Travel + Leisure Co. Just Changed the Math on Outdoor Vacation Ownership
For decades, vacation ownership has carried the faint whiff of a timeshare sales pitch — a glossy brochure, a free breakfast, and a high-pressure presentation at a resort that smells of carpet cleaner. Travel + Leisure Co. is betting that the Eddie Bauer name, combined with a genuinely flexible outdoor travel ecosystem, can change that perception entirely. On October 2, 2026, the Orlando-based leisure travel giant announced the launch of Trail Partners, a new network of outdoor hospitality partners designed to dramatically expand where Eddie Bauer Adventure Club owners can spend their membership credits. It's a serious move, and it signals something larger about where the outdoor travel market is headed.
What Is the Eddie Bauer Adventure Club — and Why Does It Matter?
A modern vacation club built on more than a century of Eddie Bauer's outdoor heritage, the Eddie Bauer Adventure Club connects travelers with outdoor destinations and experiences, with its first Basecamp location which opened in Moab, Utah earlier this year. That Moab opening was itself a landmark — the Eddie Bauer Adventure Club represents the first venture into hospitality for the outdoor brand, which was founded in Seattle in 1920 by outdoorsman Eddie Bauer. Moving from outfitting expeditions to actually hosting them is a meaningful philosophical leap for a brand that has spent over a century synonymous with down jackets and climbing boots.
The Moab resort features 39 accommodations, including studio and one-, two- and three-bedroom options, with amenities like kitchenettes or full kitchens, in-unit laundry and living areas. That's a setup built for the kind of traveler who wants to cook their own breakfast before a 6 a.m. trailhead departure — not the resort guest ordering room service and spending the afternoon by the pool. The property is near Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park, offering access to activities like hiking, mountain biking, river rafting, off-roading and stargazing. In other words, Moab was the right first call: it's one of the most activity-dense outdoor destinations in the American West, and the brand's DNA fits it perfectly.
For more than 100 years, Eddie Bauer has outfitted explorers with the gear to go farther. Eddie Bauer Adventure Club brings that same spirit to travel — reimagining escapes for those who wish to wander. That continuity of brand identity is intentional. Eddie Bauer Adventure Club is designed with thoughtful sustainability initiatives intended to help guests explore more responsibly. Refillable hydration stations, reusable bottle programs, and reduced single-use plastic amenities are integrated throughout the experience as part of the brand's commitment to outdoor stewardship. These aren't cosmetic gestures — for a membership audience that spends real time in wild places, they're baseline expectations.
The Trail Partner Network: Expanding the Map
Travel + Leisure Co. (NYSE: TNL), a leading leisure travel company, announced the introduction of Trail Partners, a new network of outdoor hospitality partners that gives Eddie Bauer Adventure Club owners more places to stay and explore using their club credits. Through the Trail Partner network, owners can use their credits to book stays and excursion add-ons with a growing selection of outdoor hospitality partners. The distinction here is important: Trail Partners don't replace the flagship Basecamps — they extend the reach of existing credits into a curated selection of third-party properties that share the club's outdoor ethos.
Basecamps serve as the anchor of the club's dedicated properties, offering a comfortable home base in inspiring outdoor destinations. Think of them as the core of the ecosystem — the places where the full Eddie Bauer Adventure Club experience is most concentrated. Trail Partners, by contrast, are the spokes radiating outward from that hub, adding geographic breadth and variety without diluting the brand promise. The model is closer to how a top-tier airline alliance works than how a traditional timeshare exchange works — there's a flagship carrier, and then there are partner routes that a frequent flyer can access with the same miles.
Booking Through the Club's Dedicated Travel Agency
Eddie Bauer Adventure Club owners can access Trail Partner stays through the club's dedicated travel agency, which can help them explore participating destinations, check availability and use their credits toward eligible stays. This is a practical but underappreciated detail. Rather than dumping members into a self-service portal and wishing them luck, the club is staffing a human booking layer that can help members navigate options and optimize their credits. For a guy who'd rather spend his planning time studying topo maps than clicking through an interface, that's a real value-add.
Meet Under Canvas: The First Trail Partner
Known for safari-inspired accommodations in some of the country's most spectacular outdoor destinations, Under Canvas pairs immersive stays in nature with modern comforts. If you've driven the road toward Yellowstone's west entrance or come off a Zion day hike needing somewhere to land for the night, you've probably seen Under Canvas properties — clusters of elegant canvas structures perched on high desert plateaus or meadow edges, close enough to the action to matter, far enough from town to feel like an escape.
Its custom-designed canvas tents feature amenities such as king-size beds, contemporary furnishings, ensuite bathrooms and wood-burning stoves. That combination — king bed and wood stove — is essentially the perfect formula for the kind of traveler who doesn't want to sacrifice sleep quality after a hard day on the trail. Under Canvas has spent years refining what outdoor luxury actually means in practice, and the result is a product that punches well above what the word "tent" typically implies.
The leader in upscale, outdoor hospitality, Under Canvas is the ultimate immersive experience. Its safari-style accommodations perfectly embrace their natural surroundings while featuring indoor luxuries, allowing guests to discover their outdoor self in comfort and style. Under Canvas operates 18 properties across three brands. That portfolio diversity within the Under Canvas umbrella adds another layer of appeal for Adventure Club members — it isn't a single property type repeated across locations, but a suite of distinct experiences tied to the character of each landscape.
To grant further access to the nation's most coveted landscapes, Under Canvas expanded its portfolio with two additional brands. ULUM, a bespoke, MICHELIN Key, luxury outdoor resort brand that debuted its first location in Moab, Utah in spring of 2023. There's a certain symmetry in the fact that Moab — the location of the Adventure Club's first Basecamp — is also home to one of Under Canvas's most elevated properties. The Under Canvas Outdoor Collection is a line of distinctive, nature-based properties curated with place and purpose in mind. The Fields of Michigan in South Haven, MI, and Bar N Ranch in West Yellowstone, MT, make up the collection.
The Destinations Now Available to Members
Through the Eddie Bauer Adventure Club, owners can stay at Under Canvas properties near some of the country's most celebrated national parks and landscapes, including Yellowstone, Zion, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Great Smoky Mountains, Santa Fe and the Columbia River Gorge in the Pacific Northwest. Run through that list and consider what it actually means in practice: a single membership unlocks glamping-caliber stays at the doorstep of some of the most bucket-list worthy terrain in America. Yellowstone's geothermal weirdness, the sheer sandstone walls of Zion, the vertigo-inducing rim of the Grand Canyon, the old-growth giants of Yosemite — these aren't filler destinations thrown in to pad the pitch. They're the marquee names of American outdoor travel.
Under Canvas Columbia River Gorge is one of 18 Under Canvas properties now available to Eddie Bauer Adventure Club owners through the club's new Trail Partner network. The Columbia River Gorge alone — with its hundreds of waterfalls, world-class windsurfing on the Hood River, and the grandeur of the gorge itself — represents a destination capable of sustaining multiple trips without repeating itself. That's the kind of geographic richness the Trail Partner network is designed to unlock.
What Members Actually Get: The Full Benefit Stack
The Trail Partner network is the headline, but the complete member benefit package has enough depth to warrant a closer look. Beyond Basecamps and Trail Partner stays, Eddie Bauer Adventure Club owners have access to additional benefits, including 50% off regularly priced Eddie Bauer apparel and gear online, automatic Guide-Tier status in the Eddie Bauer Adventure Rewards Program, and one complimentary annual excursion for two people curated based on the season and setting.
Start with the gear discount. A 50% reduction on Eddie Bauer apparel and equipment is a legitimately significant perk for someone who regularly buys technical outerwear, hiking boots, or base layers. Eddie Bauer's retail prices reflect the quality of the product — good gear costs money — so cutting that in half, annually and repeatedly, adds up to real savings over the life of a membership. For a family that kits out two or three people for each season, that discount alone could offset a meaningful portion of membership costs.
The Guide-Tier status in the Eddie Bauer Adventure Rewards Program adds another dimension. Rewards program tiers in the outdoor retail world typically unlock early access to sales, exclusive product drops, and enhanced customer service — the kind of infrastructure that matters when you're trying to gear up for a specific trip on a specific timeline.
Then there's the annual excursion. Founding owners of Eddie Bauer Adventure Club gain access to a range of exclusive benefits, including an annual curated excursion for two, priority booking privileges, and 50% savings on Eddie Bauer apparel and gear. These offerings are designed to extend the adventure beyond each stay and deepen the connection to the brand. A curated excursion for two — designed around the season and setting — is the kind of benefit that differentiates a membership from a room key. It's a guided experience, not just a place to sleep. That difference matters enormously to the outdoor enthusiast who wants the experience itself, not just the logistics of getting to a destination.
Members also benefit from 13-month priority access to Eddie Bauer Adventure Club resorts and 11-month access to the rest of WorldMark properties. That integration with Travel + Leisure Co.'s broader WorldMark by Wyndham portfolio gives the Adventure Club a geographic reach far beyond what any single outdoor brand could build from scratch. WorldMark by Wyndham has dozens of properties across the western United States, Canada, and Mexico — range that makes the overall membership proposition dramatically more flexible for members whose travel calendars don't always align with a specific adventure destination.
The Strategic Vision Behind the Trail Partner Model
Sarah Koves, SVP of Brand Strategy at Travel + Leisure Co., laid out the philosophy directly. "Eddie Bauer Adventure Club is designed to give people more ways to get outside and experience the places that inspire them," said Koves. "Our Basecamps give owners a signature Eddie Bauer Adventure Club experience in some of the world's most compelling outdoor destinations, while Trail Partners expand the possibilities even further. Together, they create an ecosystem that gives owners more choice today and more to look forward to as we continue to grow."
The word "ecosystem" is doing real work in that statement. Travel + Leisure Co. isn't describing a static product — it's describing a platform designed to grow. The Trail Partner network launches with 18 Under Canvas properties, but the framing of "a growing selection of outdoor hospitality partners" signals that more announcements will follow. The question for current and prospective members is what the eventual shape of that network looks like, and whether Travel + Leisure Co. can execute expansion without losing the brand coherence that makes the Eddie Bauer association valuable in the first place.
The Trail Partners launch aligns with the broader push into experience-driven brands such as Margaritaville Vacation Club, Sports Illustrated Resorts and Accor Vacation Club. Travel + Leisure is trying to give members more flexible, higher-end ways to use existing commitments rather than relying only on traditional resort weeks. That strategy reflects a hard-earned lesson from the timeshare industry's difficult decades: a membership product only retains value if members actually use it. Dead credits are the enemy of retention, and retention is the engine of profitability in the vacation ownership business. Trail Partners are, at their core, a mechanism for keeping credits alive and in circulation.
How This Fits Into Travel + Leisure Co.'s Broader Portfolio
The new concept joins Travel + Leisure Co.'s existing portfolio of vacation ownership, travel club and lifestyle travel brands, which include Sports Illustrated Resorts, Margaritaville Vacation Club, Accor Vacation Club, Club Wyndham, WorldMark and RCI. Each of those brands targets a distinct lifestyle identity — the beach-and-concert crowd for Margaritaville, the sports fan for Sports Illustrated Resorts, the adventure traveler for Eddie Bauer. Travel + Leisure Co. is essentially building a portfolio of identity-driven memberships, betting that people are more likely to commit to a club that reflects who they see themselves as rather than simply where they want to sleep.
For the outdoor travel market specifically, that bet looks well-calibrated. The American outdoor recreation economy has been on a sustained upward trajectory, accelerated sharply by pandemic-era behavior shifts that sent millions of people into national parks, onto hiking trails, and toward backcountry camping for the first time. Many of those people didn't retreat when offices reopened — they kept going outside, and they upgraded their gear and their ambitions in the process. Eddie Bauer Adventure Club is built to serve the next chapter of that story: the traveler who has graduated from improvised road trips and wants a membership that makes adventure more repeatable and more seamless.
Under Canvas: A Partner That Earns Its Spot
The selection of Under Canvas as the inaugural Trail Partner isn't arbitrary. Under Canvas has spent years establishing itself as the category leader in what the outdoor hospitality industry calls "glamping" — though the company itself positions the experience well beyond that word's connotations of air mattresses and Coleman lanterns. The Under Canvas model is about proximity to nature paired with genuine comfort: real beds, real bathrooms, real fireplaces, and a quality of site selection that puts guests within reach of world-class outdoor terrain without requiring them to negotiate campground reservation systems or carry everything on their backs.
That positioning aligns almost perfectly with what the Eddie Bauer Adventure Club is trying to deliver. Both brands appeal to the traveler who wants the experience to be as good as possible without the experience becoming about the logistics. The partnership is logical, complementary, and — critically — aspirationally coherent. No one looks at an Under Canvas property on the edge of Yellowstone and thinks it feels like a budget compromise. It sets a quality baseline for the Trail Partner network that will be hard to walk back if future partners are added.
The program expands credit utility into higher-end outdoor stays and curated excursions, which could influence how travelers perceive the value of Travel + Leisure memberships. That perception shift is the real prize. If Adventure Club members start thinking of their credits as access to a genuinely premium outdoor travel portfolio rather than a timeshare obligation they need to use up, the entire membership dynamic changes. Engagement goes up, renewal rates improve, and the word-of-mouth economics of the product work in the company's favor.
The Investment Angle: What Trail Partners Mean for TNL
Travel + Leisure Co. closed at USD 62.92 on the NYSE on October 2, 2026, down 0.06 percent from the previous close — essentially flat on announcement day, which tells you the market sees Trail Partners as a positive but incremental development rather than a transformative one. That's a fair read at this stage. The network starts with one partner and 18 properties; the growth story is still being written.
The launch broadens the use of existing membership credits rather than introducing a separate lodging platform. That distinction matters because the value of the program depends on member engagement and the ability to turn new travel options into recurring bookings. For investors, the more interesting question isn't whether Trail Partners improves the product — it clearly does — but whether it changes the engagement metrics enough to move the needle on the company's core financial profile.
More attractive redemption options can support recurring revenue and membership retention, yet they also introduce execution risk if partner economics or occupancy mix dilute profitability. For the thesis to hold, Trail Partners would need to deepen usage without worsening already pressured profit margins. Those are the terms on which the long-term success of this initiative will be judged. A beautifully curated network of outdoor hospitality partners that no one can afford to book with their credits is worse than no network at all.
What This Means for the Adventure Traveler Right Now
Strip away the corporate strategy and what remains is a practical question: is this a good deal for someone who loves spending time outside? The answer depends on how well a prospective member's travel patterns align with the network's current footprint — and on how seriously they take the gear discount, the excursion benefit, and the promise of a growing partner roster.
If you're the kind of person who takes one or two serious outdoor trips a year, already buys Eddie Bauer gear, and has been eyeing a stay near Yellowstone or Zion without wanting to deal with the RV chaos of a standard campground or the sterility of a chain hotel, the Adventure Club's current value proposition is legitimately compelling. To celebrate the brand launch, the vacation club ran a sweepstakes featuring a grand prize that includes a seven-night stay, a $2,000 airline credit, and a $1,000 virtual promotional prepaid Mastercard for adventure gear. That kind of introductory energy signals a company that's actively trying to grow the membership base and generate word-of-mouth, not one that's quietly managing an aging product.
Plans to expand the Eddie Bauer Adventure Club to other prime adventure destinations across the United States would offer members even more opportunities to connect with nature while enjoying the exclusive benefits that come with membership. The geographic expansion pipeline is the most important variable to watch. A club that adds a Pacific Northwest Basecamp, a Rocky Mountain property, or a Southeast mountains outpost over the next few years would dramatically increase the value proposition for members across more regions of the country.
The outdoor travel market has been waiting for a membership product that takes the adventure part seriously rather than treating it as branding wallpaper on a conventional resort experience. Trail Partners, combined with the Moab Basecamp and the full benefit stack, suggests that Travel + Leisure Co. and the Eddie Bauer team understand what that distinction means in practice. The network is young, the partner list is short, and the growth roadmap is still unfolding — but the architecture is sound, the first partner is the right choice, and the destinations now accessible with an Adventure Club credit are, without exception, worth the trip.
