Will Spurzem (AIA, LEED AP, NCARB)

You and your table will be handed a real glamping property—site map, topography, parcel boundaries, existing utilities—and put in the development team seat. Over 90 minutes, your group will make the layout calls that decide the initial site planning for the property.

• Parking strategy: centralized lot or distributed pull-up access? Each direction shapes the arrival experience, the site’s character and the operational realities your staff will live with every day. Your group will weigh the available options and defend the call.
• Unit placement, infrastructure & guest experience: clustered or spread, where do the units actually go? This is the decision where topography, sightlines, view corridors and infrastructure routing all collide—and where the gap between a “campground feel” and a high-ADR retreat usually opens up. On a unique or challenging site, getting this right is the difference between a layout that flows and one that fights itself for the long term.
• Welcome building placement: the first interaction with a guest sets the tone for the entire stay, which makes the welcome center one of the most important investments on the property. Designing it as a versatile, multi-use space—check-in, retail, common area, staff hub—is critical, but placement is genuinely hard to get right, especially when you’re balancing curb appeal, operational flow and where guests actually want to gather.
• Fire roads & emergency access: often the most overlooked piece of an early site plan, and just as often the one that derails a project at permitting. Your group will lay out a fire road network that meets code, works alongside guest paths and doesn’t eat into your buildable footprint.
• Utilities: Where to put a wastewater system or other required items is a challenge most operators don’t have a solution for until permitting forces the issue — and by then, your options have narrowed dramatically. The more spread out things are, the more costly utilities become.

Industry experts move between tables as mentors, pushing your group to defend decisions out loud and surface the trade-offs that don’t show up on a polished render.

You’ll leave with: a working framework for site sequencing, a sharper eye for hidden infrastructure costs and hidden challenges, and a clear sense of what wins (and loses) at the planning department.