After several years of record-setting traffic, it appears Colorado’s Western Slope tourism economy has hit a plateau. Some communities are even reporting declines in visitor traffic and spending, marking the first slowdown since the pandemic.
State tourism officials started warning a softening tourism market last year as vacationer traffic into the state ebbed. Last year Colorado hosted 95.4 million visitors who spent $28.4 billion. That’s up 2.1 million visitors from the crowd that spent $28.3 billion in 2023. Most of that increase in visits last year were from Front Range day-trippers exploring Colorado, with no growth in overnight visitors in 2024, according to the most recent tourism reports from the Colorado Tourism Office.
That’s a first slowdown in overnight visitors for Colorado’s statewide tourism economy since 2014, excluding the pandemic-triggered global collapse in travel in 2020 and 2021. For more than a decade, visitation and tourist spending have set records every year. That record-setting trend appears poised to end in 2025.
Hotel occupancy across the state is down 2% through June. Hotel revenue is also down. The first quarter of 2025 has seen a 10% annual dip in short-term rental home bookings. Ski-season visitor counts reached 13.8 million last season, a decline from the previous three seasons, but still above the long-term average for Colorado resorts.
And since 2019, Colorado’s share of the country’s vacationers has slipped, which along with a precipitous drop in international travelers, poses challenges for the state’s businesses and communities that rely on visitors.
“Our market share compared to the rest of the country continues to decline,” said Tim Wolfe, the head of the Colorado Tourism Office, which launched a $1.4 million winter ad campaign for the 2023-24 season that drew visitors who spent $1.44 billion. That was the largest return on investment ever for any state’s winter tourism ad campaign, according to a market research firm hired by the tourism office.
“Even with all that, we have got concerns,” Wolfe said.
The Colorado Sun’s tracking of net taxable sales in 18 large and small Western Slope mountain towns show 2024-25 ski season collections dipping for the first time in many years. The 18 towns saw $5 billion in spending — that is resident and tourist spending — from November 2024 through April 2025. That is a mere $2 million less in net taxable sales from the 2023-24 season, but it’s a 48% increase from spending in the pre-pandemic 2018-19 ski season.
Mid-season reports from mountain towns show a rare summer slowdown. The booking pace at 17 mountain towns in seven Western states declined every month in the past six months compared with the previous year, marking the longest downward trend since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, according to Destimetrics, a division of Inntopia that tracks lodging reservations across 28,000 rooms in Western resort towns.
International tourism collapses
A consistent and growing decline in international visitors is leading the slowdown in visitation to mountain towns.
Bookings by Canadian travelers are down 58% compared with 2024, bookings from European visitors are down 39% and reservations from the Aussies and Kiwis are down 21%. The number of international tourists visiting Colorado has not returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2019. The Trump administration’s tariff policies and chatter about annexing Canada have irked a growing number of America’s northern and southern neighbors who are eschewing U.S. holidays.
“We are mostly concerned about what that international decline means for next January,” said Eliza Voss with the Aspen Chamber Resort Association, which markets Aspen and Snowmass, two communities that draw large numbers of international travelers every winter. “I think the political climate and uncertainty around tariffs has impacted what you are seeing.”
International travelers stay, on average, for eight days when they vacation in Colorado. And they spend three to five times more per person than domestic travelers. Those international travelers can boost local economies with fewer people in town, creating a smaller impact than, say, lots of day-trippers who spend less.
“International is one of our top priorities,” Wolfe said. “We know these are high-value guests for communities.”
Combine the dip in international vacationers with growing reticence among U.S. travelers and the booking pace for the summer across Western resorts is down more than 7%.
“The biggest challenge right now is how long does the international decline continue?” asked Tom Foley, the head data cruncher at DestiMetrics who has spent decades studying resort-town visitation trends. “The largest visitor base coming into the U.S. is from Canada and they are simply not reserving the way they were. Because of the very personal response of Canadian consumers to the tariffs and conversations around sovereignty, we don’t actually see any evidence that an end is in sight for lower Canadian numbers at Western U.S. resorts.”
Lodgekeepers are trying to offset the dip in numbers by raising room rates, which are up about 4% compared with 2024. But that can be a tricky game. Raise prices too much and communities can pretty much eliminate an entire segment of visitors.
Owners of affordable lodging properties have struggled in the last year as demand ebbs and prices climb. But higher-priced mountain-town hotels and lodges have seen solid growth in recent years.
“Are we losing an audience at the lower end of the economic scale?” Foley asked. “And then will that play out this coming winter, as it did last winter with moderate and luxury properties dominating?”
The short-term rental community has been sounding alarms on rising rates and declining visitation for several years, ever since local community leaders began cracking down on short-term rental properties that were seen as reducing the number of homes for local workers.
Some communities could begin cutting budgets as visitor spending and tourism tax revenue drops. Declining sales tax collections in Silverthorne, for example, has town leaders prepping for reductions in planned spending.
Silverthorne Town Councilman Tim Applegate said the closure of local businesses, including a car dealership, as well as declining tourist traffic led to the budget shortfall. He’s urging the town — and his employees at several Summit County restaurants — to more robustly embrace vacationers.
“If the tourists leave Summit County, there would not be a Summit County as we know it,” Applegate said. “My concern is that we treat tourists like they are wanted and welcomed. We need that revenue to sustain our lives up here. We’ve got to take care of the locals, but we also have to take care of the people those locals rely on. We are a tourist town.”
2024 by the numbers
Overnight trips to Colorado in 2024 hit 39.8 million, an all-time high. That’s about even with 2023. The Longwoods International tourism research firm that annually reviews Colorado’s visitor traffic counted 55.6 million day trips in the state in 2024, up from 53.8 million in 2023.
- Day-trippers spend about $105 a day
- Overnight visitors spend $594 a day
- Out-of-state travelers account for 82% of travel spending in Colorado
- Visiting family and friends accounted for 34% of all overnight trips in 2024
- Touring, outdoor recreation, special events and city trips are the next main attractions for overnight visitors to Colorado
- 62% of Colorado tourists participate in outdoor recreation, compared with a national average of 49%
The annual economic impact report from Dean Runyan Associates shows flat travel spending in 2024, which is below national growth in tourist spending.
- Since 2014, travel spending in Colorado has grown by 4.4% a year
- Travelers spent $13.9 billion in Denver in 2024, the same as 2023
- The next busiest region was mountain towns, which saw $4.4 billion spending
- Workers who rely on visitor spending earned $10.4 billion in 2024, up from $9.7 billion in 2023
- Travel-dependent employment in Colorado grew by 3,720 positions in 2024 to reach 188,210 jobs
- Tax revenue from tourists reached $1.9 billion in 2024, up 1.3% from 2023
Shifting tides around short-term rentals
The slowdown in visitor traffic has yet to push many communities to reverse course on recently imposed short-term rental regulations like caps on the number of rentals in a year or increased licensing fees, said Julia Koster, whose Summit Alliance of Vacation Rental Managers has about 450 members representing more than 10,000 vacation rental units in Summit County.
“I think there is an appetite in some of these places to ease things up but there’s been no action yet,” said Koster, who also heads the Colorado Lodging and Resort Alliance.
Since 2021, as communities began reining in largely unfettered growth of short-term rentals, the vacation rental industry has warned of onerous regulations. If owners have to spike rates to accommodate large lodging tax increases or require visitors to book for several nights to accommodate annual limits on bookings, “there will be ripple effects that will affect every person in the county,” Koster said.
“We’ve been saying this for years. And now the negative effect on our local economies is coming to fruition,” said Koster, whose alliance members tell her there are declining numbers of budget-minded in-state visitors who are not booking due to high fees and taxes. This summer was really, really tough in the mountains, not just in Summit County but every destination across Colorado I’ve spoken with.”
“Maybe it’s time to dial some of those things back up”
The quality-over-quantity focus in mountain town tourism marketing has been a growing trend as communities grapple with increasing crowds. But as traffic wanes, that approach of managing tourism versus marketing to tourists is starting to shift. Especially as competition ramps up in the fight for domestic travelers in a tourism economy pining for those international vacationers.
The Dean Runyan report for 2024 shows visitor spending in Summit County at $1.16 billion in 2024, a 1.5% drop from the record-setting 2023.
Lucy Kay, who spent more than 25 years at the Breckenridge and Keystone ski areas before joining the Breckenridge Tourism Office more than a decade ago, has seen these ebbs before.
“What’s different this time is that we can’t peg what is off. We can’t point to one thing and say this is what’s wrong,” Kay said. “Sometimes we can say it’s airline costs or room rates or market uncertainty. We see this as a lot of little things. We are talking about a thousand little cuts we need to mitigate.”
Typically, summer traffic to Breckenridge is about 50% vacationers who flew into Colorado and 50% people who drove up. Now the mix is more like 30% flying, 70% driving. Tourism traffic is down about 15% so far this summer, and Kay expects the summer in Breckenridge will end closer to 10% down.
She’s hosted roundtables with business folks who are wondering if maybe the town can return to hosting more events. Bouncing out of the busy pandemic, Breckenridge tourism boosters backed away from large events, reacting to concerns over growing numbers of visitors overwhelming the town and impacting the local lifestyle.
“Now there is a feeling that maybe it’s time to dial some of those things back up,” she said, suggesting her group may redirect some tourism marketing events to promote events that could appeal to a younger demographic that has been missing in her town.
That’s one of many shifting community priorities navigated by tourism officials across Colorado right now.
“We define our vision to find a harmony between these two sides,” Kay said, “where business is good and residents feel good about their quality of life.”