Puerto Vallarta's tourism trust publishes exactly where the lodging tax goes: 60% to promotion and advertising, 30% to tourism infrastructure, 7% to operations, and 3% back to the state for collecting it. For 2025 that meant a planned 224 million pesos of destination promotion, up from 170 million the year before, funded by an accommodation tax that rose from 3% to 4% that year and to 5% for 2026.
Read the split again. There is no line for the bay.
That is not a Vallarta problem — it is the standard architecture of destination finance. If you searched recreation investment looking for where the money in a visitor economy actually goes, this is the part nobody itemizes.
what recreation investment usually means
Recreation investment is capital deployed into a recreation-based visitor economy: trails and boat ramps, lifts and lodges, park maintenance backlogs, event calendars, visitor centers, destination marketing, workforce housing, and the public debt pledged against visitor revenue. On the public side it arrives as lodging tax, marketing-district tax, park and access fees, bonds, and grants. On the private side it is CapEx, new keys, and prepaid pass products.
The category is not small. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis puts outdoor recreation at $696.7 billion of value added in 2024 — 2.4% of national GDP, roughly $1.3 trillion in gross output, and 5.2 million jobs. In Hawaii it is 6.1% of state GDP.
Now sort that spending by what it buys. Access: roads, lifts, ramps, parking, trailheads. Capacity: rooms, keys, restaurants, staff. Demand: campaigns, events, familiarization trips, brand. Those three absorb nearly all of it.
Recreation investment is almost entirely investment in getting people to the stock. Very little of it is investment in the stock.
The stock is the snowpack, the reef, the aggregation season, the salt marsh, the smoke-free airshed. It is the one part of the system that cannot be procured, rebuilt, or rebranded inside a bad year.
the spend stack
Destination capital stacks in four layers. Underneath all of them sits the stock nobody is invoiced for.
| layer | who moves the money | what it buys | what it does not buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| guest and pass | visitors, season-pass holders | prepaid demand; weather risk shifted onto the guest | the mountain that makes the pass a product |
| flag and developer CapEx | owners, brands, master developers | keys, residences, renovation | the view the rate card assumes at opening |
| association, ESG, grant | hotel groups, resort operators, foundations | disclosure, operational hygiene, community projects | a hold sized to the nature-tied book |
| public levy and DMO | city, county, state, trust, improvement district | promotion, events, sometimes gray infrastructure | condition at a named place |
| the stock | nobody, currently | — | snowpack, reef, bay, marsh, airshed |
Every layer above the line is collected because a living place is drawing people. Almost none of it is spent on whether that place can keep doing so.
three collections, and the line none of them has
These are real programs run by competent people under real political constraints. The point is not that they are wrong. It is that you can read their own published documents and find no line for condition.
Puerto Vallarta and the ISH. Jalisco's accommodation tax funds the Fideicomiso de Turismo, which allocates 60% to promotion and advertising, 30% to tourism infrastructure, 7% to operations, and 3% to state collection costs. Promotion works: the destination reported roughly 6.27 million visitors and about 40.9 billion pesos of visitor spending in 2025. And in 2016, Mexico's protected-areas commission closed Playa del Amor at Islas Marietas after overuse degraded the reef the trip was sold on; the park reopened under hard rationing at 116 visitors a day. No promotion budget reopens a closed park, and the 30% infrastructure line has historically meant public works rather than reef.
Greece and the climate resilience fee. The fee collected €368.92 million in 2024 and €588.47 million in 2025 according to the Independent Authority for Public Revenue — well above budget in both years. Its statutory purpose is resilience: prevention and infrastructure against climate-driven disaster. What is missing is the receipt. No publicly accessible, project-level account shows what the money funded, where, and with what measurable result. SETE, the Greek tourism confederation, has called the increases a revenue measure and pointed to the absence of any accounting for what was already collected. The Hellenic Chamber of Hotels has asked that a significant share of 2026 revenues move to local government through a special account with a clear commitment to named prevention and infrastructure projects. KEDE, the municipalities' union, wants a share earmarked back to the places that generated it.
Read that as something other than a fight about a tax. Hoteliers and mayors are asking for an object of spend that is named, local, and auditable. A levy can earmark — Greece's fight is about exactly that. What a levy usually does not do is price the condition of the living product, or end when the place is protected.
Venice and the access fee. The 2026 access contribution ran on 60 days at €5 or €10, historic centre only. It is a queue instrument and it was labeled as one. It manages load; it does not fund the barene, the salt marshes that make the lagoon a lagoon rather than a flooded bay. Nobody at the Comune claimed otherwise. Rationing is genuine inventory management — it is what brought the Marietas back. But a queue is not a hold.
grants prove you care. they do not match the book
The other honest answer a destination gives when you ask who funds the living product is: our grant program.
In fiscal 2024, Vail Resorts contributed $28.7 million in cash, product, and services to 401 local nonprofits. The Eagle River Fund, created in 2023 with the Western Colorado Community Foundation, funds projects that protect the quality, quantity, and temperature of water in the Eagle River watershed; its 2026 cycle expects grants of $5,000 to $25,000, and its founders hope to grow the fund to $5 million.
The Eagle River Fund is the right object of spend. It names a watershed and pays for its condition. That is the shape of the missing line — at a scale far below the dependency it sits under. Vail Resorts reported $2,964.3 million of net revenue in fiscal 2025, effectively all of it mountain-dependent. Total giving of $28.7 million is about 1% of that book, most of it directed at housing, childcare, food security, and snowsports access rather than watershed condition; a fully funded $5 million watershed endowment would be under two-tenths of one percent.
Size the hold to the book, not to the grant budget.
That is a sizing problem rather than a sincerity problem, which makes it a much easier problem to fix.
a levy is a claim on volume. a certificate is a claim on condition
| levy, fee, or marketing tax | certificate on a named place | |
|---|---|---|
| what it prices | visitor volume | condition of one living system |
| what makes it grow | more arrivals | nothing — it is a purchase, not a yield on crowds |
| where it lands | treasury, DMO, general fund | the account that represents that place |
| what you can show a council or a GM | a receipt for a campaign or a pot | a claim attached to a watershed, bay, marsh, or airshed |
| how it is audited | collections reports | published place condition |
| in a bad season | collections fall with the product | the hold is already funded; the work continues |
| when it ends | never — it is re-voted forever | at entrust, when the place is permanently protected |
doesn't the bed tax already pay for this?
Almost never. A lodging tax is levied on room revenue and, in most jurisdictions, statutorily directed to tourism advertising, events, facilities, or general municipal purposes. Its revenue rises and falls with arrivals, which makes it a claim on volume. Funding the condition of the living system that produces those arrivals is a different object of spend, and in most destination budgets it appears in no line at all.
you do not need a new tourist tax
This is the part that matters if you have to face a ballot, a council, or a hotel association.
Colorado already ran the experiment. Until 2022, county lodging tax revenue there could be spent only on tourism advertising and marketing. House Bill 22-1117 expanded permissible uses of county lodging taxes and local marketing district taxes to include workforce housing, childcare, and "facilitating and enhancing visitor experiences," subject to voter approval, with at least 10% still going to marketing. Twenty-nine counties had a lodging tax at the time.
That November, voters used it. Chaffee County approved reallocating up to 60% of its existing 1.9% lodging tax, 63.8% to 36.2%. Eagle County passed a 2% short-term rental lodging tax with 90% to housing and childcare and 10% to tourism marketing. Summit County passed a 2% tax with 72.8% approval and reserved 10% of the new revenue for "social, cultural and environmental uses related to local tourism."
Two readings, both honest.
The first reallocation went to residents, and that was correct. Housing and childcare for the people who actually run a destination is the first claim on that money. Nothing here competes with it. A destination that funds its snowpack and prices out its lift mechanics has protected nothing, and "protect the visitor economy" is not a reason to move money away from the people living inside it.
And the object of spend turned out to be a choice, not a law. That is the finding. Summit's environmental slice is the first small version of the line this post is about — a permission, not yet an instrument.
So the ask is not another levy on a guest already paying four of them. It is a slice of what you already collect, pointed at a named place, in a form you can audit. Whether an existing statute already lets you point a slice at a named place is a local question. Many lodging-tax statutes need a ballot or an amendment before the object of spend can change. Do not assume the authority is sitting unused.
For a destination marketing organization the whole argument fits in a sentence: you already collect on the product you advertise, so split the budget — sell the place, and hold the place.
If you want the general municipal version of this argument rather than the destination version, it is worked through in how to fund natural infrastructure without new taxes or debt. If the underlying question is what payment for ecosystem services is and how to write a first check, that is already answered here. This post stays on the levy.
what a destination tranche is
Three pieces, glossed once.
An agent is an onchain account that stands for a specific place, group, or purpose — eagle-river.basin, bahia-de-banderas.basin, colorado-headwaters.syndicate, recreation-experiences.ensurance. It holds funds and routes them. A certificate is a claim tied to one named natural asset; it funds that watershed or that bay, and it tracks condition rather than arrivals. A coin is the fungible, protocol-wide version, funding protection broadly instead of one named parcel.
A city or DMO does not need to hold a wallet. The usual path is appropriation to a named fiscal agent — a land trust, a basin organization, a destination fund — that can hold the certificate and report condition back in the audit package the council already reads. What a given statute allows is counsel's job. The protocol does not invent a municipal rail.
A destination tranche is a named, auditable slice of the destination capital you already collect, spent on condition at a named place. It is not a new tax. It is not an offset — an offset claims a ton somewhere else, and this claims condition here. It is not a scorecard, which reports what you did last year.
That is what ensurance is, in one sentence: funding the protection of a named natural asset before the loss instead of compensating someone after it. A destination cannot buy a lost season back.
Where we actually are, stated plainly. The place accounts are live — eagle-river.basin, bahia-de-banderas.basin, colorado-headwaters.syndicate, and the purpose account recreation-experiences.ensurance. RealValue, the accounting engine that prices ecosystem condition, has run on real parcels since 2022. What does not exist yet is a liquid destination market: the coins on our live catalog that touch this series are early and thin, and several of the structures in our destination research are designs rather than live books. If you are a finance director looking for a deep market to route a levy into, it is not built. If you are looking to fund condition on one named place inside your jurisdiction this budget cycle, that is available now.
One boundary worth keeping. Pricing condition is a bridge that lets public capital reach a living system it would otherwise leave off the ledger. The bay is not worth what visitors spend near it. The spending depends on the bay.
five rungs, smallest first
- Publish your split. Take your lodging tax, ISH, resilience fee, or marketing-district revenue and write down the percentage that lands on the condition of the living product. In most destinations the honest answer is zero. That number is the finding, and it costs a spreadsheet afternoon.
- Name the SKU and the place. One sentence: our visitor economy depends on [snowpack / reef / aggregation season / marsh / airshed] at [named place]. If nobody in the room can fill in the blanks, that is the second finding.
- Price the condition. Ask what a hold on that named place costs relative to your nature-tied revenue — not relative to your grants budget.
- Route one slice, one season. A pilot tranche from existing collection, attached to one basin, with proceeds that land on work at that place.
- Report condition next to arrivals. Put the place metric in the same document as the visitor numbers. Then give the hold a term: season, restoration clock, then entrust — where the obligation goes to zero because the place is permanently protected.
Rung one is free. Start there.
frequently asked questions
what is recreation investment?
Recreation investment is capital deployed into a recreation-based visitor economy — trails, lifts, lodging, parks, events, marketing, and the taxes and debt attached to them. In the United States, outdoor recreation accounted for $696.7 billion of value added in 2024, or 2.4% of GDP. Most recreation investment funds access, capacity, and demand. Very little of it funds the condition of the natural system being visited.
is this a proposal for a new tourist tax?
No — the argument runs the other way. Destinations already collect enough, from bed taxes and improvement districts to resilience fees and access fees. What is missing is an object of spend and an instrument: a slice of existing collection routed to the condition of a named place, in a form that can be audited.
doesn't a climate or resilience fee already do this?
It can, if the revenue is earmarked to named projects with published results. Greece's resilience fee collected €588.47 million in 2025, and the country's own hotel and municipal bodies are publicly asking where it went. A levy with no named place and no condition report is a claim on visitor volume wearing a resilience label.
next steps
If you set or advise on destination budgets, three doors, in order of commitment.
see the government read on holding a living product →
look at what condition claims already exist →
bring one destination and one place to a conversation →
Bring your collections report and the name of the living system your arrivals depend on. That is enough to start.
the series
Six posts on the living destination — the product tourism actually sells, and who funds it.
- the destination is a living product
- tourism investment is a bet on a living place
- recreation is the inventory, not the amenity
- a triple bottom line does not keep the snow
- you protect tourism by funding the living product
- the lodging tax markets the destination. it does not fund it — you are here
Adjacent, and worth one click each: who can hold nature for decades on the duration question, and a payout is not a reef on why a cheque and a living system are different assets.