Like a lot of people, I’ve been thinking about Dolly Parton this week.
There are plenty of people better equipped than I am to write about her music, her philanthropy, or her influence on American culture. But there is one part of her legacy that intersects pretty directly with what I do every day: Dolly Parton was very, very good at getting people to visit East Tennessee.
In the hotel business, we spend a lot of time thinking about what brings people into a market in the first place. We call those things “demand generators,” and they can be anything from a hospital or university to a major employer, interstate, convention center or tourist attraction.
Dollywood is obviously a demand generator. But I think there’s more we can learn from what Dolly built than simply the value of having a popular attraction nearby.
For one, she understood that people will travel for something they can’t get somewhere else.
That’s increasingly relevant in hospitality. There are plenty of perfectly nice hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues competing for the same travelers. It’s much harder to create something that makes someone choose one destination over another—or make a trip they otherwise wouldn’t have taken.
Dollywood has that pull because it is very specifically tied to Dolly and East Tennessee. The Appalachian music, food, crafts and culture aren’t just design choices intended to give the property a “sense of place.” They’re connected to the person whose name is on the park and the place where she actually grew up.
That kind of authenticity is difficult to manufacture, although our industry certainly tries.
The expansion into lodging is interesting for a different reason. For years, Dollywood created room nights that were captured by hotels throughout the surrounding market. With DreamMore Resort and, later, HeartSong Lodge, Dollywood began capturing more of that spending itself while also extending the experience beyond the park.
That’s a pretty useful way to think about hospitality real estate generally. Creating demand is one thing; understanding what else your guest needs once you’ve created it is another.
I also think there’s something to be said for how patiently all of this was built. Dollywood wasn’t conceived as a theme park, water park, multiple hotels and everything else on day one. Dolly became involved in 1985, and the destination expanded over decades as the audience and the market grew.
Commercial real estate tends to reward that kind of patience more than we sometimes acknowledge. Not every opportunity has to start with a massive master plan. Sometimes the better strategy is to understand what people already want, do one thing particularly well, and pay attention to what that demand creates around you.
Dolly Parton’s legacy is much bigger than Dollywood, and I don’t want to reduce it to a business case study.
But there is something worth paying attention to in what she built there. She understood her audience, she understood what was distinctive about the place, and she kept finding ways to give people another reason to come—and another reason to stay.