AllTrails Decides Where America Goes Outside. Nobody Meets Them at Hike Two.

Ninety-five million people now use AllTrails. The user base went from 10 million in 2019 to more than 95 million by March 2026, a number larger than the active customer base of any apparel or footwear brand in the outdoor industry and several times REI's co-op membership. In 2024 a record 63.4 million Americans went day hiking. The tool most of them reach for to decide where to go is owned by a private company most CMOs in this industry have never modeled as a competitor, a partner, or a threat.

That blind spot is half the story. AllTrails sits upstream of nearly every outdoor purchase, at the point where the decision to go gets made, before a single boot, pack, or jacket is bought. TIME named it one of the 100 Most Influential Companies of 2026. The other half is what those 95 million people are doing: they have gotten off the couch, picked a route, and are heading out for the weekend, probably with a friend or their family. The industry has spent a decade trying to manufacture exactly that moment. It is happening at scale, on a platform no brand talks to.

It stopped being a hiking app a while ago

Ask what AllTrails is and the honest answer in 2026 is no longer "an app for finding hikes." It is the discovery-and-data layer for the outdoors: more than 500,000 verified trail maps spanning hiking, biking, running, and increasingly ski touring, across 200-plus countries. Underneath runs a live conditions system fed by more than 800 partner agencies, nonprofits, and land managers, plus a user-generated flywheel of reviews, photos, and condition reports from tens of millions of people. That corpus, not the map tiles, is the asset.

The clearest tell of the ambition is where AllTrails put that corpus over the last year: a launch partner for OpenAI's ChatGPT apps in November 2025, an "AllTrails in Claude" integration with Anthropic in May 2026, Apple Intelligence in-app, T-Mobile satellite messaging for dead zones. Read together, these describe a company that has decided to be the answer behind "where should I hike this weekend," wherever that question gets asked.

The CEO hire is the trajectory, spelled out

In August 2025 AllTrails replaced Ron Schneidermann, who ran it through its growth years, with Liz Hamren, and her résumé is the most legible strategy document the company has published. Hamren came directly from two years as CEO of Ring. Before Ring she was COO of Discord. Before that she was a corporate vice president at Microsoft running engineering and product for Xbox consoles and Xbox Game Pass, one of the most successful subscription products in consumer technology. Earlier she led global sales and marketing for Meta's Oculus.

You do not hire that operator to run a better hiking app. You hire her to turn a category-leading app into an outdoor platform with a nine-figure recurring-revenue engine.

The moat, and how it was built almost for free

AllTrails is also an excellent business. Analysts estimate annual recurring revenue north of $150 million (2024 figures; the company is private and does not disclose), growing better than 20 percent a year on a freemium model with an estimated 5–7 percent paid conversion. It got there with almost no advertising. Hundreds of thousands of trail pages are engineered to rank for the highest-intent search there is, "hiking trails near me," converting organic search into installs, installs into user-generated content, and content into the next search. AllTrails owned intent while the rest of the industry was buying impressions. It is now premiumizing on top of that: the Peak tier runs $80 a year, more than double the $36 Plus tier, and gates the AI features. A hiking app doubling its top price on the strength of AI knows where it thinks the next margin lives.

The audience is the casual majority, and the industry can't convert them

AllTrails' 95 million are not, for the most part, the hardcore. The fastest-growing filters are dog-friendly, kid-friendly, stroller- and wheelchair-accessible, waterfall, and fall color; the company projects its family-and-accessibility segment to reach roughly 15 percent of search volume by 2026. This is the on-ramp, where a brand-new outdoor person forms their first intent, months or years before they would walk into a specialty retailer.

The Outdoor Industry Association has been measuring what happens to those people, and the answer is: mostly nothing. OIA defines a casual hiker as one who hikes fewer than 13 times a year. Its 2024 report put it flatly: "very few participants who are new to outdoor recreation are converted to core participants." Total participation had set records every year while core participation fell from 99.4 million in 2019 to 88.4 million in 2023, and average outings per participant slid from 87.4 a year in 2012 to 62.5. The 2025 report, published in December, recorded the first reversal in a decade: core participants up 5 million to 93.4 million, average outings back up to 65.2. Five million Americans crossed the line from occasional to regular in a single year, and the industry's marketing muscle memory, built for the enthusiast who already identifies as outdoorsy, had almost nothing to do with it.

REI's CEO, Mary Beth Laughton, named the problem at Outside Days in Denver this spring: "We don't have an inspiration problem. We have a convenience gap." Merrell has been marketing to the same idea for a year with a tagline that says the hardest part of being outside is leaving the couch. Both are right, and both describe hike one. The larger question is what happens after.

There is no front door, and five brands found the side ones

The first thing a CMO learns on trying to reach AllTrails' audience is that it cannot be bought. Strava sells a productized brand business: sponsored challenges from about $20,000, nine formats, cohort targeting, and published results (Hoka drew more than 175,000 participants to a single July challenge; Duer's Bike to Work challenge finished 58 percent over its participation goal). AllTrails has none of that. It has a small bespoke partnerships desk reporting to the CMO, a job posting that describes "brand-right deals" with no defined menu, and not one published result for any brand partner. Presence on the platform is negotiated, and the negotiations to date have taken five shapes.

Membership as currency. Kathmandu, Australia and New Zealand's largest outdoor brand, tiered free AllTrails+ into its Out There Rewards loyalty program in January 2024: three, six, or twelve months depending on tier. West Virginia's tourism board gave away a year of the premium tier in fall 2022. A $36 perk that costs AllTrails almost nothing to grant and costs the brand nothing to make. No US gear brand has copied it.

Curation. Partner lists on alltrails.com, published as trail collections rather than ads: REI's "Going Ultralight Backpacking," Hipcamp's ten-itinerary summer bucket list pairing trails with campsites in August 2025. Presence inside the intent layer, as utility.

Product. The AllTrails Gear Shop carries co-branded collections from Stio, Cotopaxi, Topo Designs, Hydro Flask, Rumpl, Leatherman, and Knockaround. Black Diamond's September 2025 deal is the most complete on record: a four-piece limited collection, Black Diamond employees curating recommended trail lists in the app, retail launch events with guided hikes in Salt Lake City, Boulder, and Seattle, and proceeds to local trail advocacy.

The pipe. Garmin built auto-sync from AllTrails to the wrist; COROS followed in June 2026 with a manual "Send to COROS." Both require a paid AllTrails tier, which means the hardware brands are effectively selling AllTrails subscriptions.

Place. Western National Parks became AllTrails' official partner in February 2025, with sponsored pages, curated itineraries, and membership giveaways, and 800-plus land agencies feed the free Public Lands Program. The same data that concentrates crowds on a trending trail is now the tool AllTrails hands land managers to manage them.

The pattern across all five: you reach AllTrails' audience with what you already own that AllTrails doesn't. A loyalty program, a retail floor and staff credibility, a device, a destination. The brand that holds none of those has nothing to trade, which is a sharper version of "no relationship."

Why the largest opportunity in the outdoors is still sitting there

If 95 million people forming outdoor intent is the biggest audience the industry has ever been offered, the question is why the response so far is a handful of co-branded water bottles. Four reasons, none of them stupid.

The first is that AllTrails does not fit a media plan. Marketing organizations are built to buy channels with rate cards, reach estimates, and a results deck; AllTrails offers a negotiation with a two-person desk and no benchmark. A CMO can defend a $200,000 Strava line item to a CFO. There is no line item for "figure out what we have that AllTrails wants." The second is measurement. Not one of the five deals above has a published number, so every brand that goes second is being asked to spend against a channel with no proof, and the brands that went first have no incentive to share what they learned. The third is AllTrails' own incentive. It is a subscription business, and the deals that have gone deepest, Kathmandu and Garmin, are the ones that sell subscriptions. A partnership that puts a gear brand in front of hikers without moving a Plus membership is, from AllTrails' side of the table, a distraction. The fourth is identity. The casual hiker with a stroller is a low-ticket customer on trip one, and most outdoor brands have spent twenty years building credibility with the enthusiast; marketing to the on-ramp reads to them as dilution. Merrell is the only footwear brand positioned squarely at that customer, and it did it with a tagline, not an AllTrails deal.

All four reasons are true today. All four also describe a channel in the year before someone productizes it, and the operator AllTrails just hired ran Xbox Game Pass.

The empty rungs are the second and third

Every one of those deals is aimed at the first hike: the welcome, the perk, the first trip. The industry's other muscle, the athlete and the summit film, is aimed at the fiftieth. Between them sits the person OIA is counting, and AllTrails is the only entity that can see them move. It knows the trails, the dates, the companions, the photos, and whether they came back. REI does not have that for 26 million members. No brand has it for anyone.

Lay the progression out as behaviors rather than hike counts and it has seven rungs. OIA publishes the bookends, casual and core and the "gateway activities" of hiking, camping, and fishing that feed everything else; the transitions in between are a TBR model, drawn in the graphic below. The prompted hike, where someone else picks the trail and the gear is whatever is in the closet. The repeat, a second and third outing in the same season with the same person, where the tell is a saved list and the first purchase is shoes from a general retailer. Planning as a habit, where the weekend has a default and the first destination trip and the first real gear spend arrive together. The identity shift, "I'm a hiker," when the person joins something and starts sharing. Lateral exploration, one activity becoming a portfolio of trail running, overnights, snowshoeing, which is what AllTrails' catalog expansion is built for and where the big gear jump lives. The objective, a trail 10K or a summit, where registration is the tell. And core: thirteen-plus outings a year, several activities, and the person who invites the next first-timer.

Brands are present at the identity rung, through community, and at the objective rung, through events. Nobody is present at the repeat or the habit, and that is where a casual becomes core. The mechanics for those rungs already exist in AllTrails' partner playbook: a curated list titled "six hikes to do with a stroller before Labor Day," a guided hike out of a store on the model Black Diamond ran, a membership perk that unlocks as a reward for coming back rather than a bribe for showing up. None of it has been aimed at the second hike.

The reason is the unit of progression. People do not move from the prompted hike to the habit alone; they move because the person they hiked with suggests the next one. OIA's 2025 report found that two in three households with children now participate, the highest rate on record, and that children's own participation rate above 70 percent "appears to be the reason their parents participate." AllTrails' collaborative lists and its fastest-growing filters, dog, kid, stroller, say the same thing. The customer on the empty rungs is a pair or a family, and the industry builds for the individual athlete. A brand that wants the second hike has to be useful to the friend who plans it.

AllTrails decides where a generation goes outside, and for the first time in a decade that generation is coming back more often. The industry sells the outdoors, and the on-ramp it keeps describing, the trailhead, is not where the customer is lost. The customer is lost on the second and third hike, on a platform that knows exactly who they are, and no brand has asked to be introduced.