Summit County vacation rentals saw fewer overnight bookings this Fourth of July weekend compared to last year, marking what experts say is a continued softening in the lodging industry. 

For the week of July 1-8, which captures both Independence Day weekends for 2024 and 2023, occupancy was down anywhere from 5% to 10% in areas of the county excluding Breckenridge, according to Summit Alliance of Vacation Rental Managers Executive Director Julie Koster. 

In Breckenridge, occupancy was down 11% year over year between June 28 and July 7, according to the town’s tourism office, which pulls statistics from Key Data, similarly to Koster’s group, based on large sample sizes. 

The figures continue a post-pandemic trend that has seen lodging in the county either decline or flatten over the last two years. Some of the county’s busiest periods, be it Spring Break or Presidents Day weekend, have seen fewer overnight bookings in those years compared to 2022 and 2021 — blockbuster years when tourists flocked to mountain communities to escape more urban, pandemic-gripped centers. 

“I think the pandemic hangover continues to be a problem,” said Koster, whose organization represents roughly 4,500 vacation rental properties in Summit County. “People are behaving very differently than they were before the pandemic when it comes to travel.”

Despite gas prices and inflation being lower than a year ago, other factors like high interest rates, which impact credit card payments, are contributing to a paradoxical economic landscape. U.S. consumer sentiment remains uneven across the income spectrum, with recent reports indicating consumers are cutting back their spending on travel and hospitality. 

But while occupancy rates look more and more like those of pre-pandemic years, the cost of doing business continues to go up. 

“Generally when you’re running a business where costs continue to go up, you raise your pricing,” Koster said. “But, in our case, we can’t continue to do that because we’d out-price our market. So there comes a tipping point.”

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Between July 1-8, the average daily rate was $253 per night, up just $5 from that same time last year. The average daily rate on July 4 this year was $261, only $1 more than it was that day last year. 

“They’re trying really hard to hold the line on price,” Koster said of vacation rental managers. 

In Breckenridge, rates were lower than last year. Data from roughly 3,300 Breckenridge-area vacation properties show the average daily rate for the end of June and first week of July was $3 less than it was in 2023, while per-room revenue was down 8%, according to the Breckenridge Tourism Office. 

“I think we rely on a family market, and families, probably more than anybody, are facing more financial pressure with their financial income,” said Breckenridge Tourism Office Director of Operations Bill Wishowski.

Still, Wishowski said the town felt “comfortably busy” over Independence Day weekend, with a popular parade drawing heavy foot traffic up and down Main Street. 

“I think the thing that I would take away here is, while the lodging numbers may show business being down year over year, business in Breckenridge was still pretty robust over that Fourth of July period,” Wishowski said. 

Looking towards the rest of the summer, Wishowski described a mixed-bag, with a lull in the second-half of July and a boost in August — possibly due to a later start to the school year.

July, to date, has seen 27% of all available nights booked countywide, according to Koster, down from 33% last year. So far in August, booked nights are up 8% compared to last year while in September, nights are down almost 20%, with Koster adding one reason could be because of an earlier Labor Day weekend. 

Koster said she hopes to see booking numbers increase before the end of the summer, adding that a slowdown in lodging can have a ripple effect on all sectors of the county’s economy. 

“I think there is a balance to be struck somewhere,” Koster said. “The last thing we want is for our places to be loved to death. But at the same time we’ve also built, at least in Summit County, an economy on tourism. So how do we manage that in  a way that continues to support what we’ve built?”