Waterparks, Coral, Vinyl, Margaritas & More

A look at the amenities resort operators dared to build and the unique guest experiences that resulted.

Being bold about recreation isn’t just a good idea. It’s a strategy strong enough to pull a property out of the comparison shopping pile entirely — off the price-filter grid and onto the shortlist of places guests seek by name. When that happens, everything gets easier. Direct bookings from guests who sought out a property by name tend to convert with less friction — less price shopping, less abandonment. Rates hold because demand holds. Occupancy follows attention, and attention follows properties that give people something worth talking about.

For vacation ownership specifically, the stakes are even higher. Sales close faster when prospects can picture themselves in the experience — when the conversation shifts from what ownership costs to what ownership unlocks. Owners who associate their membership with experiences worth returning for tend to stay more engaged with their ownership over time. The amenity isn’t just a marketing tool — it’s a retention strategy.

While not all of the properties highlighted in this article are timeshare resorts, each offers features and experiences that align closely with what today’s vacation ownership buyers are looking for — memorable, repeatable, and shareable moments that extend beyond the unit itself. These are the kinds of amenities that help prospects visualize long-term value and help owners feel confident in returning year after year.

This month’s Hospitality Innovation in Action explores properties with innovative amenities organized into five collections — Signature, Local, Interactive, Leverage, and Calendar — each representing a different way properties are turning bold ideas into bookings, owner engagement, and experiences worth talking about.

The Signature Collection

Amenities curated around an unwavering, signature identity

Some properties have amenities. These properties have an identity — and every single thing they offer exists to reinforce it. Their amenities aren’t a real estate listing of features. They are all pieces to the same puzzle. A guest doesn’t arrive and discover what kind of place this is. They already know. That clarity is what pulls them off the price-filter grid and onto a shortlist of one.

Somewhere in East Hollywood, there’s a hotel where you check in, drop your bags and head downstairs to record an album. Not metaphorically. Gold-Diggers is an 11-room property built around nine professional recording studios, a live music venue and a soundstage. Studios run around the clock, each room features original commissioned paintings by Grammy-nominated visual artist Andrew Savage. The vinyl you recorded, you keep at checkout. The tagline “Drink. Sleep. Record.” sums up the exact experience you’re immersed in here — an excellent example of crafting something truly one-of-a-kind and niche. Not every resort should build a recording studio but investing in equipment, infrastructure or partnerships that give guests access to something otherwise hard to replicate is an innovation worth serious consideration.

More travelers flock to Great Smoky Mountains National Park than any other national park every year — drawn by its central proximity, easy accessibility and expansive variety of activities wrapped in the signature brand of outdoorsy Appalachian adventure. At Westgate Smoky Mountain Resort, they brought the magic of the outdoor park into their indoor one. Wild Bear Falls — the Southeast’s largest indoor water park — carries the Smokies theme through every attraction: Ramsey Cascades, Clingman’s Dome, Laurel Falls, Cades Cove across more than 60,000 square feet, 300,000 gallons of water and a retractable roof. Westgate crafted a branded, immersive water park that mirrors the scale, variety and choose-your-own-experience identity of the national park outside its doors.

One property on this list has no amenities tab on its website. Because Matthew McConaughey didn’t stay outside Columbus, Ohio for a sweet pool. At The Mohicans in Glenmont, there is no pool, no spa, no daily activities schedule — just 10 handcrafted treehouses spread across 75 acres of hardwood forest, each one named, each one different, two designed by Pete Nelson of Discovery Channel’s Treehouse Masters. The waitlist runs three months or longer. Weekends fill immediately. Sometimes the accommodation itself is the amenity — and the only one a property needs.

While the previous example was about no amenities, this one is about endless ones. You may not find a lime-shaped bar stool on any amenity list, but when every detail of a property aligns with a vibe as iconic as Margaritaville, even the custom, photo-worthy seating at the swim-up bar is a part of the experience that drives bookings. The vacation club doesn’t offer a room and some standard resort amenities — it delivers a feeling guests recognize before they check in. It’s a feeling crafted from so many details, the amenities list isn’t expansive enough to contain it.

Most resorts are good for a vacation. Three Forks Ranch is good for your health — and it means that literally. Set on 280,000 acres on the Colorado-Wyoming border — 27 guest rooms, no neighbors, no noise — every single thing the ranch offers exists to restore and strengthen the people who come here. Fly fishing, cattle drives, private skiing, sporting clays, a hydrotherapy spa designed by Barr and Wray that exists nowhere else in North America, and an exclusive partnership with Mayo Clinic — ranked the No. 1 hospital in the world — bringing physician-led longevity assessments and predictive diagnostics directly to the ranch. Guests don’t check in with an itinerary. They arrive, and everything available to them — every trail, every treatment, every meal — is working on the whole person at once. The adventure isn’t a distraction from the wellness. It is the wellness.

Leave your signature mark. Signature amenities involve real risk — justifying large investments, initiating creative partnerships, orchestrating brand and operational alignment. Start by asking what your property stands for at its core, then look honestly at whether every guest touchpoint reflects that answer. Everything doesn’t have to be built at once. Build the right things, align them deliberately and let that identity do the selling and expanding.

The Local Collection

Properties where the surrounding place is the experience

A local ingredient on the menu is a nod. A local painting in the lobby is a gesture. The properties below didn’t treat local culture with nonchalance — they built around what the place already was before they got there.

How does nine rooms on a 50,000-acre working cattle ranch in northern Patagonia make the cut to land on Taschen’s Top 72 Boutique Hotels in the World? The answer can be found at Tipiliuke Lodge, where 17 miles of private trout water and accommodations built with locally sourced materials to complement and fit the natural surroundings. No amenity built or bought can rival the experience of a landscape that exists naturally. 

The Florida Keys are full of resorts with ocean views and snorkeling referrals. Reefhouse Resort & Marina in Key Largo has something different behind its conference center: a working coral nursery operated by Mote Marine Laboratory, one of the country’s leading marine science organizations. Guests can visit the nursery, learn about active coral restoration and witness firsthand the science behind rebuilding the Florida Reef Tract — right out the back door. Not every property sits next to a coral reef — but many sit next to something worth a closer look that guests can’t access as easily anywhere else.

Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort & Spa sits on land owned by the Tamayame people of Santa Ana Pueblo near Albuquerque, N.M. The cultural programming — traditional pottery making, Pueblo oven bread baking, storytelling under the stars — is led by Pueblo members, rooted in traditions tied to this specific land for centuries. Consistently ranked among the top resorts in the Southwest, Tamaya is the rare property where the location is wound through every element, every experience and every consideration.

Off the coast of Newfoundland, Fogo Island Inn is a community-centred social business operated by Shorefast, a Canadian charity forging a new path at the intersection of art, business, philanthropy and economic development. The artist residencies program, the food, guided experiences and the inn’s entire financial model invest back to the same island community. International artists have completed residencies on-island through Fogo Island Arts since 2010. Quilters, boat builders and storytellers are woven into the guest experience at every layer. What makes Fogo Island Inn extraordinary isn’t just what it offers guests — it’s that every dollar spent there actively sustains the culture, craftsmanship and stories that make the experience worth having.

Give your location love. Not everyone operates on world-famous waters or tribal lands. But every property sits somewhere with a story. Local artists, chefs, guides, makers, historians, landmarks — an honest look at what surrounds a resort through the eyes of a curious visitor reveals doors worth opening.

The Interactive Collection

Properties where guests don’t watch — they participate

It’s common for properties to sell t-shirts to commemorate the trip. At Wildflower Farms in Gardiner, N.Y. — named the No. 1 Resort in New York by Travel + Leisure in 2025 — guests can participate in botanical dyeing workshops on the property’s 140-acre Hudson Valley grounds, turning flowers into wearable, dyed textiles. It’s one of a rotating menu of hands-on experiences at Maplehouse, the resort’s farm education center, also including foraging walks, botanical baking and pickling. The experience isn’t remembered by opening an email campaign — it’s remembered every time a past guest looks at what they made with their own hands.

There are few things as meaningful to a traveling pet owner as knowing their dog is genuinely welcome — not just allowed. Sea Island Resort in Georgia answered that with “Dapper Dogs,” a co-branded program with Barbour where guests and their dogs share matching seasonal apparel from the Best-in-Breed Borrowing Closet. Pets order from the Bone Appétit in-room menu — dishes like Paw-t Roast delivered in a custom stainless steel dog bowl. According to the 2021-2022 APPA National Pet Owners Survey, 78 percent of dog owners travel with their dogs annually. Sea Island didn’t create that behavior. It designed around it so specifically that the program generated its own press cycle.

The Li’l Wranglers program at Brush Creek Ranch in Saratoga, Wyo., goes beyond western theme to a truly hands-on, well-rounded program that makes 30,000 acres of Wyoming landscape both safe and thrilling for young guests and families. It’s not a separate children’s program bolted onto the adult experience — it’s the same ranch, scaled down to the right size.

Make it memorable. The most shareable resort moments aren’t the ones on the brochure — they’re the ones guests made themselves. Think about what guests could create, learn or take home that they couldn’t anywhere else.

The Leverage Collection

Properties that asked more from what they already had

The most underutilized amenity at many resorts isn’t something that needs to be built, it’s something already there. 

Hilton Head Island has some of the finest golf in the country. Royal Dunes Resort packaged access to five championship courses into a single weekly offering — unlimited daily rounds for up to four players plus tennis and pickleball, for $160 per week and a seamless booking experience. No golf course to maintain, no operational overhead — just an intelligent partnership that made world-class golf part of the stay.

Royal Dunes Resort in Hilton Head Island is a floating week resort operating in a market where visitors love the access to year round activities like world-class golf. The resort found a way to offer owners and guests easy access to multiple local courses and courts for a single, unlimited access price and single point of booking – making it a good value that’s easy to access.

Dollywood’s DreamMore Resort and HeartSong Lodge & Resort in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., offer something every hotel in the Smokies technically offers: access to Dollywood. What they offer differently is a dedicated resort trolley running every 20 to 25 minutes before the park opens, complimentary preferred parking and TimeSaver passes included with the stay. The ticket is available anywhere in town. The infrastructure around it is not.

Four Seasons Resort Lānaʼi built a purpose-built observatory housing a PlaneWave PW1000 — a research-grade, one-meter telescope among the most powerful at any resort in the world — where Hawaiian celestial navigation traditions meet deep-sky viewing. The night sky above Lānaʼi was always extraordinary. The observatory gave guests the ability to experience that darkness, magnified.

Look closer. Every property on this list had the asset before it had the amenity. Walk the property and ask what’s already there that guests aren’t fully experiencing — an adjacent landmark, a natural feature, a partner organization. What changed at these properties was the decision to build something intentional around what they already had. That decision doesn’t require a construction timeline. Sometimes it just requires a partnership and some coordination.

The Calendar Collection

Properties that turned programming into a reason to book a specific date

A pool is available every day. A festival happens once. An exclusive concert for owners happens once, and only for those able to get a ticket. The difference between an amenity and an event is urgency — and urgency is one of the most underused tools in resort programming. A well-built calendar doesn’t just give guests something to do. It gives them a reason to book a specific week, tell someone about it and come back for it next year.

Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s Rendezvous Music Festival was designed explicitly to fill the spring shoulder season — the weeks after skiing winds down and before summer hiking begins. It worked. The festival commands tickets above $189 and generated enough demand that the resort added a Road to Rendezvous weekly concert series on preceding Saturdays to extend the booking window. A calendar problem became a calendar solution.

Horseshoe Bay Resort in the Texas Hill Country built a year-round events calendar dense enough to anchor specific booking decisions — Balloons Over Horseshoe Bay, Beer By The Bay, Wine Dine & Jazz Festival and layered holiday programming. Hot air balloons over the Hill Country at sunrise generate their own social content. The marketing team doesn’t have to. Each event is its own booking reason. The calendar is the amenity.

Hilton Grand Vacations is a premier example of events-as-amenities. Their HGV Ultimate Access program gives owners something one-of-a-kind beyond their resort stays. Like this performance by Ella Langley during a three-night concert series at the 2026 Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions. 

Hilton Grand Vacations’ Ultimate Access program turns the events calendar into an ownership benefit — VIP concerts, celebrity chef dinners, sports packages and member-exclusive experiences that owners schedule trips around. It’s not a facility, a pool or a view. It’s a reason to show up on a specific date, year after year — and that’s the most powerful retention tool in the ownership program.

Put a date on it. The calendar strategy is particularly powerful for vacation ownership because it solves a retention problem at the same time. Owners who have something specific to look forward to use their ownership. Owners who don’t eventually wonder why they have it. Date-based programming also gives properties the ability to drive demand in off- and shoulder seasons.

Entertain the idea that sounds a little crazy. This is just a sampling of the impressive ways resorts are becoming more than just rooms with pools. The coral nursery behind the conference center, the Barbour jacket for the dog, the Mayo Clinic physician on the ranch — all of these probably raised an eyebrow in a planning meeting. The right question isn’t whether it sounds normal. It’s whether a guest would stop and tell someone about it. If the answer is yes, the next question is what it takes to make it happen.

Kelley Ellert is the founder of Waterwheel Marketing, a hybrid consultancy and agency that builds custom hospitality marketing programs.