The REI Adventure Bubble — How the Gear Giant’s “Experiences” Exit Could Upend the Outdoor Industry

Employees, instructors, and subcontractors say the move may threaten the entire business ecosystem that grew around the co-op’s now-nixed program.

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Introductions / Welcome Back

Some of you are hearing from me today for the first time. For others, it’s been a while. Several months have been spent working on expansion plans for Cole’s Climb, which had long since outgrown its original name (you may notice we’re now called Quandary Magazine.) An official unveiling was in the works, but this story is simply too significant to let pass:

After 40 years in operation, REI is scuttling the Experiences arm of its outdoor empire. Hundreds of co-op employees have lost their jobs — a terrible story on its own —but the full magnitude of this decision still has not been realized.

*Editor’s note: several people interviewed for this story asked not to be named out of concern for their careers. Quandary Magazine operates under rigorous ethical standards, and has taken steps to verify that these individuals are who they purport to be. For ease of reading, they have been given pseudonyms and marked with an asterisk (*.)

The Experience Iceberg

For those of you who haven’t shopped there: REI, or “Recreation Equipment Incorporated,” is basically a toy store for grown ups who like to go outside. It’s also member-owned co-op, which REI always seems eager to bring up. There are a few significant perks of this membership, including a generous return policy, rental rates, and the dividend — which is actually a percentage of everything you spent the previous year, given back as store credit.

REI doesn’t just sell stuff. It also handles tune-ups, trade-ins, rentals, returns, and the resale market; squeezing as much profit out of products as possible, while keeping usable equipment out of landfills.

Until recently it also ran classes and trips where you could put all that gear to use. These were called “Experiences,” and ranged from skill instruction and day trips, to multi-day excursions.

On Wednesday, January 8th, CEO Eric Artz announced that REI would be abandoning these adventures, and laying off more than 400 employees.

Apparently, the program had been a drag on the balance sheets for quite some time.

“It is important we all understand the economics of the Experiences business. Experiences served 40,000 customers in 2024 – less than 0.4% of all co-op customers — and cost significantly more to run than it brings in. When we look at all the up-costs of running this business… we are losing millions of dollars every year and subsidizing Experiences with profits from other parts of the business. Even at our peak in 2019 — our best year for Experiences ever — we did not generate a profit.”

—Eric Artz, REI President & CEO

REI is pledging to offer full time employees their full pay through March 9th, and benefits until the end of March. Part-timers will remain benefits-eligible through the end of the month, and are also eligible for severance, according to Artz.

“All impacted employees will receive a Summit payout for 2024, depending on actual co-op performance vs. plan, and remain eligible for future roles at the co-op.”

Most coverage I’ve seen ends here, with the contents of REI’s initial press release. If you find this sort of thing valuable, consider subscribing to Quandary Magazine.

The Experience Ecosystem

Under the Experience brand, REI developed an entire ecosystem of activities that fell into three broad categories:

• Classes — educational offerings that teach outdoor skills

• Day Tours — local, single-day outings

• Adventures — multi-day guided trips

What’s missing from REI’s press release is that a lot of these Experiences aren’t actually REI experiences; many adventures were handled by subcontractors, some of whom even purchased property, expanded capacity, and launched offerings in new areas at REI’s behest.

“We work with a lot of local outfitters and small companies for our trips — and now their bottom line will be impacted,” said Morgan*, a team member impacted by the layoffs. “I'm hoping another guiding service will pick up the demand, but that's really really hard to do with such last minute notice.”

Vesna Plakanis runs one of those companies, and says she was blindsided by REI’s decision. “This was 70% of our business. Some vendors, this was 100% of their business. They did nothing but REI adventure trips. They were told that, ‘Hey, that year that you were counting on and all these bookings? Sorry, no more.’”

Photo by Sean Stratton on Unsplash

Plakanis and her husband own A Walk in the Woods, a guide service that started operating in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1998. She says REI approached them back in 2007 to guide backpacking trips on the Appalachian trail.

“We were very proud,” she said. “It was a really, really good partnership.”

Plakanis explained that her operations grew throughout the years to include offerings across much of the Southeastern United States.

“We expanded because REI asked us to, into Pisa National Forest, into Big South Fork, and then all the way down to Everglades,” she said. “We were doing mobile camps, like in the national park. They were so popular that they asked us to purchase land, and build a camp for REI. So we were one of only, I think, 3 signature camps in the country that was an REI camp.”

Signature Camps were a kind of glamping destination, offering more creature comforts like hot showers, flush toilets, and host-prepped meals.

As they expanded, the Plakanises, in turn, formed business relationships with even more third parties to help make a growing number of excursions and adventures possible.

“We have vendors that we subcontract with, that we've had to cancel all of their stuff. We do lodge-based trips, and we do zip lining and rafting, because we do multi-sport programs. And so it is far-reaching. I mean, it is just a huge ripple effect of all of these people,” Plakanis said.

Brian Goodremont faces a similar predicament in the Pacific Northwest. He owns San Juan Island Outfitters, a Washington-based guide company.

“There's all these intangibles that I don't think the decision makers at REI had considered. But I think those stories need to be told,” Goodremont said. “In order to run these tours, I employ a lot of people. I work with hundreds of other small businesses; the businesses that do everything from make cinnamon rolls for our backpacking trips, to the woman that runs my commercial kitchen that prepares all the meals for these tours.”

Like the Plakanises, Goodremont’s guide company grew around REI adventures. He estimates between 50 and 60% of his revenue has been lost overnight.

“The first year I worked with them we only took out 70 people. And then, during our peak times we took out over 1000.

“So during the course of my career we have slowly increased our business with them — per their request — and in many cases, sacrificed other opportunities to respond to their requests.

“I just want to acknowledge: it's a business decision, there's no guarantee that any business is gonna continue. But as a business owner, what you hope is that when you have trip agreements in place for 2 years, and the account managers who you've been working with for over a decade assure you that business is strong, and they're planning full steam ahead to continue to support all these programs...

“…I made decisions to work with REI and continue to expand my business with REI based on the track record, the people that I worked with and the assurances that I had been given.”

—Brian Goodremont, San Juan Island Outfitters

Trip agreements, Goodremont explained, are negotiated a full year in advance. That means much of the 2025 booking calendar he’d been counting on has been blown out. “Until last week we were working on trip agreements for 2026,” he said.

Photo by Shannon Kunkle on Unsplash

“It’s All Handled By REI.”

Even if these local guide companies want to continue running these trips independently, the framework of the Experience system makes it almost impossible.

On paper, these guests were never really their customers. Both Goodremont and Plakanis tell me that all customer information was held and handled by REI; they didn’t even know who was going on these trips until one month beforehand.

“We were hoping we could reach out to the guests that were on these trips already, but there's a gray area as to whether or not that's even a legal thing for us to be able to do, because they didn't give us the phone number, they gave a REI the phone numbers,” said Plakanis. “We're kind of in a holding pattern. We don't even know if we're allowed to do that.”

I am currently developing a project to repair this vendor network, helping customers reconnect with guide services with a kind of index. If you operate a guide company, or have one you’d like to see added, please consider taking a minute to fill out this form:

“It didn't have to be done this way,” Goodremont said. “If REI chose to, they could have continued to support the vendor network that they developed. Instead of just severing this relationship, they could have supported the vendor network. And they chose not to. And there's no explanation that REI can give to the vendors that makes any sense in the real world, other than they just want it to be done.

“It would cost them nothing. There's no liability associated with that. There's no cost associated with that, which is why they made this decision in the first place, right? Cutting costs.”

Photo by Karson Chan on Unsplash

A Gaping Hole in Outdoor Education

Aside from the Adventures and Tours, REI also facilitated classes on a variety of subjects. As part of this program, it was the largest sponsored WFA (Wilderness First Aid) courses through NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School.)

Brett Friedman is an outdoor educator who teaches for NOLS, and worked for REI for 15 years. When the hammer dropped, Friedman says four of his seven contracted courses were cancelled.

On his own YouTube channel, Friedman does a fantastic job breaking down the second-order effects of cancelling these classes.

“Every scoutmaster that goes to Philmont, or Seabase, or Northern Tier, has to have a Wilderness First Aid certification. If you work in the outdoors, you have to have a Wilderness First Aid certification,” Friedman explained. “I would say 35% of the people I see on Wilderness First Aid courses are taking it because they have to. And it’s going to be way harder to find a course now.”

If the Experiences Program was Never Profitable, why Wait so Long to End it?

When a company offers a new service, they often give it some time to start making money. Disney, to cite a recent example, launched its streaming service in 2019 and didn’t see a profit until 2024. Sure, the company as a whole had to help shoulder the loss, but that was alright because it served Disney’s long-term goals.

Weathering a 4-year loss is one thing. But 40?

Plakanis theorized these adventures served as a kind of loss-leader that gave big-spending customers encouragement to upgrade their kit, and cemented REI as their outdoor retailer of choice.

“These were people who spent a lot of money at REI, and I know that because we'd look at them and go, ‘You know what, that backpack's not gonna work.’ And they'd go, ‘OK,’ and then they'd go in there and they'd buy it, you know, the $500 backpack,” she explained.

Without some kind of referral tracking system, it’s almost impossible to see whether sales like this would’ve offset Experience losses. It’s also difficult to quantify whether these trips turned guests into brand evangelists; customers who attract more buyers by sharing pictures from their adventures, or encouraging friends to shop at REI.

Logic dictates that Experiences somehow served the co-op’s goals, and if the revenue situation didn’t change, then the underlying goals must have — a point Goodremont touched on:

“When the CEO of REI puts on the website that this decision is going to help them get back to their original goals of selling outdoor gear, that's just simply not true; that wasn't the original goal of REI and the REI co-op. The goal of the REI co-op. was to create a community of outdoor enthusiasts and outdoor conservationists,” Goodremont said.

“I don't think the gear sales resulting from people using cool gear on our trip was super significant. We fulfilled the goal of getting people outdoors, that would otherwise not have those opportunities.”

Program Problems: Allocation and Visibility

In the unofficial REI community on Reddit, some commenters indicated they didn’t know the decades-old Experience program even existed.

“Even within REI stores community rooms are underutilized. With just a little push, even on social media, these rooms could be chock full once a week or so, with basic classes on everything from backpacking to snowshoeing to basic equipment education. REI did this for years and years, posting signs up in stores, talking about them.

“They still offer some, but many classes are almost invisible. With the growth in the great outdoors in the last 5+ years, REI could have also used these weekly community classes to inform people about REI experiences. REI completely botched this opportunity to capitalize on this.”

—RiderNo51 | Reddit

“We often had to cancel our day programs due to low enrollment,” said Rory,* another guide impacted by the layoffs. “Regions were supposed to keep strict gross margin numbers. So if classes weren’t filling, they were canceled prior to a date – typically about a week prior – in which REI would lose money.”

Yet other multi-day programs sold at the same location were extremely popular, and booked solid months in advance. “Our trips for Santa Fe and South Dakota were full with waitlists for spring of 2025,” Rory* said.

Could a key contributing factor in the Experiences failure simply have been what kinds of programs were marketed, and where?

Ali Williams owns Wayfinder Outdoors in central North Carolina, and made a similar observation.

“I think people just can’t or won't spend the money to take a class with a professional. I think a lot of people rely on YouTube or ‘friends who know what they’re doing’ to educate themselves.

“I also think people will pay for an experience. They can get info online, but not an experience. So, with Wayfinder I really leaned into how classes and trips will be a specific kind of experience.”

Williams worked for REI’s Outdoor School from 2017 to 2019, before founding Wayfinder Outdoors in 2021. She still works part time on the retail side of REI’s operation.

An Unclear Path Forward

The true magnitude of the experiences bubble is difficult to grasp, but certainly extends far beyond the REI Co-op itself. Who will fill the training void in WFA and other crucial classes? What happens now to the guide companies that made REI Adventures possible, now that the bulk of their 2025 trips have been effectively cancelled? Will the other local businesses that supported those guide companies be able to handle the revenue loss?

Quandary Magazine reached out to REI directly, to learn whether the company had any plans to offer assistance to impacted guide companies — either material, or by putting them in contact with customers who had been planning on traveling with them through REI Experiences.

“REI continued operating through our final week of scheduled departures. We paid operators in full for all trips scheduled to operate up to 30 days from the date of our announcement. honoring or exceeding all mutually agreed cancellation terms and penalties. We are not requesting refunds from cancelled future trips for which payment was already made.

Operators can continue to operate their former REI trips independently or through other sellers. We provided information to operators to help support them in that effort. We are also providing customer and vendor references on request and working with each operator individually. They can also retain any REI provided gear and apparel for future guiding.

REI is refunding customers for all funds paid to REI for all unoperated trips. Regarding timing, as stated in Eric Artz letter to employees that is posted to our newsroom, …”we have gone through many iterations and explored multiple options to keep this business up and running and to preserve jobs. We’ve held out as long as possible, but the fact remains that Experiences is an unprofitable business for the co-op, and we must adjust course. Every path to profitability we explored would have required us to invest more time, effort and focus away from parts of the business that reach significantly more customers, drive more positive financial outcomes, and have greater impact on our mission to get people outside.”

—REI Communications

Thank You for Reading

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