The idea of running commercial services inside a national park seems to me to be ridiculous as a concept. The idea that a strip mall with grocery stores, hotels, and gas stations (and yes they have that in Yellowstone) is "national park" land makes the concept of a national park ridiculous.
Why not just take the areas inside national parks that are currently commercially developed, remove them from the park, and sell them off to private owners. Now there can just be a law that you can't build a damn thing on national park land, and then private companies can run commercial services on non-park land and there won't be this conflict of interest.
I thought the article would have mentioned that putting for-profit companies in charge of maintaining historic buildings doesn't mean those buildings will be maintained:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2025/06/25/yosemi...
I'm a regular in the Yosemite rock climbing scene, and Aramark is a universally despised entity for many reasons (gross negligence, outright lies, rampant neglect). One of their executives recently lost his job for hitting golf balls into Ahwahnee Meadows.
However, until people would rather camp than stay at the $600/night hotel, and cook over a campfire rather than eat overpriced food, there will always be a lucrative opportunity in Yosemite Valley that is only available to the most politically-connected companies.
In a lot of Europe 'the great outdoors' is parks and agricultural land (not all of of course but a lot).
You have lots of great parks with forests and actual wildlife
I hope you don't repeat our mistake.
Sometimes I wonder about the far future. Just looking at how hard it is to fight the urge by some to fell those trees for a quick buck, and seeing how preventing that requires a constant fight that comes back every 10 years and needs to be restarted all over again... It seems inevitable that at some point the stars will align and they will get their way.
I wonder, after 500 years, after 1000 years of industrialization, what will be left of Earth?
I do not understand. Is Yosemite under the National Park Service, which is within US Dept of the Interior, which is subject to FAR?
There is no justification for Sole Source Contract here. There are many companies that can run hotels, concession stands, and such.
Full and open competition.
It seems like concessionaires and operators are increasingly abdicating their responsibility. I was at another site in CA that was so poorly managed the employee was trash talking management (for verbally and even physically assaulting the employees among other failures). The company got a fixed amount of money from the government for things like upkeep so they seemed to think it was in their best interest to spend as little as possible on upkeep to maximize profit. Unfortunately this was to the detriment of everyone staying at the site as the host burdens were so onerous for so little pay that the hosts kept bailing. And maintenance and janitorial was severely understaffed.