The Presence Premium

We were pedaling through an eerily empty town in eastern Germany when it started.

At first I thought maybe it was someone’s stereo at a backyard birthday party. But as we rolled through the square, then past the market, the sound didn’t fade. It got clearer.

ABBA.

Not from a bar, not from a car, but from above us — pouring out of rusted, Soviet-era loudspeakers bolted to lampposts and building corners, still wired for announcements from another century. “Lay All Your Love On Me,” followed by “Dancing Queen,” then “Take A Chance On Me.”

I looked at my wife, my parents, and my brothers and all we could do was laugh and soak in what was one of the more bizarre things any of us had ever experienced.

Decades ago, these town-wide speakers might have carried air-raid tests or party slogans. That day, under a bright summer sky on our eight-day bike ride from Berlin to Prague, they were blasting the Swedish icons to no one in particular.

It’s a moment I’ll never forget. It was part of a Backroads trip in summer 2024, and we were in a group with two other families and led by three guides who were engaging, knowledgeable, and extremely skilled. Founded in 1979, Backroads is the world’s #1 active travel company, and an absolute machine of a business.

They took over 65,000 people to more than 50 countries in 2024…if they charge ~$7,000 per person on average, they’re looking at ~$450 million in revenue.

These trips aren’t cheap, but the level of curation, adventure, and high-touch service makes everyone buy in. The result is an extremely present group who specifically chose to spend a vacation doing something more challenging than tanning and piñas (though there was plenty of German beer throughout).

Companies like Butterfield & Robinson, Alpenglow, and Thomson find themselves at the intersection of several powerful trends: longevity & wellness, identity-driven affinity groups, and changing status games.

There’s very little price elasticity when all of these forces meet. This is a K-shaped economy reality — the upper end of the consumer market is spending more than ever on experiences that affirm who they are, and they’re increasingly indifferent to price when identity is on the line. For this crowd, life is comfortable — almost too comfortable — and people want what they can’t have.

The challenge becomes the thing they pursue. Make no mistake, Backroads trips aren’t spartan expeditions. You stay in great hotels and eat incredibly well. The discomfort is curated.

I’m increasingly bullish on this category.

The global wellness market expected to grow to $9 trillion by 2028. Covid, wearables, social media, GLP-1s…there are lots of inputs, but it’s undeniable that longevity is a mass-market pursuit. People don’t just want to live longer. They want to feel 30 at 60.

This movement is a massive tailwind for experiential adventure companies. When you spend your mornings listening to Huberman and your evenings tracking your HRV, you don’t want to spend your vacation on a lounge chair. You want to test what all that investment in your body has actually built. A ride across the Dolomites or a Himalayan summit attempt (for a cool $54,000) isn’t a break from the wellness-conscious lifestyle — it’s the culmination of it. The adventure becomes the proof of concept for the body you’ve been building.

We’ve all seen it happen to a friend or relative: they get more than slightly serious about cycling, hunting, fly fishing, or backcountry skiing, and something shifts. It stops being a hobby and starts being an identity. They organize their calendar around it. They spend to affirm it. And they want to be surrounded by others who take it just as seriously.

This is why the group is the product as much as the place. A NOLS expedition works not just because of the terrain but because every single person chose to be there — and paid a premium for the guarantee that nobody in the group is phoning it in.

It’s the same psychology that drives someone to book a guided dove hunt or surf trip through a specialist operator rather than just showing up solo. You’re not paying for access to waves or birds. You’re paying to be in a room full of people who get it.

Going analog is now a flex — just look at the resurgence of print magazines and dumbphones. In a world of algorithmic feeds, AI assistants, infinite scrolling, and parasocial relationships, experiential companies are thriving — and the defining characteristic isn’t luxury. It’s presence. These businesses force you to be fully absorbed in something hard, beautiful, or wild, surrounded by people who chose to be there for the same reason you did.

Being offline is a luxury signal. Being physically challenged, unreachable, covered in mud with twelve other people who chose this — that’s a status marker the algorithm can’t replicate.

And the smart money is starting to notice.

Two of the companies I’ve mentioned — Alpenglow and Thomson — are now part of a recently announced holding company called Milky Way Park, which is building a portfolio of premium adventure brands. One of their backers is Sideline Group, founded by Greg Mazlin, whose investment thesis is centered on exactly this: offline, IRL, presence-driven experiences. Capital is flowing to this category for good reason, and MWP is a company I’ll be watching closely.

On the hospitality side, AJ Capital Partners (where Cooper Manning is a Managing Director) is quietly building one of the more interesting portfolios in this space. They partnered with Starwood Capital to launch Field & Stream Lodge Co. — taking a legacy outdoor media brand and turning it into a hospitality platform targeting markets where travelers congregate around outdoor recreation.

They knew exactly who’d show up: people who already identify with the Field & Stream ethos. The brand did decades of trust-building through media. The lodge is just the activation layer. Their Marine & Lawn Hotels & Resorts brand applies the same logic to golf — acquiring and renovating historic hotels near world-renowned courses across Scotland, Ireland, and now the U.S. with properties near Pinehurst.

Which brings me to a thought experiment.

Take a publication like Hemmings — a brand that has served the classic car enthusiast community for over 70 years. Their audience is affluent, passionate, and deeply identity-driven. These are people who spend weekends at car shows, own vehicles they’ll never sell, and can tell you the difference between a ‘67 and ‘68 Camaro from across a parking lot.

Now imagine that brand extending into experiential hospitality. A property in a car-culture destination like Palm Springs or Miami. A curated on-site fleet. Rallies. Restoration workshops. An entire experience designed by and for people who live and breathe this stuff.

Presence, in this context, is what turns consumer nostalgia into community capital.

I’ll leave it there — but the broader point is that there are dozens of trusted, decades-old enthusiast media brands sitting on experiential businesses waiting to be built. The hard part — earning the trust of a fanatical niche audience — is already done. The experience is just the activation layer.

After years of atomization, people are spending real money to do hard things with other people who care. That’s more than a trend. That's a reversion to something fundamental — and it's one of the most investable categories in the experience economy.

P.S. We never figured out why ABBA was playing in that quiet town. Open to theories.

I’ll be publishing this newsletter every other Wednesday.

Stay tuned and share this with someone who should be paying attention to where the Sports Economy is headed.

 If you’re building, investing, or advising within the Sports Economy — please reach out!

Email: [email protected]

– Brent