How planning, guest flow, and program design determine whether a surf park actually works.
Surf parks succeed or fail on planning decisions made before a single wave is built. That's the core takeaway from a new interview between MVE principals Pieter Berger and Chase Rongé and Surf Park Central, prompted by MVE's work on Snug Harbor. The conversation covers guest flow, mixed-use programming, and the shift bringing non-surfing real estate investors into the space.
Read the full interview on Surf Park Central. The sections below expand on a few of the key ideas.
Why does guest flow matter as much as the wave itself?
A surf park isn't just a pool with a wave machine. It's a facility that has to move large groups of people, and their equipment, in and out efficiently while keeping the experience feeling premium rather than chaotic.
As Berger put it, a well-designed surf park needs the same discipline as walking into Disneyland's Main Street: purposeful, direct, and measured. It's not uncommon for fifty guests to arrive for a single session, some carrying three or four boards each. Without deliberate planning around circulation and layout, that volume turns into a bottleneck instead of an arrival experience.
The design also has to serve two very different guest profiles at once: an experienced surfer with a daily routine, and a first-timer fresh off a flight who's never worn a wetsuit. Planning for both is where a lot of surf park projects run into trouble.
Why isn't the lagoon the only design priority?
Rongé's perspective is that the wave is one component of a larger system, not the centerpiece developers should design around in isolation. Every other part of a surf-anchored development, hospitality, retail, multifamily, wants visual or physical access to that lagoon. Unlike a country club, where amenities can spread out and circulation can flex, a surf park works within a finite, highly concentrated footprint. That constraint has to be part of the plan from day one, not something layered in after the fact.
Berger points to developable land area as the other half of that equation. A project with room for multiple blocks, mixed-use residential, an event venue, retail, and a hospitality component, has more flexibility to make the broader pro forma work than one built around the lagoon alone.
What role does the surrounding program play?
The interview also gets into why the non-surfing side of a development often determines whether a project succeeds long-term. Berger describes designing for families where each member wants something different: a spouse looking for food and beverage, younger kids wanting a shallow pool or play area, older kids wanting to surf. Case studies like Revel Surf Park build in cliff jumping and a standing wave alongside the main lagoon specifically to capture that range.
The framing Berger uses: a session becomes a full day, and a full day is what turns one visit into three.
What's changing about who invests in surf parks?
Both Berger and Rongé point to a shift already underway. Early surf park investment came largely from people with a personal connection to surfing. That's changing as more parks reach completion and produce real operating data, attendance, spend per visit, repeat bookings, rather than just concept renderings and enthusiasm. That data is what's bringing in real estate investors with no connection to surf culture at all, evaluating these projects as straightforward real estate deals.
The takeaway
Surf-anchored development works when the planning treats the lagoon as one piece of a larger system, not the whole plan. Guest flow, program diversity, and site constraints all get resolved at the design stage, long before a wave technology vendor is selected.
Read the full interview with Pieter Berger and Chase Rongé on Surf Park Central.
