For more than a century, parents and children have dined together, played together and reconnected at Pennellwood Resort in a wooded setting alongside Lake Chapin in Berrien Springs, about 70 miles east of Chicago.
Pennellwood, an American plan resort, is getting ready to raze its 40 rustic cabins at the end of this season. They’ll be replaced by 38 cottages that will be sold individually for $325,000 to $475,000.
American plan resorts traditionally offer accommodations, three meals a day and family-oriented leisure activities for one price.
At their peak, around 1960, more than half of U.S. resorts were American plan-style, with 120 American plan resorts near Pennellwood in Berrien County alone.
Now it is about one in 10, estimates Joe Goldblatt, who teaches at the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management at Temple University in Philadelphia.
You can still find American plan resorts in Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other states as well as in Ontario.
They are more popular in Asia and Europe than they are here.
The resorts are fading because American travelers are getting older, they are taking shorter vacations, and the resorts often can’t compete with glitzier attractions, Mr. Goldblatt says.
“In travel, brief, bright and brilliant equals better,” he says.
Pennellwood still offers six guest rooms in its lodge, and the new cottage owners will be able to rent out their homes.
The old cabins will be missed by families like Jim Watson’s, whose grandparents started coming to Pennellwood in the 1920s.
“It’s like home,” says Mr. Watson, 56, a jeweler from Chicago who has vacationed at Pennellwood almost every year of his life. “It’s a part of our lives, a part of our families.”
Mr. Watson brought his wife and nine other relatives to Pennellwood for a season-opening Memorial Day weekend event exclusively for regulars.
They played tennis, went fishing, threw a Frisbee, sang karaoke and went square dancing.
“It’s just an overall great family time where the parents can spend more time with their kids and the kids aren’t locked into their computers,” Mr. Watson says.
Emily Senk, who grew up in the northern Michigan community of Glen Arbor and worked two summers in the late 1990s as a food server at the Glen Eden resort, says many people were regular guests of the resort, which the owners closed shortly after she left.
“It was just a great environment,” says Miss Senk, who works at a public relations firm in New York City. “A lot of the families, even if they originally didn’t know each other, they would see each other on vacation year after year and become good friends.”
For 138 years, Nina Smiley’s family has owned and operated Mohonk Mountain House, an upscale American plan resort — a 265-room Victorian castle in the Hudson Valley region of New York.
Mohonk has changed with the times. In addition to old-fashioned fun like campfires, there also is a yoga room. Two years ago, the resort opened a full-service, 30,000-foot spa wing. This year, it added a rock-climbing program.
Yet the American plan style remains part of the Mohonk experience. “We see many families who value the more relaxed time they have together at an American plan resort where meals are included in the daily rate along with a variety of activities,” says Miss Smiley, the resort’s marketing director.
“This active, but not harried, environment leads to found moments where family members can relate in a way that’s not possible when a travel itinerary keeps families on the run.”
Back at Pennellwood, owners David and Jamie Stacey hope the changes they plan next year will make the resort more profitable.
The resort will receive a management fee for handling rentals of the new cottages, and the Staceys also will continue operating the lodge and planning family activities.
“We’re trying to preserve the past but prepare for the future to keep this concept alive and well,” Mr. Stacey says.
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Pennellwood Resort, Berrien Springs, Mich.; go to www.pennellwoodresort.com or phone 269/473-2511. Weekly cabin rates (including meals and activities) for up to five people, $2,100.
Mohonk Mountain House, New Paltz, N.Y.; www.mohonk.com; 845/255-1000. Nightly room rates (including meals and most activities) for two persons, $445 and up.
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