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A record 96.8 million travelers in Colorado spent $29.2 billion in 2025, a slight increase from 2024 and a continuation of a nearly 10-year record-setting streak for the state’s robust tourism economy.
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But the slowing growth of tourism traffic and spending, reported by the Colorado Tourism Office on Tuesday, reveals a troubling trend: Colorado’s signature tourism industry is losing steam.
“Flat is good news, but it’s tough news,” said Tim Wolfe, the director of the Colorado Tourism Office.
After a decade of record-setting growth, 2025 marks the second year in a row with insignificant improvement in the tourism economy that supports large swaths of rural Colorado, especially in the mountains. And 2026 “is not looking so rosy,” Wolfe said.
Business travel is down. Small-spending single-day visitors are surging. The international visitors who stay long and spend big remain at critically low levels, unable to reach 2019 counts and “significantly below” the peak year of 2015, Wolfe said.
And the Colorado Tourism Office budget of $19.3 million — $1 million less than last year as typically set aside for tourism promotion for this year — has not moved in a decade, ranking below Wyoming, half of New Mexico and a fraction of California’s marketing budget.
“We are competing in the West both domestically and internationally for these travelers, and we have lost share of those travelers for the last four years straight,” Wolfe said. “I’m grateful for every dollar that the legislators approve for us, but I know we can do a lot more with a little more investment, which in turn gives local communities more money in their general funds.”
After a dismal winter that decimated ski resort traffic — which followed a slow summer for Colorado’s tourist-dependent communities — tourism boosters would typically be assembling sweeping ad campaigns to right the state’s tourism ship. There are more than two dozen communities where voters have raised lodging taxes and redirected revenue away from tourism marketing toward things like housing, roads and public safety.
“We are seeing a number of yellow flags,” said Dave Santucci, whose Mission2Market consulting firm helps promote travel to more than two dozen Colorado destinations. “We are certainly not in a crisis as a state but our growth trajectory is very anemic.”
$819 in tax revenue for every Colorado household
The reports from Longwoods International — which has analyzed Colorado’s tourism industry since the early 1990s — and Dean Runyan Associates show there were 1,160 fewer travel-generated jobs in 2025, marking a small, but rare decline.
Visitor-dependent business owners and their workers earned more, with tourist-generated earnings reaching $10.5 billion, up 1.6% from 2024. Since 2015, earnings from visitors have climbed an average of 6.8% a year. The past two years have been the same smallest increases in earnings in the last decade.
The lodging and restaurant industries, which employ more than 1 million workers in Colorado, lead the state’s tourism economy with $4.7 billion in earnings in 2025.
State and local governments collected $1.9 billion in tax revenue from tourists in 2025, a slight increase over the previous year. That amounts to about $819 in taxes generated from visitors for every household in the state. Since 2015, tax revenue from visits has increased 5.3% a year and, again, the past two years have seen the smallest annual increases in tax revenue.
The annual analysis of the economic impact of travelers by Dean Runyan Associates again ranks Denver as the state’s top draw in 2025, with visitors spending $14.2 billion and businesses supporting those visitors employing 74,180 workers who earned $5.6 billion.
Next was the Western Slope and mountains — which the Dean Runyon group breaks into three distinct regions spanning 25 counties. Visitors to those high country counties in western Colorado spent $8.5 billion, with 59,040 workers hosting those visitors earning $2.9 billion.
The 29,560 workers in the region defined as the “Rockies Playground”— Clear Creek, Eagle, Garfield, Gunnison, Lake, Park, Pitkin and Summit counties — earned $1.6 billion, accounting for the largest percentage of Colorado’s overall tourism economy earnings due to the high costs of living and higher wages in the state’s mountain communities.
1 million more daytrippers in 2025
The annual study by Florida-based Longwoods International counted 40.2 million overnight and 56.6 million day trips in Colorado in 2025. That’s an increase of 400,000 overnight trips and 1 million day trips compared with 2024.
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That spike in day traffic is troubling. Overnighters spend about $600 a day, accounting for $24 billion of the more than $29 billion in total spending last year. Daytrippers spend about $107 a day.
The Colorado Tourism Office can fix that imbalance with the right ad campaign, Wolfe said. The state’s winter marketing effort was awarded top prizes for return on investment, for every dollar spent on the ads. Travel research firm SMARI ranked Colorado’s winter marketing campaign at the top of all the cold-season promotional efforts it has measured at dozens of destinations and states.
Those campaigns bring visitors from afar who stay longer and spend more on a variety of activities and events.
“The international traveler does not cancel and is much more weather resistant,” said Wolfe, noting that long-haul visitors rarely cancel planned holidays due to low snow, which happened quite often last winter when visits to ski areas plummeted to the lowest level since 1992. “We help them see there are other things to do, like hot springs and restaurants and snowmobiling.”
Those other things are increasingly important after last winter, as mountain communities felt the pinch of over-reliance on lift-riding skiers who did not show up when the snow failed to arrive.
Attracting visitors between weekends and in the offseasons helps to flatten the peaks and valleys that stress visitor-dependent communities that feel too busy on weekends and too slow at other times.
“If we can get people to stay for a week, it can be better for the environment, better for the community and there are wins across the board,” Wolfe said.
Overnight outdoors trips soar
Business travel fell 11% in 2025, while the state saw slight increases in overnighters visiting resorts, attending special events and touring.
The number of folks heading on overnight trips into the outdoors of Colorado soared, with 6.1 million trips, up 22% from 2024, marking the steepest annual increase Longwoods has tracked in the past 20 years. That’s a sign that the Colorado Tourism Office’s efforts to promote off-the-beaten path travel is working, Wolfe said, pointing to flat visitation in 2025 at Rocky Mountain National Park and .
The largest traveler base for Colorado’s tourism economy remains Colorado residents, who accounted for 23% of all overnight trips. Next are California, Texas, New York and Florida. And 31% of overnighters are visiting friends or relatives, with 15% pursuing outdoor recreation, 14% touring, 8% attending special events and 6% visiting cities.
The average overnight visitors spent 4.1 nights in the state, down slightly from 2024.
When Longwoods asked travelers to define their travel style, the top response prioritized affordability. The state hosted fewer repeat visitors in 2025, and only 63% of overnight visitors said they were “very likely” to return to Colorado.
And again, not surprisingly, the state’s tourism champions warn the ground is fertile for advertising that can increase return visitors and reveal the value in a Colorado holiday.
It starts with locals recognizing the importance of tourism promotion, said Santucci, who sees the benefits of investment in Colorado promotion reaching well beyond tourism businesses. With a strong tourism economy that appeals to visitors, more workers will want to relocate to Colorado and support local businesses, he said.
“In order to have economic stability and growth we need to be competitive because other states have increased their investment in tourism, and this year we are running at less than half of national growth,” Santucci said. “We are not being competitive. The pie is growing but our slice of the pie is not.”
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