The Park City Chamber of Commerce says preliminary data shows visitation for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival was down 20% compared to before the pandemic.
But Park City still saw crowds and gridlock. By all accounts the town was just as busy as it was during Sundance 2020. Dan Howard is Vice President of Communications for the Chamber of Commerce, which keeps tabs on the town’s economy.
“They saw a lot of traffic on that first weekend,” Howard said. “But honestly, by the second week of Sundance, things were actually moving pretty smoothly through town.”
Statisticians and government officials use hotel and short term rental occupancy rates to estimate how many visitors Summit County gets during Sundance.
Howard said occupancy was up because far more skiers were in town during the ten day time period.
“It isn't like it's exclusively Sundance deriving that occupancy, because we also were in the middle of a really strong ski season in January,” Howard said. “And so we had some good numbers, but it wasn't attributable completely to Sundance.”
He said more skiers and fewer moviegoers overall is not a bad thing for the town, economically speaking.
“In the tourism world, our ideal scenario is: being able to have Sundance in town instead of 100% virtual, but not have it disrupt the town and not have it displace the opportunity to ski, when we only have 16 weeks a year that we can ski,” Howard said. “It's important that those 10 days and Sundance be a combination of both moviegoers, and skiers.”
This February, the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah released the annual State of Utah’s Tourism and Travel Industry report. It uses different data sources than Park City, but their numbers confirm that overall visitation was the same during Sundance 2020 and Sundance 2023.
Jennifer Leaver, the report's author, said from Jan. 19 to Jan. 29 this year hotels were 62.7% full, and short term rentals were 63% full in Summit County—virtually the same as Sundance 2020.
Visitation took a hit in 2021 when Sundance went virtual, and recovered negligibly the following year. But in 2023, Sundance went hybrid, showing movies in person for the first time since 2020, as well as online.
The university report also confirmed that the ski industry is strong. The 2021-2022 ski season saw all-time highs in visitation and total skier spending statewide. That’s without much help from international skiers too, whose visitation rates have not recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Time will tell if this year’s heavy snowfall increased skier and skier spending even further.
Park City’s Chamber of Commerce publishes data on future bookings, which helps the city know how many visitors to expect. As of Feb. 15, fewer rooms were booked for the next two months than were booked in 2022.
Click here to read the full tourism report from the University of Utah.
