Why Thousand Trails Discontinued Lifetime Memberships: A Former CEO and Lawyer’s Take

Much ado has been made about why Thousand Trails — and more accurately its parent company, Equity LifeStyle Properties (ticker: ELS) — decided to stop selling lifetime memberships.

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The reason you hear most often is the obvious one: they make more money off the new subscription product.

And to some degree, sure. That’s true. I have no doubt that over time ELS will do exactly what a public company is built to do, which is generate returns for its shareholders. Nobody should be shocked by that.

But I’ve spent a lot of hours inside ELS’s SEC filings, and I’m here to tell you the real answer is more interesting than “they got greedy.” I ran a company. I practiced law for a long time before that. And when I read what ELS actually disclosed, I didn’t see a money grab.

I saw an accounting problem.

Stick with me on this one. It’s going to require about ten minutes and zero accounting background, and I promise by the end you’ll understand this better than 99% of the people arguing about it on Facebook.

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So... Why Did Thousand Trails Kill Lifetime Memberships???

💡 The Short Version

Thousand Trails didn’t kill lifetime memberships out of greed. They killed them because of how accounting rules let them count the money.
A $16,000 lifetime check could only be recorded as revenue over 24 years — about $667 a year. In the year they sold it, they very likely lost money on you.
A term subscription counts in full, the year you pay it. Same relationship, a completely different exchange rate.
Over four years ELS now collects roughly $9,300 less cash per member — and gets to count about $4,000 more revenue. Nobody grabs less money.
And the whole thing is small: all Thousand Trails membership revenue is about 5.3% of ELS’s total.
The real win for you? A company on a two- or four-year renewal clock has a reason to earn you back.

First: What Was a “Lifetime” Membership, Really?

Let’s clear something up, because that word was doing a lot of work.

A lifetime membership was a contract sold by Thousand Trails, in various flavors over the years, that essentially said: as long as you keep paying your annual dues, you can keep using the Thousand Trails system.

Note what it was not. It was not a one-time payment. You didn’t buy camping for life. You bought the right to keep paying dues for life.

“Lifetime” was, in effect, a marketing term.

Now, don’t get me wrong — there were real protections baked into those contracts.

Thousand Trails dues were capped at CPI. And I want to be precise here, because this gets overstated constantly: that cap applied to your Thousand Trails base dues only. Not Trails Collection. Not RPI. Those are separate line items and they were never covered by the CPI protection. Plenty of legacy holders have watched their “capped” annual bill climb anyway and wondered what happened. That’s what happened.

Most lifetime contracts let you pause your dues. This one gets misunderstood constantly, so let me be precise. Original holders often had the ability to suspend dues for a period — an Adventure, for example, could typically be paused twice, or for five years total. Once you hit either of those limits, the ability was gone. Permanently. It was a genuine benefit, but it was finite, and a lot of folks burned through it without realizing they were spending something they couldn’t get back.

Transfer rights varied wildly. Some memberships were resaleable indefinitely. Some gave you exactly one transfer and that was it. Most could be willed to a family member — though as a lawyer I’d have some reservations about willing a “lifetime” membership to a child. But bygones.

So there was real value in there. But the word “lifetime” did a lot of heavy lifting in that description, and I suspect it carried more water with folks than it should have.

And let me be clear about where I land on this, because it matters for everything that follows: I don’t think Thousand Trails did anything wrong here. Every one of these terms was in the contract. The pause limits, the transfer restrictions, what the CPI cap did and didn’t cover — all of it, in writing, available to read before anybody signed anything.

The gap isn’t between what was promised and what was delivered. It’s that the term “lifetime” was doing a lot of heavy lifting in people’s minds and not as much heavy lifting in the contract.

Here’s what a typical purchase looked like. A buyer would put down somewhere between $5,000 and $16,000, with $16,000 roughly the top of the market in the last year Adventure was sold as a lifetime product. Then they’d pay annual dues, reset each year at the then-current rate, escalating with CPI.

As of this writing the Thousand Trails base dues run $775, with Trails Collection Plus and RPI available on top. Load on every option and you’re at about $1,650 a year.

Those legacy contracts came in a bewildering number of flavors. So somebody who bought a lifetime Adventure four years ago probably wrote a check for $14,000 to $16,000, and now pays around $1,650 a year if they add all the options.

And What Is the New Term Product?

Completely different animal.

The entry point is a fraction of the old one. You’re looking at a few hundred to about fifteen hundred dollars down, followed by a monthly payment across a two- or four-year term.

Let me give you real numbers, and let me be honest about which ones are which.

A recent sale had a four-year Adventure at $1,400 down and $247.92 a month. That sale is over — these come and go constantly, which is exactly why the number you see today isn’t the number you’ll see next month.

At full sticker price, straight off the Thousand Trails website with no sale at all, a two-year Adventure runs about $900 down and $313 a month. And even that carries a $500 discount code on the site right now — applied against your dues, not your down payment.

(This is the part where I’ll be straight with you: I run a referral relationship with Thousand Trails, and I can usually get you meaningfully better pricing than what’s posted publicly. Reach out here. Use it or don’t — the analysis below doesn’t change either way.)

If you want the full breakdown of how the current products actually work, I wrote a complete guide to how a Thousand Trails membership works. At the end of your term you roll to whatever the then-current rate is. During the term, though, the number you were quoted is the number you pay. No CPI bump every December. No surprise dues letter.

And this is where folks tie themselves into a pretzel.

I see it constantly. Somebody looks at the price on the Thousand Trails website and assumes that’s the base membership cost, and that they’ll also be paying annual dues on top of it, the way legacy holders do. That’s not how it works, and the confusion makes the new product look far more expensive than it is.

Which leads to the argument I get in my inbox about twice a week: “Why would anybody buy something only good for 2 to 4 years when you could pay about the same and get a lifetime?”

Because that’s not actually how the numbers shake out. I’ve done this math to death — the honest cost/benefit analysis — where I give you the full breakdown, a downloadable Google Sheet, and a calculator so you can run your own situation instead of taking my word for it.

But here’s the headline: if you buy a Journey (term product) versus a Lifetime Elite Basic (the closest legacy equivalent), the total cost of the Journey runs about $300 a year more than the dues on that comparable lifetime — give or take, depending on what sale you caught and what incentives came with it.

Three hundred bucks a year, folks. That’s it. That’s the chasm everybody’s screaming about. That’s not even a tank of diesel in my Super C.

What ELS’s Books Actually Tell Us

Now here’s the part nobody talks about, and it’s the whole ballgame.

It was never that lifetime memberships weren’t profitable. In some ways I’d argue they made the company more money than the new product does. The difference is in how ELS was allowed to account for the money.

Let me ask you a question that sounds simple and isn’t.

In the year Thousand Trails sold you a $16,000 lifetime Adventure — how much money did they actually make off you?

Most folks would say sixteen grand. That’s the number on the check. That’s the number everybody’s mad about.

The real answer is $667.

An analogy from everyday life: a gift card

You’ve bought a gift card before. Say you hand a coffee shop a hundred bucks for one.

That shop now has your hundred dollars sitting in the register. Real money. They can spend it today.

But here’s the thing — they haven’t sold you any coffee yet. So their accountant won’t let them write down a hundred dollars of sales. They have to count it a cup at a time, as you actually drink it. The cash is theirs. The sale isn’t. Not yet.

Every business in America works this way. You count money when you earn it, not when you catch it.

Hold onto that.

A lifetime membership was a 24-year gift card

When Thousand Trails sold you a lifetime membership, their accountants had to answer one question: how long are we on the hook to this person?

The answer is sitting right there in ELS’s SEC filings, in black and white. Non-refundable upfront payments on the legacy products are recognized on a straight-line basis over 24 years.

Not 24 months. Twenty-four years.

So your $16,000 was never a $16,000 sale. It was a gift card you’d be redeeming until roughly 2050. And ELS could only count about $667 of it a year.

ℹ️ For the accountants in the room

Per Note 2(j), Revenue Recognition, on page F-15 of ELS’s 2025 Form 10-K, non-refundable upfront payments on legacy product offerings are recognized straight-line over 24 years and presented within Membership upgrade revenue. Membership subscriptions, by contrast, are deferred and recognized straight-line over the period during which access to Sites is provided — a single year. Two products, two radically different conversion rates from cash to recognized revenue. That gap is the entire story below.

So let’s add it up

Take a real lifetime Adventure holder. Sixteen grand up front, and last year’s dues with every option loaded on — call it $1,650 a year, which is the most a legacy member can generate.

Everything Thousand Trails could put on its books from that member, annually:

The $16,000, sliced 24 ways	$667
Annual dues	$1,650
Total they get to count	$2,317

Now think about what it cost them to land you. The rally. The park tour. The free weekend. The salesperson’s commission. The marketing that got you through the door. All real money, and most of it spent the same year you signed.

Against $667 of countable revenue from that big check.

In the year they sold you a lifetime membership, Thousand Trails very likely lost money on you.

And I’m not speculating. ELS warned its own shareholders about precisely this in earlier filings — stating that because selling and marketing costs get expensed immediately while the revenue is deferred across the contract’s expected life, the company may incur a loss from entering these upgrade contracts.

They told Wall Street, in writing, that selling you a lifetime membership could show up as a loss.

Now run the new deal

That four-year Adventure at $1,400 down and $247.92 a month comes to roughly $13,300 across the full term.

And because it’s a term subscription, ELS counts every dollar in the year you pay it. No 24-year slicing. Dollar in, dollar counted.

Here’s what that does.

You, the customer, feel about $1,300 a year more leaving your pocket than the old lifetime holder pays in dues. That’s real. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But look at those same two members from ELS’s side of the table, across a full four years:

Over 4 years	Lifetime buyer	4-year subscriber
Cash ELS collects	~$22,600	~$13,300
Revenue ELS gets to count	~$9,300	~$13,300

Read that twice.

ELS collects roughly $9,300 less cash from the subscriber — and gets to count about $4,000 more revenue.

ℹ️ Straight from the filing

Footnote 2 on page 49 of ELS’s 2025 Form 10-K states that beginning in the first quarter of 2025, membership upgrade products are two- to four-year term subscriptions recognized in Annual membership subscriptions. Two-year products run $4,000 to $8,000 and four-year products approximately $7,000 to $14,000 — which, in their words, “results in approximately $2,500 to $3,000 of earned revenue on an annual basis.”

Worth noting: the four-year Adventure I quoted above works out to about $13,300 all-in. That sits right inside the range ELS discloses. You don’t have to take my word for the pricing — the company published it.

This right here is the whole thing

Under the old model, every dollar Thousand Trails collected turned into about 4 cents of countable revenue.

Under the new one, a dollar collected is a dollar counted.

That’s not a price increase. That’s an exchange rate.

They didn’t find a way to squeeze more cash out of you. They found a way to make the money they collect actually count. They traded a fat check they couldn’t use on paper for a smaller one they could.

And let me be blunt, because this is the part the forums have exactly backwards: a company running a money grab does not leave $9,300 a member on the table. Nobody grabs less money.

They gave up cash. They got revenue. That was the trade.

Why it had to happen

Forget individual members for a minute and go sit in ELS’s chair.

Say you need to put another $500,000 of revenue on the books this year. Not a fortune. Half a million.

Dues are easy — dues count in full, the year you collect them. But those big upfront upgrade checks only count at one twenty-fourth. So to show half a million dollars from upgrade sales, you had to go out and collect twelve million dollars in checks.

Twelve million, to show five hundred thousand.

At $16,000 apiece — the most expensive membership Thousand Trails ever sold — that’s 750 families writing the biggest check they’ll write all year. And most lifetime contracts landed somewhere between $5,000 and $16,000, so realistically you’re hunting for well over a thousand people.

A thousand people who happen to have five figures sitting around and want to spend it on camping.

Every single year. Just to keep the number flat.

Now do it the new way. To show $500,000, you collect $500,000. It all counts. That’s roughly 170 four-year Adventures.

And the ask isn’t a five-figure check anymore. It’s a few hundred to fifteen hundred down and a monthly payment.

Think about how many more folks can say yes to that. Not because they’re necessarily getting a better deal — that’s a separate argument, and I’ll make it in a minute — but because $1,400 and a payment is a decision an ordinary family can actually make. Sixteen thousand dollars is a decision most people can’t make at all, no matter how badly they want to.

That’s why the model had to change. Not greed. Arithmetic.

And look what happened when they flipped the switch: membership sales and marketing expense dropped 27% while annual subscription revenue rose 5%. Spending less to sell, earning more per member.

Now here’s the part that ought to end the money-grab argument for good.

That 5% bump in subscription revenue? In actual dollars, the entire year-over-year gain on that line was about $3.4 million.

NRG Stadium in Houston, where the Texans play, holds 72,220 people. Picture it sold out on a Sunday afternoon, every seat full.

If ELS’s total revenue were that stadium, then a full year of growth in the membership subscription business — everything, the switch to subscriptions included — comes out to about 160 seats.

A hundred and sixty chairs. Out of seventy-two thousand. That’s a few rows in a section. You couldn’t delineate it from the top of the stadium.

They retired their flagship product. They took a public relations beating that is still going on in Facebook groups this morning. And what they got for it wouldn’t fill the back few rows of a single section.

That is not a company chasing your wallet. That’s a company that finally quit buying its revenue at a lousy exchange rate.

The Advantages to You, the Consumer

Alright. Enough accounting. What does this actually mean for the person hitching up a trailer?

First, some perspective on the size of this thing

Before anybody accuses Thousand Trails of getting rich off you, let’s put the membership business in context. Straight from ELS’s 2025 income statement:

ELS, full year 2025
Total revenues	$1,531,382,000
Annual membership subscriptions	$69,266,000
Membership upgrade revenue	$12,412,000
All Thousand Trails membership revenue combined	~$81,700,000
Consolidated net income	$402,061,000

Every dollar of Thousand Trails membership revenue in America — every subscription, every upgrade, every legacy contract still amortizing — adds up to about 5.3% of ELS’s total revenue.

Their rental income alone is fifteen times the entire membership line.

Sit with that a second. The thing we all argue about endlessly, the thing that feels enormous when you’re writing the check, is a rounding error to the parent company.

This is not where ELS makes its money. It never was.

Which, honestly, should tell you something about the “money grab” theory. If you wanted to grab money, you would not go after the 5% line item.

Better campgrounds — and the money to build them

Here’s a tension I see in Thousand Trails groups almost daily, and I say this with genuine affection for the people making both arguments at once:

The same folks who say the campgrounds need work also say the new memberships are a money grab.

I understand both feelings. I just don’t think they can both be true.

Look at what the membership business actually earns, not what it grosses. ELS reports net contribution from the whole membership operation — subscription and upgrade revenue, minus what it costs to sell and market. In the second quarter of 2026 that was about $17 million, running roughly $34 million through the first half of the year.

Spread that across a member base in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand households and you’re at a few hundred dollars per member per year. And that’s before one dollar of what it costs to actually operate the campground you’re parked in. The water. The sewer. The mowing. The staff. The insurance. The property taxes — which in Florida alone have been climbing at rates that’d make your eyes water.

I’m not telling you Thousand Trails is a charity. It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be. But the picture of a company printing money off camping memberships does not survive contact with the filings.

Campground improvements don’t come from goodwill. They come from two things: money, and a reason to spend it.

More incentive to improve

Let’s face facts. Under the old model, Thousand Trails had very little reason to invest in your experience.

Most members had made a five-figure commitment. They weren’t going anywhere. And those memberships were amortized over such a long stretch that the money available in any given year for improvements that didn’t directly boost the underlying real estate value was minimal.

No money. And worse — no reason.

Let me put it in terms you’ll feel.

Imagine you own a rental house. A tenant walks up and offers to pay you 24 years of rent in a single check, today.

Fantastic, right? Cash in hand.

Now answer me this: in year eleven, how motivated are you to replace that tenant’s water heater?

They already paid. They’re not going anywhere — they’ve got 24 years on the meter. You’ll fix it when it breaks, because you’re not a monster and it’s your house. But you’ll fix it when it’s necessary, not when it’d be nice.

Now run it the other way. Same tenant, same house, but they pay you every year and can walk at the end of any lease.

Suddenly that water heater moves way up the list.

That’s the ballgame. Under a two- or four-year term, you’re not a booked sale anymore. You’re a renewal decision. Every stay is an audition.

Same campgrounds. Completely different incentive.

Less money upfront, less commitment

Thousand Trails picked this model to reach the broadest possible group of people, and their own data — which we don’t get to see — presumably showed most members keep and actually use a membership for four years or less.

If that’s true for even 80% of buyers, this is simply the better structure for the consumer.

And frankly: the number of people who can put together $1,400 without financing it and eating interest is vastly larger than the number who can produce $16,000.

Why lower upfront is usually the smarter play anyway

Here’s where the old CEO in me comes out.

Most people are better off with less money out of pocket, even when that means higher ongoing payments. Folks routinely fail to account for the fact that every use of capital carries an opportunity cost.

In business we used to say things like never use short-term capital to solve a long-term problem, or never turn a short-term liability into a long-term one, or my favorite: always use OPM — other people’s money — when you can.

Want proof this isn’t just theory? Ask yourself why most large companies don’t buy their vehicles. They lease them.

Set aside the tax treatment for a second. A company with billions on the balance sheet could absolutely write a check for a fleet of trucks. They don’t. Why? Because buying converts flexible capital into a depreciating asset, and it solves a short-term problem — getting employees from point A to point B — with long-term money. They’d rather pay slightly more over time and keep the capital working somewhere it earns a return.

Businesses lease cars for a reason. It’s not because they can’t afford them.

Business finance and personal finance aren’t the same thing, but the lesson carries.

So ask yourself: why would I hand Thousand Trails $16,000 of my money today? I’m better off spreading it across four years. I keep the money in the bank. I earn whatever that capital earns. I carry less risk. And if the world goes sideways and I decide to disappear to a nameless little island in the Caribbean — (hint: check the About page for the secret Live Free RV basecamp hideaway) — I can walk. I might catch a lawsuit, but you get the point. Or, I convert the risk to something negligible by doing a two year subscription (which is exactly what I did).

Flexibility has value. Most people price it at zero.

No temptation to ride the sunk cost fallacy

A friend of mine used to say: you make or lose your money when you buy it, not when you sell it.

He was talking about real estate, but it fits perfectly here.

Sunk cost fallacy is the trap where you keep pouring money into something because of what you already spent, not because of what it’s worth to you going forward. Economists will tell you the money you already spent is irrelevant to today’s decision. Every human being alive will tell you that’s easy to say and impossible to feel.

So picture it. You paid $16,000 for a lifetime Adventure. Three years in, life changes. Maybe your health changes. Maybe your job changes. Maybe you just don’t feel like camping for a while.

The rational move is to run the numbers on the next twelve months and make a call. The move you’ll actually make is to keep paying the dues every December, telling yourself you’ll get back out there next season.

And you might! But be honest about what’s driving it. It isn’t the $1,650. It’s the $16,000 you can’t get back.

You know exactly what I’m describing, because a lot of you have one sitting somewhere right now. A storage unit. Climate controlled. Ninety-five bucks a month. Full of stuff you haven’t laid eyes on in four years and couldn’t inventory if I asked you to.

Run that math sometime. Four years at $95 is $4,560. I’d bet real money you could replace everything in that unit twice over for less had you sold it all and invested the proceeds and what you paid for storage. You know this. You still pay it. Because emptying it means admitting the last four years of payments bought you nothing except putting off a decision.

That’s the sunk cost fallacy. Not stupidity — just being a person.

Here’s what the term product quietly does for you. It puts a decision point on the calendar. Every two years, or every four, the question comes and finds you instead of you having to go looking for it: do I still want this?

You don’t have to overcome anything to walk away. You don’t have to admit a $16,000 mistake. You just don’t renew. And if you’re holding a legacy contract you no longer want, there is a way to sell it — it just takes more work than not renewing.

Freedom from a bad decision is worth something. It’s worth a lot more than most people price it at.

Now the Disadvantages, Because I’m Not a Salesman

I’ve got a whole article laying out advantages and disadvantages across every membership type — every Thousand Trails membership type, legacy and new — but here’s the honest short version.

⚠️ Three real trade-offs

If you’re going to hold it a long time, legacy probably wins. For folks who keep a membership well past the initial term, the term product will likely cost more overall. Every time I run the breakeven between new and legacy it lands around year five or six, depending on the variables. If you genuinely intend to keep and use this thing for a decade, the legacy product may be the better fit. Full stop.

It’s all-inclusive, and you lose the ability to pick and choose. This one’s underrated. With a legacy membership you can look at your year and say you know what, we’re staying west this season, I’m dropping Trails Collection. That’s real money back in your pocket. The bundled term product doesn’t hand you that lever.

You lose the CPI cap. Your price is locked for the term, but when the term ends you’re at the then-current rate — whatever the market says that is. Legacy holders have inflation protection written into the contract. That’s worth something over a long enough horizon.

Those are legitimate trade-offs. Anybody who tells you the new product is strictly better for everybody is selling you something. If you want the blunt version, I also wrote about who should not buy a Thousand Trails membership at all, and the 8 things to consider before you buy any of them.

The Bottom Line

Folks tend to see any shift toward a subscription as a bad thing, and I understand the reflex. But in practice? It’s usually the better model.

Software is the perfect example. I’d much rather pay Adobe seven bucks a month for Lightroom than $500 upfront. I pick it up when I need it. I drop it when I don’t. And critically — Adobe has a reason to keep making it better, because I’m making that decision again every single month. They’re incentivized to reinvent, reinvest, and renew.

Same thing applies to Thousand Trails.

The lifetime memberships didn’t disappear because somebody in Chicago got greedy. They disappeared because a business can’t run on money it isn’t allowed to count, and because a company with no reason to earn your renewal eventually stops trying to.

I’d rather be a customer a company has to earn than a customer a company already has.

If you want to see how that’s actually played out for me, here’s my honest one-year review, plus 9 trail-tested ways to squeeze more out of the membership and my ongoing honest park rankings.

Ty’s Takeaways

If you already hold a legacy contract, nothing was taken from you. ELS said so in the same filing that killed the product: members in good standing keep their enhanced benefits for as long as they choose to stay in the program. Discontinuing a product is not the same as revoking one.

If you’re deciding right now, the question isn’t lifetime versus term. It’s how many years you’ll actually use the thing. Every time I run the breakeven it lands around year five or six. Under that, the term product wins. Well over it, legacy probably did.

And don’t let the accounting talk you into anything. Understanding why ELS made a rational business decision is a completely separate question from whether this membership fits how you travel. I just think you deserve to know which one you’re actually arguing about.

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Roughly 3,000 different Thousand Trails contracts have been sold over the years, and no two people camp the same way. New or used — and which used — comes down to your plans, your travel style, and where you want to be. Find out which one matches your adventure lifestyle, and which one is right for you.

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