Site Planning | AGA Pre-Show Expert Roundtable
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.
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Passion projects and profitable businesses don’t look the same on paper—and this session walks you through the difference. Working from a real glamping operator scenario, you’ll build the pieces of an investable business plan, learn how to translate your story into numbers that lenders and investors take seriously, and pressure-test the assumptions most operators don’t examine until it’s too late.
Your group will work through:
- Telling your story with numbers: A strong business plan is your story translated into the language of capital—and the operators who win funding are the ones whose plans line up with their vision and their math. Your group will work through how to build a plan that reads as credible to a banker who has never set foot in a glamping property, even if you’re a first-time operator without a track record.
- The pro forma—revenue, costs and the gaps that sink deals: ADR, occupancy, seasonality, ramp-up, CapEx, OpEx, staffing and the soft costs operators routinely under-budget (maintenance reserves, working capital, marketing spend, insurance, debt service). Your group will work through how to build numbers that are realistic enough to defend and strong enough to fund—and how to spot the miscalculations that quietly sink deals before they ever reach underwriting.
- Phasing the project for proof of concept: You will work through how to stage your project so Phase 1 proves the model, generates real operating data and earns the right to scale—building a path from concept to credibility instead of asking capital to take a leap of faith.
- What banks and investors actually look —and what makes a plan “investable”: Debt and equity sources speak specific languages and care about certain project characteristics. You will work through what a bank wants to see (debt service coverage, collateral, credit, cash reserves) versus what an investor wants to see (returns, scalability, defensibility, exit path)—and how to position your plan for the right kind of capital at the right time.
- The endgame: Long-term goals, exit strategy and the lifestyle the business is supposed to support. Working backward from the life you want in 10 years often changes the decisions you make in year one—and clarifies whether you’re really building a business, a hobby or something in between.
Experts circulate between tables, challenging soft assumptions and sharing what they’ve seen actually work—from operators who’ve raised capital to lenders who’ve underwritten deals.
You’ll leave with: the bones of a credible business plan, a clearer-eyed view of your own financial assumptions, a phased approach you can actually defend and the questions you need to answer before any meaningful conversation with a bank or investor.
Marketing Essentials | AGA Pre-Show Expert Roundtable
Marketing is where many early-stage operators either over-spend on the
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Your group will work through:
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Marketing is where many early-stage operators either over-spend on the wrong areas or under-invest in the areas that actually drive bookings. This session puts you inside a working scenario and asks the hard questions about how to allocate time, money and attention across the tools and channels that actually move the needle for a glamping property.
Your group will work through:
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- Telling your story—why you, not them: With new glamping properties opening every month, the brands that win are the ones who can clearly articulate what makes their guest experience different. Your group will work through how to position your property, how to translate your story consistently across your website, OTAs and social channels, and how to make your “why” obvious to a guest in the eight seconds before they bounce.
- Marketing the experience—on-site vs. local area: Are you selling the property, the destination, or both? Most operators don’t think hard enough about this — and miss the chance to bundle on-site experiences (firepit dinners, guided activities, wellness add-ons) with the reasons guests came to the area in the first place. Your group will work through how to position each without diluting your brand or under-pricing your offering.
- AI—best bang for your buck: AI is the topic everyone is asking about and the one most people are confused by. Your group will cut through the noise and identify where AI actually pays off for a glamping operator today—customer service and inquiry response, content and social, dynamic pricing, guest journey automation and the shift from SEO to GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) as more guests search through AI assistants. Where should you start if you only have bandwidth for one?
- Analytics that matter when you’re starting out: Most early-stage operators either drown in dashboards or track nothing at all. Your group will work through the handful of numbers that genuinely matter in year one—ADR, occupancy, channel mix, conversion rate, repeat rate, review sentiment—and how to use them to make sharper decisions instead of just describing what already happened.
- Repeat guests & on-site marketing — making the stay unforgettable: Repeat business in glamping is notoriously elusive, but it doesn’t have to be. Your group will work through how to design the on-site experience so guests leave with stories worth telling, what to do at check-out and after the stay to bring them back and how to turn first stays into referrals, reviews and second bookings.
Experts will be present to share what’s actually working for them — tool by tool, dollar by dollar.
You’ll leave with: a sharper marketing prioritization framework, a clearer picture of where your first (or next) dollar should go, a strategy that fits your stage and practical tools you can apply to your property the week you get home.
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