The Park City Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Bureau uses hotel bookings to measure how many tourists visit day-to-day or month-to-month.
Booking numbers from November 2023 to April 2024 beat the previous year by 3% on average, according to Park City Chamber President and CEO Jennifer Wesselhoff.
Still, Park City hotels only beat the average occupancy rate of similar ski resort communities once. That was February, which in 2024 was Park City Mountain’s snowiest February on record.
So Wesselhoff says there’s room to grow.
“Right now, summer's looking really slow,” she told the Summit County Council May 22. “Reservations on the books as of April 30 are pacing about 11% behind where we were this time last year.”
Council Vice Chair Tonja Hanson, who has worked in the lodging industry for Marriott, Park City Mountain, Snowbasin and Sun Valley, said the industry is generally seeing guests book later and later.
“The ‘booking window’ is the window that guests booked between the time they booked to their arrival date,” Hanson said on Local News Hour after the meeting. “And that booking window is getting shorter and shorter.”
So there’s still time for summer tourism to pick up. But with the exception of October, Wesselhoff also notes that Park City usually underperforms during the summer compared to other Mountain West resort areas.
And the chamber isn’t forecasting any growth in the year ahead, winter included.
“We are anticipating to be flat for the upcoming year,” Wesselhoff said. “I think it's just a lot of competition—international competition. The most recent report says that about 39% of Americans are going to be traveling more internationally.”
Average daily rates—how much visitors pay to book a hotel room—are flattening out too, she said.
Rates aren’t falling, but generally the chamber would like fewer people to visit, while also spending more money. That scenario generates the most tax revenue without straining locals and local infrastructure, a key pillar of the chamber’s “sustainable tourism” mission.
