Colorado Tourism Growth Pulls Back with Booking Dips and Flat Spending

By Jason Blevins | The Colorado Sun

Colorado hosted 95.4 million visitors who spent $28.4 billion in 2024, an increase largely from day-trippers. The state is worrying about a decline in international visitors who stay longer, spend more.

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.

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