Best Practice Series — Vol. 03: Under Canvas — A Business Case Study in Scaling Outdoor Hospitality

Under Canvas didn't just build a glamping company. It built the proof of concept that institutional capital needed to take outdoor hospitality seriously. Understanding how — and what it cost — is essential reading for anyone building in this space.

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The Origin and the Insight

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In 2009, Sarah and Jacob Dusek opened their first safari-style camp in West Yellowstone, Montana. By 2014 they had three sites and roughly $1 million in annual revenue. By 2016 that figure had grown to $8 million. In late 2018, a private equity firm acquired a majority stake for over $100 million. Today, Under Canvas generates $115 million in revenue, operates across 15+ locations, runs three distinct brands, holds partnerships with both Hyatt and the Small Luxury Hotels of the World network, and has just completed a record $50 million investment round for the 2025 season.

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The fundamental insight behind Under Canvas was deceptively simple: place luxury safari-style accommodation within proximity of America's most visited national parks, charge hotel-level prices for locations that aren't costly to build and maintain, and let the national parks themselves do the marketing. The strategy is asset-light relative to traditional hotel development, requires no urban land costs, and draws on a guaranteed pipeline of motivated visitors. Proximity to Yellowstone, Zion, Grand Canyon, Glacier, and Bryce Canyon isn't just a location advantage — it's a distribution strategy.

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Under Canvas charged hotel prices for locations that weren't costly to build or maintain. The national parks did the marketing. That asymmetry is the business.

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The PE Event and What Followed

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In November 2017, private equity firm SBJ Capital took a minority stake. SBJ's first moves were operational: revamping bookkeeping, instituting standard GAAP accounting, hiring a CFO from the outdoor apparel sector, and bringing in a chief development officer from Disney Imagineering to systematise the process of identifying and opening new sites near national parks. Within thirteen months of SBJ's investment, Under Canvas's valuation had grown by approximately five times.

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In December 2018, KSL Capital Partners acquired a majority stake for a reported $100+ million — one of the largest transactions in the outdoor hospitality sector to that point. KSL followed with a $25 million expansion investment in 2022, and a record $50 million in March 2025 to fund continued growth and infrastructure development across the portfolio.

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Three Brands, One Platform

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One of the most strategically significant moves Under Canvas has made is the deliberate construction of a three-brand portfolio: the core Under Canvas safari-style camps aimed at the premium outdoor traveller; ULUM as the ultra-luxury brand with full-service restaurants, elevated spa programming, and five-star amenities; and the Outdoor Collection — a portfolio of locally distinctive properties including a working blueberry farm in Michigan and a western ranch in Montana — that extends the platform into more experiential, place-specific territory.

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This structure is significant because it allows the parent company to serve multiple guest profiles and price points under a single operational infrastructure, while maintaining distinct brand identities that don't cannibalise each other. It is also the structure that makes the business legible — and attractive — to the next tier of institutional investor.

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The Hyatt Partnership

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In July 2024, Hyatt announced an alliance with Under Canvas, bringing its camps into the World of Hyatt loyalty ecosystem. For Under Canvas, this provides access to Hyatt's tens of millions of loyalty members, a direct booking channel of enormous scale, and the credibility that comes from association with one of the world's most recognised hotel brands. For Hyatt, it adds nature-immersive inventory to a loyalty programme that was underweight in outdoor experiences — a gap that had become increasingly visible as demand for this category accelerated.

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The Under Canvas story is the most complete case study available in how to scale an outdoor hospitality brand from a single site to institutional scale in the US market. In Europe, the conditions are different but the direction of travel is the same. The operators who move now with the right model, the right team, and the right partners will define what this category looks like for the next decade.

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Building an outdoor hospitality concept that's ready for where the market is heading? We'd love to help you get it right from the start.

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