Friday, November 4, 2011

The Economy Must Be Improving

Great Wolf Resorts actually turned a profit in the last quarter.

This is a company that was so badly run, it built its huge Lake Delton waterpark resort without convention space to put heads in beds. When it finally realized that hotels with convention centers can be highly profitable, it built one in Sheboygan, which doesn't even count as a "second tier" convention city.

While rivals Chula Vista, Kalahari and Wilderness Resort managed to do decent business during the recession, thanks largely to convention business, Great Wolf temporarily closed their flagship resort and eventually sold it.  The company pushed out the Board members who wanted to provide actual oversight rather than rubber stamp inflated management compensation and continued to borrow to build new resorts like Las Vegas developers during the boom years.

If Great Wolf, which is deeply in debt and heavily dependent on discretionary spending by families rather than corporations, is now turning a profit, things must really be turning around.

1 comment:

purplepenquin said...

Of course they made a profit THIS quarter...but for the year they are still $10million in the hole.

I hate to badmouth former employers...and I know a lot of people say this about places they used to work at...but anyone who has spent at anytime working for Great Wolf ain't surprised that they can't turn a profit. The upper management are good and kindhearted folks, but they have no business sense at all.