Slow visitor traffic in Colorado this summer as international tourism collapses, uncertainty looms

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Sneak Peek of the Week

A rare summer slowdown in tourist traffic, spending in Colorado’s high country

Colorado’s streak of record-setting numbers of visitors and tourist spending could end in 2025 as mountain destinations report a rare slowdown.

State tourism officials started warning a softening tourism market last year as vacationer traffic to Colorado ebbed. Last year Colorado hosted 95.4 million visitors who spent $28.4 billion. That’s an increase of 2.1 million visitors who spent $28.3 billion in 2023. But most of the increase in visits last year were from Front Range day-trippers exploring Colorado. There was no growth in overnight visitors in 2024, according to the most recent tourism reports from the Colorado Tourism Office.

That’s the first slowdown for Colorado’s tourism industry since 2014, excluding the pandemic-spurred 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’s ski resorts.

And since 2019, Colorado’s share of the country’s vacationers has slipped, which along with a precipitous drop in international travelers this year, 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 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. “Summer was really, really tough in the mountains, not just in Summit County but every destination across Colorado I’ve spoken with.”

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

In Their Words

Counting sheep on Pikes Peak

For Colorado Parks and Wildlife senior biologist Julie Stiver, the annual bighorn sheep count atop Pikes Peak is more than just another work assignment — it’s personal.

Stiver was one of about 60 staff biologists, wildlife officers and trained volunteers who rolled out of bed well before the sun came up Wednesday to get atop America’s Mountain for a crucial counting that helps CPW assess trends in population size, assess herd health and help make hunting license recommendations.

By 4 a.m., the group of surveyors were gathered outside the agency’s Colorado Springs’ office before heading up the 152 sharp turns along Pikes Peak Highway in the dark before heading out on 11 routes, either on foot or by car, to start counting sheep.

Alongside her were her two sons: 12 and 14.

For the past 30 years, Stiver has devoted her career to bighorn sheep management in Colorado, so naturally her children are a big part of that world. Standing on the trail Wednesday, she recalled being 5-months pregnant with her now 12-year-old and darting a bighorn ewe on Pikes Peak with a tranquilizer gun.

She put a GPS collar on the ewe, which had one normal-sized horn and one that was very short. She watched the sheep travel for four years before it died of natural causes. She retrieved the skull, which now hangs in her office, and investigated the sheep’s death.

Years later, she brought her boys back to the spot where it died. Her sons have tagged along with her on other projects, but Wednesday was their first time counting bighorns on Pikes Peak.

“There’s a lot of family legacy,” Stiver said. “It’s my profession, but it’s also sharing this with my family and my kids and those experiences have been pretty exciting.”

On the summit, Ty Woodward, a biologist for CPW who has organized the count for the last five years, scanned the alpine terrain with a scope spotter. It was 44 degrees before the sun crept above the horizon and there were snow patches left by a recent storm.

Aside from the visual count, it’s also Woodward’s job to make sure everyone gets off the mountain safely. Conditions can change fast at 14,000 feet, and he told those surveying by foot to finish by 11 a.m., one hour before a storm was forecast.

Seasoned volunteer Nathan Kettner was ready for a post-lunch nap by 2 p.m., after he finished hiking four miles up and down the steep Barr Trail collecting data. Kettner, an avid hunter, has helped with the count for about 15 years and sees it as a unique way to connect with the state’s wildlife biologists.

“When there’s a chance to do more, most of us want to help any way we can,” Kettner said. “Even if it means taking a day off work and getting up at three in the morning.”

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read Olivia’s story

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The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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The Playground

Keystone owners sue Vail Resorts over role of homeowner’s association

Communities wholly dependent on resorts — like Keystone — are typically started with homeowner associations or metro districts that direct property taxes toward new roads, water lines, sidewalks and parks. And as that community matures — and maybe even forms into a town, like Keystone — the role of that developer-controlled association changes.

Residents of Keystone are pushing back on that so-called master homeowner association and are suing Vail Resorts over the resort operator’s control of community services at the base of the Summit County ski area.

The residents, calling themselves Dissolve-KNC.org, argue that the Keystone Neighbourhood Co. — or KNC, a nonprofit condo association formed by resort developer Intrawest in 1995 and now controlled by Vail Resorts to fund projects and development around the ski area — unfairly favors the resort operator. The lawsuit filed in Summit County District Court argues that a small parcel of undeveloped land owned by Vail Resorts in the middle of the 1,100-owner Keystone Neighbourhood Co. community gives the company total control over the community. (And, yes, they do spell the “neighbourhood” the British way.)

The lawsuit is the culmination of long-simmering angst among property owners who, despite providing the taxes that support a majority of the resort-controlled neighborhood company’s improvements and maintenance in the community, cannot eclipse the resort owner’s votes. That scrutiny of KNC has boiled over with the creation of the Town of Keystone in early 2024, which also collects tax revenue to fund services.

“We pay quite a bit in property taxes to Summit County and another half of that goes to the Keystone Neighbourhood Company. Shouldn’t the Town of Keystone be getting some of this revenue and providing services instead of Vail Resorts?” said Maureen Barrett, an Evergreen resident who two years ago bought a condo in Keystone in a deal that included a $23,000 one-time transfer fee on top of $2,000 a year to KNC. “The formation of the town has really exacerbated this feeling that we are paying in and not really getting anything out.”

Barrett has been the main organizer of the Dissolve-KNC group. Since her purchase a couple years ago, she has worked to rally other owners in a push to reform the master homeowners association that is not an uncommon tool for communities that are just getting started. (Keystone ski area opened in 1970 and the now-defunct Canadian resort developer Intrawest built the ski area’s River Run Village in the late 1990s, which spawned the development of many condo complexes around the village.)

The master homeowner association structure allows a developer to fund critical infrastructure as a community takes shape. But as the community matures and, say, becomes a formal home-rule municipality, that master homeowner association structure becomes less vital to community development, Barrett said.

“Sure everyone hates HOAs, but this is different,” she said. “When you look at other HOAs, you see that votes are tied to what you own but not this one. This HOA is unique because votes are not tied to what individual property owners own.”

Homeowners get one vote in the KNC bylaws. Business owners get one vote for every 1,000 square feet of commercial space. And the so-called resort parcel — which features a beaver pond, making it ill-suited for any development — gives its owner Vail Resorts 1,000 votes. Any changes to bylaws and amendments governing the KNC condo association require 67% of the possible 2,739 votes in the community.

So Vail Resorts’ ownership of that parcel gives it “absolute veto power over any change to the KNC,” reads the lawsuit. “The resort parcel was specifically created to allow the declarant, Vail Resorts, to maintain control of the KNC. The voting structure of the KNC was specifically created to discriminate in favor of the declarant.”

The residents are asking a Summit County judge to dissolve or reform the Keystone Neighbourhood Co.

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

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Telluride locals mount a revolt against resort owner Chuck Horning

A few months ago, locals in Telluride and Mountain Village began publicly blasting the resort’s owner, a rare revolt by a community that has grown weary of the erratic Chuck Horning.

For years, residents around the resort had quietly lamented the antics and decisions of the temperamental Horning, the 81-year-old California real estate investor who acquired Telluride Ski & Golf Resort in 2004. It’s the only resort Horning has ever owned and over the last 21 years, he has fired several veteran ski area executives — including, earlier this year, his son, Chad.

Now, unnamed locals have launched a website, publicly detailing the resort owner’s messy management of the Telluride ski area and other businesses across the country.

“For years, Chuck Horning has caused harm to us all, both individually and collectively,” reads the opening paragraph of ChuckChuck.ski — which originated when a Telluride councilman in March said that it was “time to chuck Chuck.” “The community deserves something better. For years, we’ve whispered about the stories, the incidents, the poor decisions we’ve witnessed. Those stories should no longer be kept secret from everyone that relies on our ski resort for our wellbeing.”

The chuckchuck.ski site drags skeletons out of Horning’s closet. There are a lot of skeletons in there. The website details a long history of lawsuits across the country accusing Horning and the Newport Federal Financial investment firm he founded in 1970 of fraud.

There’s the 2000 lawsuit in California’s Orange County Superior Court where a jury found that Horning — his legal name is Merritt C. Horning, Jr. — and his son, Chad, — Merritt C. Horning III — conspired to defraud a business associate and fined Horning $2.5 million and his son $500,000.

There’s a 2018 suit filed by Horning’s business partner in convenience stores in North Dakota. Horning never responded to a 2019 lawsuit filed in Boulder County District Court by a private lender against a Boulder-based Horning investment fund that borrowed $3.75 million and never repaid the final $900,000 of the loan. The Boulder court ordered Horning to pay the lender $1.9 million, which includes three years of interest on the unpaid debt and legal fees.

Horning has recently triggered several conflicts with local elected leaders in San Miguel County. Earlier this year he failed to meet several deadlines to sign a previously negotiated agreement to pay a voluntary 4.5% tax on lift tickets to the San Miguel Authority for Regional Transportation to fund the gondola between Telluride and Mountain Village. Several times he revised the agreement mere hours before the authority’s meetings.

In response, the Mountain Village Town Council in June approved a 5% lift tax proposal the community’s voters will consider on the November ballot. Horning also irked Mountain Village property owners with his refusal to provide land for the community’s venerable Sunset Concert Series, forcing the Mountain Village council to use eminent domain to access the slopeside parcel that has hosted the weekly concerts for 25 years.

San Miguel County Commissioner Lance Waring, in an open letter to Horning published in the Telluride Daily Planet newspaper in March, noted a sticker that has been plastered around Telluride in recent months that reads “Better Crazy than Corporate.”

“Although a bit pointed, I agreed with the sentiment,” Waring wrote. “But your recent actions cause me to reconsider.”

The website has a form for community members to offer perspectives on Horning.

“As the owner of Telski and Mountain Village, Chuck has overseen the degradation of a one of a kind iconic and global destination putting it on the brink of disaster only being held back and saved by an engaged community and dedicated civil servants,” reads the website. “We are running out of time to save our community and it’s finally time to chuck Chuck.”

— j

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