(SeaPRwire) – By: Christian Pierce
Last summer’s Camp Mystic flood that killed 28 people, 25 of them campers, didn’t just spark widespread parent panic. It blew a hole in the U.S. summer camp industry’s decades-old operational playbook. For 70 years, operators like California’s Mountain Meadow Ranch built their businesses on predictable mild summers. They planned for one or two heat waves max, no regular wildfire risk, and cool evenings that required sweatshirts around campfires. That model is dead now. Kids need in-person outdoor camp more than ever, as screen time eats into social skills and physical activity for most U.S. school-aged kids. But extreme weather is raising costs so fast many small operators can barely keep their doors open. Parent demand is at a 15-year high, per internal American Camp Association (ACA) data, but almost 12% of small family-run camps shut down between 2022 and 2024 due to climate-related cost pressures.
The last 11 years rank as the warmest on global instrumental record, with summer temperature spikes hitting U.S. camp locations hardest. ACA CEO Henry DeHart says extreme heat days per summer have jumped from an average of 5 a decade ago to 8 to 10 now for most U.S. camp properties. ACA-accredited camps are now required to have formal extreme weather plans covering wildfires, floods, and record heat to keep their accreditation. Brooks Johnson, director of Vermont’s Brown Ledge Camp, says every parent who reached out in the off-season asked first about safety protocols. His team now coordinates directly with local emergency officials on designated evacuation zones, pays a structural engineer annually to inspect all buildings for storm resistance, and cuts outdoor activity blocks from 2 hours to 45 minutes on high heat days. On one sweltering day last summer, his team scrapped scheduled horseback riding entirely. Kids suited up in bathing suits alongside their riding boots to bathe the horses instead, turning a safety adjustment into a fun new activity. Mountain Meadow Ranch now uses water bottles as activity passes to make sure kids stay hydrated at all times. The camp canceled its entire August session entirely to avoid peak heat and wildfire risk, and had to scrap sessions completely in 2021 and 2024 due to hazardous wildfire smoke. Even small adjustments add up fast. Cutting activity periods means more staff are needed to cover shorter rotating blocks, infrastructure upgrades for storm and heat resistance run tens of thousands of dollars per property, and canceled sessions mean lost revenue with almost no way to recoup costs. Liability insurance premiums for camp operators have jumped 41% since 2020, with climate-related risk the top cited reason for increases by insurance providers.
Right now, almost all of these added costs are being passed directly to parents. Average weekly overnight summer camp tuition is up 27% since 2019, per ACA data, with climate-related costs making up 12 percentage points of that jump. Small, family-run camps that don’t have the capital to invest in safety upgrades or absorb lost revenue from canceled sessions will start folding at even faster rates over the next three years. We’ll see a wave of consolidation across the industry, with large regional camp operators buying up small independent properties, standardizing safety protocols, and pushing tuition even higher to cover their upfront capital investments. Low-income families will be locked out of in-person summer camp entirely within five years, unless state or local governments step in with targeted subsidies for camp safety upgrades and sliding-scale tuition assistance.
Author bio: Christian Pierce, chief financial columnist and markets commentator covering consumer recreational industries for 18 years.