavioral demand component. Not as a nice-to-have appendix, but as a core deliverable. If the study cannot tell you how your community actually behaves, it cannot tell you what to build.

The outdoor recreation economy contributes nearly $700 billion to U.S. GDP. But capturing this value requires the intelligence that sits between the feasibility study and the capital decision. The next generation of destination development requires a shared language across private capital, public leadership, and the people who actually use the place. Your investment thesis must describe a real demand engine, not an imagined one.

The real cost

The Feasibility Trap does not just kill bad projects. It kills good projects that never get a fair read.

It is the developer who spends two years pitching a supply-side story to decision-makers looking for demand-side proof, unable to understand why the meetings go nowhere. It is the community that commissions a conventional study, gets a positive conclusion, and still cannot attract a partner because the project cannot defend its demand story under scrutiny. It is land with genuine potential that sits idle because the process designed to de-risk the opportunity obscured the most important truth: who the place is actually for, and what people will reliably do when they get there.

The question is not “will they come?”

The question is “who are they, how do they already behave, and does your project match that pattern strongly enough to survive reality?”

That is the way out of the trap. It starts with realizing that what we really need to know was never fully captured by Lane 1 analysis alone.

Next in this series

Next up is a Case Decode in Cuyuna Country, Minnesota. Not a retrospective on what happened. A forward look at what happens next. The trail network is performing. The economic numbers are real. But what are the behavioral demand signals telling us about where the growth is, where the friction is, and what these communities need to unlock the next chapter? That is the kind of question a traditional economic study does not answer. It is exactly the kind of question behavioral demand intelligence was built for.

Matt Small is a Director at RVi Planning + Landscape Architecture. He writes The Spark, a newsletter exploring why places thrive or die. From glamping and outdoor recreation to urban destinations, The Spark delivers the data and the actionable blueprints for successful development

The next generation of place-making will not be built by buildings alone.

It will be built by destinations: places where public investment, private capital, and human behavior intersect to generate compounding economic value.

Yet most destinations are still developed using broken logic:

Public agencies invest in parks, trails, and infrastructure and hope private investment follows. Developers propose mixed-use districts and resorts and hope demand materializes. Feasibility relies on comparables, averages, and assumptions rather than behavioral proof.

The result is not a failure of vision. It is a failure of translation.

Capital stalls. Public assets underperform. Value leaks out of the system.

This persistent breakdown is not a design problem or a finance problem. It is an intelligence problem.

THE MISSING MIDDLE

Most destination projects fail, or underperform, in the same place:

The Missing Middle: the structural gap around public amenity investment and private real estate performance, where behavior should translate into dwell time, dwell time into spending, and spending into financeable development.

In the Missing Middle:

• Parks, trails, and public places are treated as cost centers, not economic anchors.
• Local communities feel their voices are not heard.
• Private development is deemed “high risk” because demand is inferred and not proven while thin margins and high land-basis mean deals don’t “pencil”.
• Public-private partnerships collapse because no shared economic truth exists.

This gap persists not because the opportunity is unclear, but because no discipline exists to bridge behavior, design, finance, and governance into a single system.

That discipline is Behavioral Destination Economics (BDE).

THE DISCIPLINE: Behavioral Destination Economics (BDE)

Behavioral Destination Economics is an applied place-economics discipline that uses observable human behavior as the primary input for destination strategy, physical design, and capital alignment.

BDE replaces:

• Demographic proxies with behavioral evidence
• Industry averages with location-specific validation
• Hope-based placemaking with performance-based infrastructure

The Core Premise: Behavior Signals Economics

Behavior does not simply create economics. It reveals the roadmap for it.

Before a dollar is spent, a behavior is enacted. Before a lease is signed, a pattern exists. Most destination development ignores this sequence, relying on demographic proxies and comparable transactions to infer demand.

BDE reverses the process. If you can measure how people actually move, gather, spend, and aspire in a place, you decode the patterns that validate investment and expose the gaps that development can fill.

The BDE Value Chain

Behavior → Signal Decoding → Experience Design → Private Return → Public Solvency

How It Works

Behavioral intelligence identifies unmet needs via market signals before ground is broken. Design responds to those signals, not to assumptions. Because demand is proven rather than inferred, private capital faces less risk and public investment generates measurable return that reference public input.

The result: developers build to validated demand, municipalities fund stewardship through performance, and destinations sustain themselves across generations.

THE INTELLIGENCE LAYER: Demand-DNA™

Demand-DNA™ is the proprietary diagnostic framework at the heart of BDE.

Where traditional feasibility relies on demographic averages and comparable transactions, Demand DNA decodes the behavioral signature of a specific place, revealing where value concentrates, where it leaks, and where latent demand remains uncaptured.

Demand-DNA analyzes four behavioral dimensions:

• FLOW: How people move through space and where attention concentrates
• CONNECT: How social units form and what holds them on-site
• SPEND: What triggers conversion and how adjacency drives yield
• ASPIRE: What identity people seek by participating in a place

The output is not a report. It is a behavioral baseline that becomes the foundation for positioning, design mandates, and investment logic.

Demand DNA is diagnostic, not speculative. It tells the behavioral truth of a place before design, finance, or politics distort it.

THE SYSTEM: Nexus-RE

Insight alone does not build destinations.

Nexus-RE is the integrated operating system that translates Demand DNA**™** into executable strategy for real estate and public places: aligning public goals, private returns, physical infrastructure, governance, phasing, and long-term performance metrics.

Nexus-RE exists because responsibility for destination success has historically been fragmented across agencies, consultants, and capital stacks.

Nexus integrates what has always been separated.

THE METHOD: The Pathfinder

Pathfinder is the execution method within Nexus-RE. It is how behavioral intelligence becomes buildable, financeable, and governable.

A Pathfinder engagement translates Demand-DNA™ into:

• A defensible market position and identity advantage
• Non-negotiable physical and programmatic requirements
• Strategic insights to de-risks capital and gage performance

This is not a report for shelves. It is an operating blueprint.

WHAT BDE REPLACES

BDE does not compete with existing fields. It resolves their fragmentation.

• Tourism economics studies policy and macro impact.
• Behavioral economics studies individual decisions.
• Real estate feasibility studies leases and comparables.

BDE studies the system.

It is the applied discipline of designing physical infrastructure and governance models that monetize real human behavior, at the scale where public amenity meets private development.

That is why this category did not previously exist as a named field.

And why it must exist now.

THE PROMISE

When communities and developers adopt Behavioral Destination Economics:

• Public investment stops leaking value and starts compounding it.
• Private projects move from speculative to validated.
• Parks become anchor tenants, not liabilities.
• Experience design becomes economic infrastructure.

The destination economy is not built on hope.

It is built on behavior: decoded, designed, and sustained.

THE DECODER SERIES

This manifesto establishes the architecture of Behavioral Destination Economics.

Subsequent publications will examine each component of the system in greater depth, clarifying how behavioral signals inform destination strategy without prescribing a single implementation model.

Forthcoming explorations include:

• FLOW: Movement patterns, attention concentration, and spatial sequence
• CONNECT: Social formation, dwell dynamics, and on-site cohesion
• SPEND: Behavioral triggers, adjacency effects, and value capture
• ASPIRE: Identity alignment, signaling, and category meaning
• The Missing Middle: Translating public value into private feasibility
• Nexus: Aligning intelligence, infrastructure, capital, and governance

Each decoder builds on the same foundational premise: behavior precedes economics.

CANONICAL DEFINITIONS

Behavioral Destination Economics (BDE): An applied place-economics discipline that uses observable human behavior as the primary baseline for destination strategy, master planning, and public-private financial modeling.

Demand-DNA™: The proprietary diagnostic framework of BDE, analyzing four behavioral dimensions (FLOW, CONNECT, SPEND, and ASPIRE) to establish the behavioral baseline for destination development.

The Missing Middle: The economic gap between public amenity investment and private real estate execution where behavioral demand fails to translate into financeable, compounding value.

Nexus-RE: The integrated system for real estate and public places development that aligns behavioral intelligence, physical design, capital structure, and governance into a single destination operating model.

Pathfinder: The execution method within Nexus that translates Demand DNA into positioning, design mandates, investment sequencing, and implementation logic.

Matt Small, PLA, SITES AP, Creator of Behavioral Destination Economics

© 2025 All Rights Reserved. Demand-DNA™, Nexus-RE, and Pathfinder are proprietary methodologies.

Start with clarity. Build with confidence.

Most hospitality developers start in the wrong place. They start with tactics: “We need a pool.” “Let’s add some cabins.” “Everyone has a dog park.” They’re building based on what they’ve seen, not what their specific guests actually need.

The Pioneer Vision Canvas forces you to answer the foundational questions first—before you commit capital, before you break ground, before you build something that might miss the mark.

Why This Tool Exists

I’ve watched too many developers invest six or seven figures into amenities that don’t drive bookings. Beautiful features that guests walk past. Expensive maintenance costs with no revenue upside. The problem isn’t lack of vision. It’s lack of systematic validation.

The Pioneer Vision Canvas is the strategic planning tool I use with every client at the start of our engagement. It ensures we’re building on intelligence, not assumptions.

What’s Inside the Canvas

The Canvas has six core sections that force strategic clarity:

1. Guest DNA: This isn’t demographics. It’s behavioral intelligence.

a. Who are your ideal guests?

b. What drives their booking decisions?

c. Where are they coming from?

d. What else do they spend money on?

e. What experiences create loyalty?

f. The shift: From “families with kids” to “adventure-seeking families from Denver who value unique outdoor experiences and spend $200+ on guided activities per trip.”

2. Experience Promise

a. What transformation happens when guests stay with you?

b. What do they experience that they can’t get elsewhere?

c. How does nature play a role?

d. What makes this memorable enough to share?

e. What’s the emotional outcome?

f. The shift: From “comfortable glamping” to “reconnecting families with nature through curated adventure experiences that create lifelong memories.”

3. Market Position: You can’t differentiate if you don’t know the landscape.

a. Who are you actually competing against?

b. What makes you genuinely different?

c. What gaps exist in your market?

d. Where is the white space?

e. The shift: From “we’re a glamping resort” to “we’re the only adventure-forward glamping property within 90 minutes of Denver that specializes in multi-generational family experiences.”

4. Revenue Model: How does the money actually work?

a. What are guests paying for?

b. What’s the pricing strategy?

c. What are ancillary revenue opportunities?

d. How do you maximize lifetime value?

e. The shift: From “nightly rates” to “base accommodation + experience packages + guided adventures + equipment rentals + return visit incentives.”

5. Operational Reality

a. Strategy is worthless if you can’t execute it.

b. Can you actually build and operate this?

c. What resources do you need?

d. What are your constraints?

e. What’s the phasing strategy?

f. The shift: From “let’s do everything” to “Phase 1 focuses on what we can execute excellently with current team and budget. Phase 2 adds complexity only after we’ve proven the model.”

6. Validation Plan:

a. How will you know if you’re right?

b. What assumptions need testing?

c. What data will prove or disprove your hypothesis?

d. What are the success metrics?

e. How will you adapt based on learning?

f. The shift: From “we think this will work” to “we’ll validate guest demand through pre-bookings, test pricing with early adopters, and measure success through repeat visit rates and referral velocity.”

How to Use the Canvas

This isn’t a “fill it out once and file it away” tool. It’s a thinking framework that evolves.

Step 1: Start “Big Picture”

Get your initial thoughts down. Don’t self-edit. Capture your vision as it exists today.

Step 2: Pressure Test

Challenge every assumption. Ask “how do we know this?” for each claim. Find the gaps in your thinking.

Step 3: Validate

Use data, guest interviews, market research, and competitive analysis to validate or adjust each section.

Step 4: Iterate

Refine as you learn. The Canvas should evolve as your intelligence improves.

Step 5: Align

Use it to get your team, investors, and partners on the same page. It’s a communication tool as much as a planning tool.

The Pioneer Vision Canvas is my gift to the hospitality development community.

I’ve seen this framework save developers from costly mistakes, sharpen their competitive positioning, and give them confidence to move forward with clarity.

[Download the Pioneer Vision Canvas - PDF]

Use it. Share it with your team. Challenge your assumptions. Build something that actually works.

What Comes Next

The Canvas gives you strategic clarity. But strategy needs execution.

In upcoming posts, I’ll share:

· How to gather the guest intelligence to complete your Canvas

· The Pioneer Vision Workshop process for aligning teams

· Experience Builder Cards for tactical implementation

· Case studies of properties that got it right

You don’t have to build blind. You can build with intelligence.

Owners have vision. Operators worry about execution. Investors want ROI proof. Designers chase uniqueness. Everyone sees the project differently, and those differences compound into confusion, delays, and compromises that dilute what could have been extraordinary.

The Pioneer Vision Workshop solves this problem.

What Happened at The Glamping Show Americas

This week, Lance Ippel and I facilitated a Pioneer Vision Workshop for a private island resort development. The session brought together property owners with big dreams, operations leaders concerned about feasibility, investment partners needing financial clarity, and designers pushing creative boundaries.

These stakeholders walked in with competing priorities and walked out an hour later with unanimous agreement on guest DNA and target market, a validated experience strategy backed by behavioral data, a solid plan everyone could execute, and clear metrics for measuring success.

One owner pulled me aside afterward: “In 10 years of development work, I’ve never had this level of clarity this early.”

That’s what the Workshop does. It transforms scattered perspectives into unified strategy, and it does it fast.

Download the AGA Workshop Materials

Download companion Pioneer Business Model Canvas

The Problem Most Planning Sessions Create

You’ve been in these meetings. Maybe you’ve even led them. The pattern is always the same, and it’s always broken.

A consultant presents recommendations. The team reacts and debates. Louder voices win. Compromises dilute the vision. Everyone leaves with different interpretations of what was decided. Execution suffers from misalignment, and six months later, you’re wondering why the project feels off track.

The Workshop flips this entirely.

Instead of consultants presenting and teams reacting, the team builds strategy together using frameworks. Data validates or challenges assumptions in real-time. Decisions emerge from intelligence, not politics. Vision gets sharper instead of diluted. Everyone owns the outcome because they created it. Execution happens with clarity and commitment because everyone knows exactly what they agreed to and why.

How the Workshop Actually Works

The magic starts before anyone walks into the room.

Pre-Workshop: Building Intelligence, Not Just Agendas

One to two weeks before the Workshop, we gather guest intelligence. This means analyzing market data through tools like Placer.ai and AirDNA, mapping the competitive landscape, researching guest behavior patterns, and assessing revenue models. Meanwhile, each stakeholder completes a draft Pioneer Vision Canvas and surfaces their key questions and data gaps.

This preparation ensures we’re working with intelligence, not just opinions, when we convene. No one gets to hide behind “I think” when the data tells a different story.

Workshop Day: Four Sessions, One Unified Strategy

The Workshop itself runs four to six hours, structured in four progressive sessions that build on each other.

Session 1: Guest DNA Alignment (90 minutes)

We start with the most critical question: Who is this property actually for?

Using behavioral data and market intelligence, we define ideal guest profiles with specificity, map their decision-making patterns, identify what drives their spending, and understand their unmet needs. This isn’t demographic guessing—it’s behavioral mapping backed by data.

The output? Unanimous agreement on primary and secondary guest personas that everyone can validate and defend.

Session 2: Experience Strategy (90 minutes)

With guest DNA clear, we design experiences that resonate.

Using the Experience Builder Cards (more on these in a future post), we brainstorm experience possibilities, test them against guest DNA, pressure test operational feasibility, and identify differentiation opportunities. This is where creativity meets reality, and beautiful ideas that can’t be executed get killed before they waste anyone’s time or money.

The output? Three to five core experience pillars that are guest-validated and operationally viable—not theoretical wish lists, but real strategies your team can actually deliver.

Session 3: Market Position & Revenue Model (60 minutes)

Now we answer how we compete and monetize.

We examine the competitive landscape and identify white space, develop pricing strategy informed by guest willingness to pay, surface ancillary revenue opportunities, and articulate a unique value proposition that actually matters to your target guests.

The output? Clear market positioning and revenue strategy that the finance team can model immediately. No hand-waving about “premium experiences”—specific numbers tied to specific guest behaviors.

Session 4: Validation & Action Plan (60 minutes)

The final session answers how we de-risk and execute.

We create a phased implementation roadmap, identify key assumptions to validate, establish success metrics and KPIs, and assign immediate next steps with clear owners. This isn’t aspirational planning—it’s executable strategy with accountability baked in.

The output? A 90-day action plan where everyone knows exactly what they’re responsible for and how success will be measured.

Post-Workshop: Documentation That Actually Gets Used

Within days, you receive a complete documentation package: the completed Pioneer Vision Canvas reflecting team consensus, a summary of workshop insights and decisions, an action plan with timeline and owners, a data appendix supporting key decisions, and a follow-up coaching session scheduled 30 days out.

This isn’t a report that sits in someone’s inbox. It’s the roadmap your team will actually use.

What Makes This Different from Every Other Planning Process

It’s data-driven, not opinion-driven. Every strategic decision is validated against guest behavior data, market intelligence, and competitive analysis. Opinions are welcome, but data decides. This eliminates the loudest-voice-wins dynamic that ruins so many planning sessions.

It’s collaborative, not top-down. The team builds the strategy together. When people participate in creating the plan, they’re committed to executing it. Ownership isn’t assigned—it’s earned through participation.

It’s practical, not theoretical. Every output must be operationally viable. As a landscape architect, I kill beautiful ideas that can’t be built or maintained. Reality checks are built into every session, so nothing leaves the room that can’t survive contact with the real world.

It’s action-oriented, not just visioning. We don’t just create strategy documents that live in drawers. We create 90-day action plans with clear owners, timelines, and success metrics. Strategy without execution is just expensive daydreaming.

When You Should Run This Workshop

The Pioneer Vision Workshop works best when you have multiple stakeholders who need alignment—owners, operators, investors, designers all pulling in slightly different directions. It’s ideal when you’re facing strategic decisions about positioning, amenities, experience design, or business model. It’s essential when you have capital at risk where clarity now prevents expensive mistakes later. It’s critical when timeline pressure requires fast, confident decision-making. And it only works when there’s openness to data and willingness to challenge assumptions.

It’s particularly valuable at inflection points: new development conceptualization, major renovation planning, business model pivots, expansion strategies, and partnership alignments. These are the moments when getting alignment wrong costs six or seven figures and years of momentum.

What You’re Actually Buying

When you invest in a Pioneer Vision Workshop, you’re getting one to two weeks of pre-workshop intelligence gathering, a four to six hour facilitated strategy session, a complete documentation package, a 30-day follow-up coaching call, and decision clarity that prevents six-figure mistakes.

The typical ROI? One redirected amenity decision often saves 10 to 20 times the workshop investment. One validated experience strategy can add 30 to 50 percent to projected revenue.

But the real value isn’t just in the money saved or earned. It’s speed and confidence.

Teams that run the Workshop move faster because everyone’s aligned. They execute better because the strategy is clear. They adapt smarter because the validation framework is built in. They stop second-guessing decisions and start implementing them.

How to Get Started

If your team is facing a strategic decision and needs alignment fast, the Pioneer Vision Workshop might be right for you.

The process is straightforward: We start with a 30-minute discovery call where we discuss your challenge, stakeholders, and timeline. I then provide a custom workshop proposal designed for your specific needs. We conduct pre-work including intelligence gathering and stakeholder prep over one to two weeks. Then comes the workshop day—a facilitated strategy session with your team. Documentation is delivered within five days, followed by a 30-day coaching check-in to ensure momentum continues.

Ready to explore? Email me at msmall@rviplanning.com with “Workshop” in the subject line. Include a brief description of your project and the decision you’re facing.

What Comes Next

The Workshop gives you strategic clarity and team alignment. But strategy needs tactical execution.

Next week, I’ll introduce the Experience Builder Cards—the tactical tools for turning workshop insights into guest experiences that drive bookings and loyalty.

Until then, if you want to explore the Workshop methodology on your own, download the Glamping Show Workshop Package and start mapping your own vision.

Because the best hospitality projects don’t happen by accident. They happen when the right people get aligned around the right strategy, backed by the right data, at the right time.

That’s what the Pioneer Vision Workshop delivers.

This isn’t a throwaway observation. It’s the central challenge facing outdoor hospitality right now.

The industry has solved the accommodation problem. Walk any trade show floor and you’ll see stunning domes, beautifully designed cabins, and thoughtfully laid-out glamping tents. Manufacturers have delivered innovation in spades.

But Scott identified something more troubling: “ADR Struggles – Guests show fatigue with higher rates if not matched by meaningful experiences. Pricing must reflect value delivered.”

Translation? Pretty structures aren’t enough to justify premium pricing anymore. And loyalty? Scott’s research shows that “experiences—not just accommodations—bring guests back.”

The experience gap is real, measurable, and growing.

The Maturation Problem

Scott noted that developers at the show were “more informed” and arrived with “clearly defined visions.” That’s great news—it means the industry is professionalizing. But it also raises the bar.

When your competition understands hospitality fundamentals, has done their homework, and shows up with refined concepts, you can’t win on accommodation innovation alone. Everyone has access to the same manufacturers. Everyone can create Instagram-worthy structures.

The differentiation now happens in what guests actually do at your property and how they feel while doing it.

This is where most properties struggle. Not because they don’t care about guest experience, but because they lack a systematic way to design, validate, and deliver experiences that create loyalty and justify premium ADR.

You can’t workshop your way to great experiences with Post-it notes and good intentions. You need frameworks, data, and proven methodologies.

The Three Gaps Scott Identified

Let’s look at what’s really happening in the industry through Scott’s observations:

Gap #1: The Hospitality Gap
Properties know they need to “blend authentic hospitality into curated experiences,” but they don’t have a repeatable process for doing it. They’re improvising, hoping staff personality and natural talent will carry the day.

Gap #2: The Value Gap
Guests are pushing back on rates that aren’t matched by meaningful experiences. Properties set pricing based on comps or costs, not on the actual experiential value they deliver. When guests feel the mismatch, they don’t return.

Gap #3: The Loyalty Gap
Scott’s research confirms what many operators suspect: accommodations get guests to book once, but experiences bring them back. Without intentional experience design, you’re stuck in an expensive acquisition cycle, constantly chasing new guests instead of nurturing repeat visitors.

These gaps compound. When you can’t systematically create hospitality-infused experiences, you can’t deliver consistent value. When you can’t deliver value, you can’t justify premium rates. When rates don’t match expectations, loyalty evaporates.

What Successful Properties Do Differently

The properties that thrive don’t just have better structures. They have better systems for designing experiences.

They approach guest experience the way manufacturers approach product design: with intentionality, prototyping, testing, and iteration. They don’t leave magic moments to chance or rely solely on staff intuition.

They ask better questions:

• What should guests feel within the first 30 minutes of arrival?
• Which experiences create the strongest memories and emotional connections?
• How do we sequence activities to build narrative and momentum?
• Where are the natural opportunities for surprise and delight?
• What specific touchpoints justify our premium positioning?

And most importantly, they have frameworks for answering those questions systematically across their entire guest journey.

The Experience Builder System

For the past year, I’ve been developing and testing a tool that addresses exactly what Scott identified at the Glamping Show: a systematic way to design experiences that blend authentic hospitality with curated programming to create true guest value.

The Experience Builder Cards are a practical workshop tool—a 12-card deck that helps you systematically design the experiences that create guest loyalty and justify premium pricing.

Each card tackles a specific aspect of guest experience design: from defining your target guest and unique promise, to crafting arrival magic and signature experiences, to building the connections and memories that bring guests back. The cards work as structured prompts that move you from strategy (who are we serving and why?) to execution (what specific moments will deliver on that promise?).

The 12 Cards

The deck walks through the complete experience design process:

Foundation Cards (1-3): Target Guest, Unique Promise, The Invitation — defining who you serve and what you offer that no one else can

Arrival & Place (4-5): Arrival Magic, Authentic Place — creating those critical first moments and understanding how your location tells your story

Experience Design (6-8): The ‘Wow’ Moment, Signature Experiences, Real Connections — crafting the specific moments guests will remember and talk about

Sensory & Memory (9-10): Sensory Symphony, Forever Memory — designing multi-sensory experiences and identifying the peak moments that define a stay

Loyalty & Return (11-12): Epic Stories, Return Journey — turning guests into advocates and creating reasons for them to come back

Each card includes focused questions that move teams from abstract concepts to concrete plans. They’re designed for workshop sessions where you need alignment, clarity, and actionable outcomes.

Connecting Vision To Execution

Here’s how this fits with the other tools I’ve shared:

The Pioneer Vision Canvas helps you define your strategic positioning—who you serve, what makes you different, why guests choose you. It’s your North Star.

The Experience Builder Cards translate that strategy into tactical reality—the specific experiences that deliver on your promise and create the differentiation your canvas describes.

Together, they bridge the gap Scott identified: properties that know what they want to be but struggle to execute the experiences that make that vision real for guests.

What’s Coming

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share how these cards work in practice with real property examples. You’ll see how the framework connects to business outcomes—ADR, occupancy, and repeat bookings—and why systematic experience design matters more than ever in a maturing industry.

The Industry Moment

Scott’s insights from the Glamping Show make it clear: we’re at an inflection point.

Accommodation innovation is table stakes. Development costs are rising. Guests are more sophisticated and more selective. Competition is more informed and more capable.

The properties that will thrive aren’t the ones with the most beautiful structures. They’re the ones with compelling answers to the question: “What will guests experience here that they can’t get anywhere else?”

The Experience Builder Cards provide a systematic way to answer that question.

I’m making the first 6 cards available to readers [LINK HERE] —the foundation and arrival sequence that gets you from strategy to those critical first guest moments. It’s enough to run a productive workshop session with your team and start closing the experience gap.

Matt Small helps real estate developers and hospitality owners turn projects into distinctive destinations that drive premium returns. The Experience Builder Cards are workshop tools used by resorts to design memorable guest experiences that justify premium pricing and drive repeat visits.

Want all 12 Experience Builder cards? Email msmall@rviplanning.com with “Experience Builder” in the subject line.

One of the most powerful ways to apply empathetic design is through nature. Nature is not a one-size-fits-all experience. How we connect with the outdoors changes throughout our lives, shaped by our developmental stage, past experiences, and personal preferences. A young child’s experience of nature is vastly different from that of an adult seeking relaxation or an adventurer craving challenge. Understanding these differences allows us to create more tailored, impactful experiences for every guest. This heightened sensory experience in nature is deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. For early humans, survival depended on their ability to detect subtle changes in their surroundings—shifting shadows, the rustling of leaves, or the scent of fresh water. These instincts remain hardwired in us today, making nature an environment where our senses are fully engaged, heightening awareness and memory formation. This evolutionary connection explains why time spent in nature can feel so immersive and why it has such a profound impact on our emotions and well-being.

In a world dominated by technology and constant connectivity, people are seeking refuge in nature more than ever. Yet modern lifestyles have drastically reduced our exposure to natural environments. Urbanization, screen dependency, and indoor routines contribute to what researcher Richard Louv calls Nature-Deficit Disorder—a lack of time in nature linked to anxiety, attention disorders, and declining mental well-being. This is particularly pronounced in early childhood development, making it essential for hospitality brands to consider how they can foster meaningful outdoor experiences for their youngest guests.

With that in mind, let’s dive into how nature influences human development across different life stages, starting with childhood.

Resorts that cater to families have a unique opportunity to create lasting guest loyalty by fostering deeper connections with nature for their youngest visitors. But this goes beyond the typical “kids’ club” or standard playgrounds. It’s about offering experiential learning and opportunities for safe, unstructured play in nature—the kinds of moments that spark curiosity, creativity, and lifelong memories.

Birth to Age 5: The Foundation of Connection

Early childhood is a critical period for cognitive and emotional development, and nature plays a fundamental role in this process. According to Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, young children learn through sensory-motor exploration—touching, smelling, and hearing the world around them. Time spent outdoors strengthens this development, improving sensory integration, fine motor skills, and problem-solving abilities.

Researcher Richard Louv has shown that children who spend less time outdoors experience higher rates of anxiety, attention disorders, and reduced creativity. Similarly, Erikson’s Psychosocial Development Theory highlights early childhood as a crucial stage for building trust and autonomy.

How are you integrating nature experiences that provide a safe yet stimulating environment where young children can explore freely, fostering confidence and resilience?

Designing for Families: Creating Meaningful ‘Plan B’ Experiences

If you’re in the outdoor hospitality industry, you’re in a prime position to cater to young families—but it has to be intentional and reinforce your brand. Parents often plan for the perfect outdoor adventure—a day at a national park or a scenic hike—but with young kids, plans can change in an instant. What does your resort offer on property to serve as an engaging, enriching “Plan B” when the big adventure doesn’t go as planned?

Even if a national park isn’t at your doorstep, a well-designed nature space can provide an immersive, hands-on experience that captures the magic of the outdoors in a manageable, accessible way. A few key considerations:

• Small, naturalized areas with soft paths where parents and toddlers can explore at their own pace. As part of a learning landscape project we are working on, the kids prioritized a landscape that provide a sense of
• Progressive trail experiences, with some stroller-friendly paths and others designed for sensory exploration—featuring different textures, colors, shadow patterns, and sounds. Remember that small paths can feel like big adventures for little kids.
• Interactive elements that connect kids with local wildlife—think hidden discovery nodes with art, signage, or playful elements that encourage exploration.
• Themed storytelling zones, developed in collaboration with local authors, historians, or artists, where children can engage with rotating seasonal stories or folklore tied to the region. Storybook themed garden spaces are lots of fun!

Nature Play: More Than Just a Playground

Nature play areas provide an incredible opportunity to deepen a child’s connection with the outdoors while reinforcing a resort’s unique brand story. These spaces should go beyond the standard playground model and incorporate organic, sensory-rich experiences that invite kids to engage, create, and explore.

• Tactile Play Areas: A dedicated space where young children can dig in the dirt, play with sand and water, or engage with natural materials to build and “plant.” Incorporating both ground-level and raised elements ensures accessibility for kids of different abilities.
• Active Nature Play Zones: Soft-surfaced areas with simple climbing structures made of natural materials—integrated seamlessly into the landscape—can encourage movement while maintaining a natural aesthetic. Thoughtful enclosure and shaded seating for parents add comfort and peace of mind.
• Partnerships with Nonprofits: Collaborate with organizations like the National Wildlife Federation to incorporate age-specific educational content, scavenger hunts, and themed collections that encourage families to engage with nature—not just at your resort, but across multiple properties, reinforcing brand loyalty.

By prioritizing immersive, nature-based play experiences, resorts can provide families with more than just a stay—they offer a place where childhood memories are made, sparking curiosity and a lifelong love for the outdoors.

Stay tuned for the next post when I will provide some additional insights into specific amenity programming connected to nature for the middle childhood, a key age of creativity and independence.

"The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man." – Author Unknown

The hospitality industry invests heavily in understanding guest desires, striving to deliver exceptional service and cultivate brand loyalty. Yet, most resources are directed toward curating static architectural environments and enhancing digital experiences. But if a brand can exist anywhere, what gives it staying power? What truly captures the next generation of devoted advocates?

Close your eyes and think back to your most unforgettable travel experiences. What made them stand out? Was it the people you were with? The sense of discovery? The way the environment made you feel? Often, the most powerful memories are tied to moments when our senses were fully engaged—when we could hear the rustling of trees, feel the warmth of the sun on our skin, or breathe in the crisp mountain air.

This is no coincidence. Research shows that nature has a profound impact on memory formation, emotional connection, and overall well-being. Our brains are evolutionarily wired to respond to natural stimuli, a survival instinct that once helped early humans detect danger, find food, and navigate the world. Today, that same heightened awareness in nature enhances our experiences, making them more immersive and unforgettable.

For hospitality brands, this presents a massive opportunity. In a market projected to reach $350M by 2030, outdoor hospitality is becoming increasingly competitive. Early adopters have found success, and new operators are entering the space rapidly. To stand out, we must move beyond traditional accommodations and curated aesthetics. The real differentiator is in creating transformative, sensory-rich experiences that forge deep emotional connections with guests.

Empathetic design mandates putting ourselves in our guests frame-of-mind, building emotional connections through nature-driven experiences, key to unlocking brand loyalty and advocacy. Outdoor hospitality has a ‘natural’ advantage as today’s travelers actively seek immersive experiences that foster authentic connections with nature.

What drives our desire to connect with nature, and how can this be leveraged to create experiences that stand the test of time? A personal curiosity led me to ask: What if we shifted more resources toward deepening our innate connection to nature—the connection we are all drawn to? How can we integrate nature into everyday experiences in meaningful ways? If we understand the psychology behind our bond with the natural world, could this unlock hidden opportunities for hospitality brands to forge stronger, lasting relationships with their guests?

I believe outdoor hospitality serves as a gateway to transformative experiences. By designing environments that encourage direct, immersive interactions with nature, we can reconnect people—both young and old—to the natural world. Let’s explore the psychology that drives our connection to nature, how we learn and recharge, and how we can bring nature back into focus for hospitality. Based on my 20+ years of experience in landscape architecture, I will share insights on how this approach can drive brand loyalty, staying power, and differentiation—powering your brand for the future. Subscribe now to follow along as we dive into key insights.

For me the greatest journeys, the ones that have special meaning, have been ones connected to nature. Journeys to connect and discover a new place and surroundings where Mother Nature takes center stage. This is a main reason I was drawn into the profession of Landscape Architecture.

In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.”- John Muir

Immersed in nature, time seems to slow down. The digital world fades away. Hearing the aspen leaves quaking in the wind. Sunlight dancing on the ground as it hits the forest floor. A cool breeze that awakens the senses with the smell of fresh snow. Your journey winds through the refuge of the forest to open to a clearing in the distance where you arrive to take in the dramatic mountain peaks.

This is a journey I remember, in vivid detail.

Hospitality, and in particular Outdoor Hospitality, is a industry primed to connect people with nature through immersive experiences and stories. Nature in Hospitality is driven by a desire to share how we all can all make our natural places better and tell stories of people and places that are making an positive impact on the planet and local communities.

My hope is that hospitality can create a spark toward restoring our natural places and educating guests through immersive experiences to make the places we impact more connected to a nature. A nature that represents the native ecosystem of the area.

Every other Monday, I will share insights related to regenerative hospitality, climate positive site design, and experiential design within native ecosystems. I will also share the people and places that I find inspiring and offer insights into how this can impact you and your guests.

I am excited to start this journey with you, and I hope you will join me. Share your ideas, what inspires you, and your special places in nature that call to you. Together we can have a shared dialogue about how we can have a positive impact for future generations.

Small changes can have a big impact.

Lets be the spark that helps ignites positive impact for more wild places.

Please subscribe to follow along.