Marriott Resorts Turns To A Tiny Toy Retailer To Keep Kids Happy

To give children staying at their all-inclusive resorts a place to play while parents do their own thing, Marriott International, with $21 billion annual revenue from 8,700 hotels, is turning to a company called Camp that runs nine activity-oriented toy stores with revenue that Forbes estimates is less than $50 million. The odd coupling will run for five years for an undisclosed licensing fee, the companies announced Monday.

“We want to rapidly get this experience into as many resort destinations and all-inclusive hotels as possible,” Jason Nuell, senior vice president at Marriott International, told Forbes. Part of the reason Marriott chose Camp is because it sees the toy-store chain as a “disruptor,” Nuell said.

Marriott International and other hotel chains have been making an effort in recent years to grow their all-inclusive businesses, where guests pay a flat fee for their room, food, drinks and many activities. They view the resorts as a way to drive growth following the Covid-19 slump, with vacation travel coming back at a faster pace than business travel, which will likely never be what it once was.

“Leisure travel has dramatically increased,” Nuell said. “That’s been an impetus for us to really start focusing on our kids’ offerings.”

Marriott has opened 31 all-inclusive resorts in the last three years. It plans to roll out new kids clubs at all of those locations.

Marriott began looking for a partner in 2021 and quickly zeroed in on Camp, Nuell said. He brought his kids, ages five and 14, to Camp’s flagship store in New York City, where they spent two hours playing happily.

During a five-day pilot test that Marriott and Camp ran last year at a resort in Costa Rica, visits at the new kids club rose threefold. Marriott Cancun is slated to get its new kids club in March, with entry packaged into the all-inclusive fee.

Magic Door

Camp was founded in 2018 by former Buzzfeed chief marketing officer Ben Kaufman and his wife Nikki. The company bet big on experiential retail before the pandemic hit. It touted free entry to a playground-esque space behind a “magic door” where kids could spend hours playing, and assumed enough people would buy toys while they were there.

During the pandemic, Camp began charging an entrance fee, which has become one of its main sources of revenue. It also doubled down on immersive theatrical shows, fashioning entire locations to transport kids to the worlds of popular TV series and movies like Bluey and Encanto. It’s also building out a birthday-party business. While the stores sell toys, that has never made up the majority of its revenue.

Now Camp is “following these families to vacation,” said Kaufman, with a partnership that has the potential to expand to hundreds of other hotels that Marriott operates in North America.

Camp will bring some of its most popular features to Marriott, such as a “schmutz bar” where kids can make their own slime, a splatter room for messy art and refurbished classic cars that kids can climb on. Parents can leave the kids for the day, they can stay with them to play or they can take the kids’ activities back to their rooms.

“It’s going to be so different from the windowless room drop-off stuff that exists now,” Kaufman told Forbes.

Licensing Fee

Camp, which will collect a licensing fee, will essentially be the architect of the clubs. It will instruct Marriott on how to design the kids club and what materials to use. It will provide a detailed programming schedule, with step-by-step instructions on how the counselors can help kids make custom kaleidoscopes, homemade spacecraft and origami lanterns. It will also train employees. However, it will be up to Marriott to do the heavy lifting by building, running and staffing the locations.

The partnership is a win for Camp, helping it market its existing stores by increasing name recognition among families with kids. The company said licensing fees, like the kind it will collect from Marriott, will make up less than 5% of its revenue for the foreseeable future.

Camp’s revenue has increased eightfold since 2019, according to Kaufman. Forbes estimates that the company’s annual sales are less than $50 million. The company declined to comment on that number, or disclose exact revenue figures.