The Colorado tourism industry is still on a tear. Since 2010 — minus the global meltdown in travel during the pandemic years — Colorado has hosted record numbers of visitors leaving record-setting amounts of cash in their wake.
A total of 93.3 million travelers in Colorado spent $28.3 billion in 2023. Both those numbers are all-time highs. For reference, that compares with what was then a record in 2014, when 71.3 million visitors spent $18.6 billion in Colorado.
There are more travelers spending more in Colorado than ever before, according to Longwoods International, a visitor research firm that began tallying the impacts of U.S. tourism in the 1980s. Colorado was the first state to engage Longwoods to survey visitors in 1986.
“It’s great to keep it moving in the right direction,” said Tim Wolfe, the head of the Colorado Tourism Office.
Longwoods’ 82-page 2023 report identifies travelers who came to Colorado after seeing an ad campaign or promotional materials promoting the state as a vacation destination. The Colorado Tourism Office spends $12.7 million a year on media advertising, with $11 million of that directed toward the state’s 12-year-old “Come To Life” campaign and the remaining spent on the office’s “Do Colorado Right” ads, which this year, for example, focused on how to stay safe in Colorado with messages that promote life vests around the state’s lakes and fire safety when camping.
In 2023, travelers responding to marketing booked an estimated 21.6 million overnight trips in Colorado, down 4% from the previous year, while travelers staying with friends and family stayed 14.8 million nights in 2023, a new high, up 14% from 2022.
Overnight visitors spent $22.9 billion, while an estimated 53.8 day-tripping visitors in 2023 — a record number of people taking day trips to or within the state — spent $5.5 billion, which was nearly evenly split between in-state residents and out-of-state visitors.
About 5 million of those overnight trips were booked by vacationers coming to Colorado to explore the outdoors. About 2.7 million overnight trips were from people in Colorado for special events and 1.1 million visited resorts. The 2023 Longwood reports show about 2 million overnight trips involved people staying in cities and 1.3 million overnight trips were for people visiting Colorado’s casinos.
An economic review of tourism in Colorado by Dean Runyan and Associates, which also has been studying the state’s tourism travelers for decades, showed visitor spending of more than $28 billion employed 188,000 workers in 2023, up 5% — or 9,450 jobs — from 2022. And those workers earned $9.9 billion in 2023, up 13% from the previous year.
State and local tax revenue paid by tourists grew to $1.8 billion in 2023, generating the equivalent of $800 for every Colorado household.
About half of that traveler spending was in Denver, with visitors to the Mile High City leaving $13.9 billion in their wake. Visitors to nine Colorado high country counties — Clear Creek, Eagle, Garfield, Gilpin, Gunnison, Lake, Park, Pitkin and Summit — spent $4.3 billion in 2023, followed by visitors to the Pikes Peak region who spent $3 billion, and Boulder, Larimer and Weld county visitors who spent $2.5 billion.
Business travel to Colorado still waiting for a rebound
Business travel has yet to rebound following the pandemic, with Colorado logging 3 million overnight trips from those travelers. That’s up slightly from 2022, but well below more than 25 years of annual business traffic to the state reaching more than 4 million overnight trips.
The Colorado Tourism Office recently distributed $4.8 million in Tourism Recovery Marketing Grants to seven regions of the state through the federal Economic Development Administration. About half of that went to Front Range communities that have been slow to rebound from the pandemic declines, especially with business travelers.
But the grants to communities in metro Denver, the northern Front Range and around Colorado Springs were not necessarily focused on rebuilding business traffic, which has seen a decline as part of an overall business shift toward remote work and online meetings.
“I wonder if there would be a huge return on investment trying to bring business travel back,” Wolfe said. “So now we are seeing people thinking about how they can replace that business traveler, maybe by boosting leisure travel.”
The largest expenditure for visitors to Colorado is lodging, accounting for $6.2 billion in spending, followed by transportation, dining, recreation and retail. Spending in those four categories climbed in 2023. The average cost per person for an overnight trip to Colorado was $580, up from $550 in 2022. Daytrippers spend about $101 per person.
About 85% of overnight visitors to Colorado have been here before and 62% have traveled to the state in the past year. About 29% of the travelers driving the Colorado tourism industry are Colorado residents — and most of them are from the Front Range — followed by visitors from California, Texas, New York and Florida.
The U.S. tourism industry is strong, with travelers spending $1.3 trillion in 2023, an all-time high. The travel industry employed 254 million workers in 2023, up 5% from 2022, but below record levels. U.S. visits from international tourists are up as well, climbing 25% in 2023, but international tourism to the U.S. has not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.
The largest draw for Colorado visitors is visiting friends and family, followed by people who are touring, playing in the outdoors, attending a special event or visiting a city. About 4% of the state’s overnight trips were for skiing or snowboarding, which amounts to about 864,000 overnight trips in the 2023 calendar year.
Colorado ski resorts reported about 14 million skier visits in the 2023-24 ski season. While Longwoods counts yearly traffic and resorts count seasonal visitors, the discrepancy between these tallies indicates the size of the daytripping skier market, with Colorado residents heading up to ski for the day accounting for the vast majority of skier visits. (The Colorado resort industry does not release demographic information about its skier traffic.)
Longwoods reported that about 13% of overnight visitors booked their trips through short-term rental web platforms like Airbnb or Vrbo. That is up from 10% in 2022. The Runyan economic analysis shows 2023 visitors spending $15 billion on hotels and motels across the state and $2.5 billion on short-term rental homes. That compares to $14.6 billion spent on hotels and motels in 2022 and $2.3 billion on short-term vacation rentals.
The average income of Colorado’s overnight travelers was $80,000 a year, with about 40% of travelers earning less than $50,000 a year. And 82% of Colorado’s tourists are white, compared with 78% in 2022.
Since before the pandemic, Colorado tourism officials have seen more community angst over tourism as residents work to protect their quality of life in towns that are seeing record numbers of visitors.
More communities are diverting lodging tax revenues away from tourism marketing and toward affordable housing. Many communities are increasing regulations, taxes and limits on short-term rentals. But the lamentation over tourism is starting to change, Wolfe said, as occupancies and tax collections fall in the first half of 2024. Early surveys show occupancy in short-term rentals across Colorado has fallen in five of the first six months of the year.
Wolfe said the return to “a more normalized pattern” of travel coming out of the exceptionally busy months after the pandemic, coupled with more state and federal funding for affordable housing, is alleviating some of the concerns about increasing tourism impacts.
When Colorado voters slashed tourism funding in 1993 — eliminating a tourism-marketing budget of $12 million — the state’s ranking among travelers dropped from first place to 17th. In 2000, lawmakers reinstated funding for tourism promotion. The state lost an estimated $2 billion a year in tourism revenue when tourism promotion went dark in the 1990s, according to Longwoods. Longwoods uses the funding cut as what it calls a “cautionary tale for financial decision-makers” who may be tempted to cut tourism marketing dollars.
Right now Wolfe’s tourism office is working to grow international traffic — which has never recovered from the pandemic decline — as well as extending the length of stay of overnight visitors. The average stay for Colorado vacationers in 2023 was 4.4 nights, the lowest in six years and below the long-term average.
“If we could fill those resorts with six- to seven-night stays through the winter, it would be much easier for those communities and the environments,” Wolfe said, noting how shorter visits stress lodging staff with more turnovers while longer stays provide more revenue with fewer impacts.