The Impact on Destination Performance
For developers and operators, accommodation delivers two powerful benefits. First, it strengthens the performance of the attraction itself. Overnight guests tend to stay longer, visit more attractions and spend more across food, beverage, retail and secondary experiences. Across many destination types, onsite guests can represent a significant share of total visitation, particularly where day visit capacity is constrained.
Accommodation also helps to diversify demand. Hotels with conference, education or event facilities can support weekday and off peak occupancy, smoothing seasonality and broadening the audience mix. Critically, offering short breaks rather than day trips also expands catchment, enabling destinations to attract visitors from much further afield.
Hotels as a Financial Engine
The second benefit lies in the economics of accommodation. Compared with major attractions, hotels are typically less capital intensive and, when integrated effectively, can deliver strong and resilient returns. Attraction anchored accommodation often achieves higher occupancies and significant rate premiums over local hospitality benchmarks, driven by experience, convenience and scarcity.
Themed and experiential accommodation performs particularly well, while destinations offering a range of typologies – from mid scale hotels and lodges to glamping and premium themed rooms – are best placed to maximise demand and appeal to a broad market.
In practice, accommodation often acts as the financial engine of the wider destination, generating cashflow that supports additional attractions, evening entertainment, leisure facilities and future phases of development.
Planning for Integration
Experience shows that these benefits are maximised when accommodation and attractions are planned together as a single economic system. Key considerations include the optimal number of hotels, unit counts, positioning and phasing; amenity mix and programming across food and beverage, wellness, MICE facilities and retail; and a clear understanding of how accommodation drives performance across the wider estate.
LDP works with attraction owners, developers and operators to provide strategy and feasibility for accommodation within attractions, entertainment anchored real estate and mixed use destinations. Services include market and demand assessment, financial feasibility and cashflow modelling, integrated impact analysis and bankable feasibility studies to support investment and funding discussions.
Project experience includes resort and hospitality advisory work with park developers at destinations such as Universal, Liseberg, PortAventura, Fårup Sommerland and Longleat, among others.
Opportunities for Experience UK Members
For Experience UK members, accommodation represents a major opportunity for collaboration – bringing together storytelling, design, placemaking, operations and commercial strategy to deliver world class experience led resorts. Capturing overnight demand onsite strengthens both visitor experience and long term returns, while creating platforms for innovation across the supply chain.
63