The secret sauce seems to be high-end luxury stores. Nordstrom and Bloomingdales, not Sears or JC Penney.
Around the SF Bay Area, all the non-Westfield malls are dying and the Westfield malls are so crowded you can't park on a weekend.
There was a time when going to the Metreon was a mini vacation. I recall a Discovery store on the first floor, Sony and Microsoft, the Airtight garage with games that you'd never find at the arcade, a "how things work" store where I got a tensirigitoy, Expandagon Construction System, and other cube things that still find their way into the back of my video calls. There was that kids area at the top which I believe I would have loved if I was in the mid single digits.
But things changed and the vacation feel left. I recall the last time I was there there was a pop up store where the discovery store was and the comic book store that was in the place of the how things work store was struggling. Sony and Microsoft had their spat.
The other examples they had were of big outdoor gear stores - Bass Pro Shop or similar with in in store aquarium or the REI store with rock climbing.
Going to a bunch of stores that are under the same roof and scraping by with a flea market like atmosphere isn't the type of thing that I enjoy as a vacation. I'm sure some do, but that's not what I'm after.
At one time, the malls were something that just having Aladin's arcade, KB Toys, a hobby shop (that had model rockets and plastic models), a small book store, a few restaurants with better than acceptable food (but not a food court), Spencer's (with those weird posters that had a different image under a black light in the back)... that was enough of a vacation for a pre-teen or teenager and a place you asked to go.
[0]https://www.unitedcupertino.org/single-post/2017/06/01/histo...
That's a sign that they see something in their numbers, and it's not good.