A Hotel Guy Running National Parks? I've Seen This Movie Before.

I was standing in the lobby of a waterpark resort in Utica, Illinois — 65 acres, 272 suites, an amusement park, a conference center, 300 employees — watching parents sit on benches with dead eyes while their kids ran through the splash zone. Nobody was spending money. The waterpark was a loss leader and everyone had accepted that like it was gravity.

I hadn't accepted it. I added poolside cabanas with adult beverages. Turned that loss leader into a profit center. Not because I was some visionary — because I was an operator who walked the floor and saw a problem nobody else was looking at.

I bring this up because the internet is on fire right now about Trump nominating a hotel and food service executive to run the National Park Service. And I get it — the optics are terrible. The conservation community is losing its mind. The headline writes itself.

But here's what nobody's telling you.

The National Park Service isn't just a conservation organization. It's a massive hospitality operation. We're talking about facilities that welcome hundreds of millions of visits a year. Lodges. Campgrounds. Restaurants. Gift shops. Visitor centers. Staffing. Maintenance. Deferred maintenance — billions of dollars of it. Supply chains to some of the most remote locations in the country. Seasonal workforce management that would make most hotel companies cry.

I've run a 65-acre resort complex. I've run casinos with 400+ employees. I've managed three hotels in three different cities simultaneously. And I'm telling you — the operational complexity of a single national park rivals anything I've dealt with in the private sector. The difference is the national parks have been running on duct tape and good intentions for decades.

Now — does that mean a hospitality exec is the RIGHT pick? That's a different question.

Here's where my brain goes. I've been in rooms with two kinds of executives my entire career. There's the operator who walks the floor, talks to the staff, understands that the maintenance budget isn't a line item to cut but an investment that prevents catastrophic failure. And then there's the executive who looks at a P&L, sees a bunch of cost centers, and starts slashing.

I don't know which one this person is. Neither does anyone screaming on social media right now.

What I DO know is this: the National Park Service has a deferred maintenance backlog that's been estimated in the billions. Billions. Infrastructure crumbling. Trails deteriorating. Facilities aging out. Staff stretched impossibly thin. And the conservation-first leadership that everyone's romanticizing? They've been in charge while that backlog grew. Year after year after year. I'm not blaming them — they've been underfunded and hamstrung by Congress. But let's not pretend the status quo was working.

When I walked into Hooters Casino Hotel in 2015, that property had been through multiple bankruptcies. No meaningful investment in years. The bank was monitoring it. Most employees were embarrassed to say where they worked. Everyone told me it was a lost cause.

Twelve months later: NOI went from $2.2M to $5.1M. Room revenue up. Gaming revenue up 21%. Not because I was a casino expert — I was an operator who understood that the fundamentals are the fundamentals regardless of the logo on the building. Fix the basics. Invest in your people. Stop pretending the problems will solve themselves.

The danger here isn't that someone from hospitality gets the job. The danger is if this person sees 400 million annual park visits and thinks "revenue opportunity" instead of "sacred trust." If they walk into Yellowstone and see a hotel site instead of an ecosystem. If they look at the concession contracts and see margin expansion instead of visitor experience.

I've watched private equity guys walk into hotels and gut the housekeeping budget to make the quarterly numbers. You know what happens? Reviews tank. Revenue follows. You cannot cut your way to excellence. That principle doesn't just apply to hotels — it applies to anything people experience.

But I've also watched hospitality operators walk into broken organizations and fix them. Because that's what we do. We inherit disasters. We triage. We find the thing everyone else walked past — the cabana no one thought to build, the parking lot nobody marketed, the staff no one invested in — and we make it work.

The question isn't whether a hospitality executive CAN run the Park Service. It's whether THIS one understands that the product isn't the lodge or the gift shop or the concession revenue. The product is the Grand Canyon at sunrise. The product is a kid seeing a bison for the first time. The product is silence.

You can't optimize silence. You can only protect it.

And if this person doesn't understand that — if they show up with a revenue management mentality instead of a stewardship mentality — then every conservation advocate screaming right now will be proven right. Spectacularly right.

But if they show up the way a good operator shows up — walk every trail, talk to every ranger, understand the deferred maintenance crisis, fight for the budget instead of cutting it, and recognize that some things have value that doesn't show up on a P&L — then this might not be the disaster everyone assumes.

I've been wrong before. But I've also watched enough people underestimate operators to know that the resume isn't the whole story. It never is.