Our February 2013 Leisure eNewsletter featured an article, Evidence that the staycation trend is both real and long-term. In that article, we examined household entertainment participation and spending on trips and found that since the year 2000, overall participation has dropped 34% and average spending has dropped 38%.
The National Park Service just released 2012 attendance data for recreational visits to U.S. national parks. We examined annual park visits back to the year 2000 and found additional evidence of the staycation trend. Overall attendance is only down one percent over the 12 years. But when you adjust for the population’s growth and calculate visits on a per capita basis, attendance has declined by 11%.
The decline is not as dramatic as it was for entertainment venues, perhaps since national park visits can be more affordable and some parks are visited on day-trips to locations close to home. Nevertheless, the attendance pattern seems to support the long-term staycation trend we found with visits and spending at entertainment venues on trips.
About Randy White
Randy White is CEO and co-founder of the White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group. The 31-year-old company, with offices in Kansas City, Missouri, has worked for over 600 clients in 37 countries throughout the world. Projects the company has designed and produced have won seventeen 1st place awards. Randy is considered to be one of the world's foremost authorities on feasibility, brand development, design and production of leisure experience destinations including entertainment, eatertainment, edutainment, agritainment/agritourism, play and leisure facilities.
Randy was featured on the Food Network's Unwrapped television show as an eatertainment expert, quoted as an entertainment/edutainment center expert in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times and Time magazine and received recognition for family-friendly designs by Pizza Today magazine. One of the company's projects was featured as an example of an edutainment project in the book The Experience Economy. Numerous national newspapers have interviewed him as an expert on shopping center and mall entertainment and retail-tainment.
Randy is a graduate of New York University. Prior to repositioning the company in 1989 to work exclusively in the leisure and learning industry, White Hutchinson was active in the retail/commercial real estate industry as a real estate consultancy specializing in workouts/turnarounds of commercial projects. In the late 1960s to early 1980s, Randy managed a diversified real estate development company that developed, owned and managed over 2.0 million square feet of shopping centers and mixed-use projects and 2,000 acres of residential subdivisions. Randy has held the designations of CSM (Certified Shopping Center Manager) and Certified Retail Property Executive (CRX) from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).
He has authored over 150 articles that have been published in over 40 leading entertainment/leisure and early childhood education industry magazines and journals and has been a featured speaker and keynoter at over 40 different conventions and trade groups.
Randy is the editor of his company's Leisure eNewsletter, has a blog and posts on Twitter and Linkedin.
