After the wild success of 2025, I’ll admit I was nervous walking into this year’s Summit. Six new surf parks opened in 2025, and the event grew right along with them — a bigger venue, deeper industry and operator participation, record attendance, and finally, mature conversations about financing, safety, and where surf parks actually sit as a real estate asset class. We kicked things off with a tour of a newly opened park, a Summit first. The bar was set disconcertingly high for whoever had to top it.
Somehow, we topped it — helped along by the fact that ten new surf parks opened in 2026 alone, a roughly 67% jump in openings year over year.
The kinks got ironed out. Attendees surfed an AI-adjudicated contest at Atlantic Park. The vendor hall ballooned. Industry leaders staged side events on their own initiative, without us lifting a finger. About a third of the room was there for the first time. New workshops launched, and the operators committee kept grinding on safety best practices. The Surf Conservation Fund launched, and its Advisory Council held its first meeting at Atlantic Park.
And for the first time, we had real aggregated utilization data to share — courtesy of our friends at Flowstate. Since that data went public on September 2nd, several other parties have reached out wanting to explore sharing their own data for the good of the industry.
We’ve hit a critical mass of surf parks operating globally — enough to aggregate and anonymize operational data at scale. That means sharper pro formas, more parks making it through feasibility and financing, and data-driven programming once they’re open. This feels like the start of a real data-access inflection point, and every one of us stands to benefit.
New personas showed up too — ticket aggregators and booking platforms working to fill sessions, book heads in beds, and grow F&B and ancillary revenue. Looking at you, surfparks.com and Swell Pass.
Thirteen years in, and this is the best attendee feedback we’ve ever gotten. So now the real question: how does Surf Park Central top this for 2027? We’re already on it — building out year-round value for members with regular data releases and every session from Summit 2026, reformatted as a podcast.
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