Vacation bookings in Summit County appear to be flat heading into the summer compared to this time last year — a continued cool-down from pandemic-era surges that began in 2021. 

With winter and spring break in the rearview, the county is entering its shoulder season, a time when, historically, bookings slow before rising again during the heart of summer. In 2021 and 2022, however, bookings remained high throughout much of the year, said Toby Babich, president and chief executive officer of Breckenridge Resort Managers.

“The term for it at the time was ‘revenge travel,'” said Babich, who also serves on the board for Summit Alliance of Vacation Rental Managers, a group representing over 4,500 vacation properties in the county.

“People were getting out and going on vacations at less typical times during the shoulder season, and I think that’s starting to normalize,” he continued. 

But since the beginning of last year, trends have begun to reset to prepandemic levels. A review of more than 3,000 rental units in the Breckenridge area from data site Key Data shows that occupancy is down between 1% and 11% for dates in May compared to last year, Babich said. 

“That starts to reverse trend around the end of June with a little bit of a bump in occupancy for the Fourth of July weekend, and then that peaks in August,” Babich said. 

In Breckenridge, tourism officials say they are about 30% of the way to hitting the total number of nightly bookings they had for the Fourth of July period last year. So far, they aren’t seeing any major shifts in occupancy, daily rates or the average length of stay for those bookings compared to this same time in 2023. 

But it’s still “very early in the season” for the upcoming summer, said Breckenridge Tourism Office Director of Operations Bill Wishowski. “If you think of it as a race, we’re about a quarter of the way through the race.”

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If Breckenridge is able to hit a number of stays similar to last year for some of its busiest travel times, like Fourth of July, it would represent a level similar to pre-COVID years. Beginning last year, bookings in the county for major dates declined compared to 2022 and 2021, with last Independence Day weekend seeing lodging numbers closer to 2019. 

Experts chalked it up to a natural calming from the surge in travel driven by the COVID-19 pandemic — with 2024 seeming to continue that course correction. Heading into this winter season, Wishowski predicted bookings would be tight, “and it has been.”

Bookings in Breckenridge for President Day weekend were lagging by late January. March, which was aided by having Easter in its final weekend, saw an 8% drop in bookings in Breckenridge during what is historically its busiest week for spring break. 

For the total month of March, the number of guest nights was down 1% compared to March 2023 while the average daily rate was down by $7 — going from $531 per night to $524. The average length of stay was nearly the same, up by just one-tenth for a total of four nights, Wishowski said. 

Breckenridge isn’t the only resort area seeing flat booking figures. According to an April report by DestiMetrics — a division of Inntopia — data from resort communities across the western U.S. shows that occupancy was down by just 0.3% in March compared to that same time last year.

The report also found that between November and April, representing the entire winter season, occupancy was down 3.7%, according to an analysis of approximately 28,000 lodging units in 17 mountain destination communities. As of March 31, data for May through September shows that occupancy is up 1% compared to last summer.

“When we look at the summer season as of March 31, we see stable numbers that represent manageable business conditions,” stated Tom Foley, senior vice president for business intelligence at Inntopia, in the report. “Frankly, it is what the industry needs — a breather from chaos and a chance to operate amid textbook conditions that can be managed without a slide-rule.”

Babich, the Breckenridge Resort Managers president, said he’ll always “take flat over down” but said he hopes it doesn’t create a trickle-down effect that slows growth for businesses that rely on travelers. 

“We need to keep rooting as much as we can for having a vibrant economy and that exists on people coming up here, visiting and spending their money,” he said.