Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct net taxable lodging sales data.
When it comes to quantifying exactly how busy the town of Breckenridge was during ski season, things can get a bit tricky.
There are a handful of data sets that the short-term rental and tourism industries rely on, yet there isn’t one that paints the whole picture. Despite this, there are certain indicators these industries look to in order to gauge how busy the ski season was.
Both industries largely rely on short-term rental data — such as average daily rates, length of stay, and nights booked — to get an idea of how many visitors were in town during the ski season.
The Breckenridge Tourism Office utilizes a software called Key Data to get a snapshot of how booked short-term rental properties in the town were during ski season. Public relations director Melissa Andrews said that the data the tourism office pulled May 5 shows that guest night bookings were up 2% year over year. She said this is fairly flat.
Andrews said that while Key Data captures data from most short-term rental properties in Breckenridge, it does not capture every single one.
Property management companies in the area also use Key Data software to get short-term rental data in addition to another software called DestiMetrics.
President of Breckenridge Resorts Managers Toby Babich uses data from both Key Data and DestiMetrics. Babich said that by comparing both data sets, he found that December was up in occupancy, January was flat in occupancy and February was also flat in occupancy for bookings in short-term rental properties. Additionally March was flat in occupancy and April was down in occupancy.
“Quantifying data is so complicated because timeshares don’t participate, hotels don’t participate and each data set is made up of different rental units,” Babich said. “On top of all of that, that doesn’t even count the owner-managed vacation rentals in town.”
While getting exact numbers on how many tourists Breckenridge saw in a given ski season can be tough, there are trends that these industries can pick up on based on the data they have.
One key piece of data is the average daily rates people pay to stay in short-term rentals. This is telling of how high, or low, the demand is.
According to Babich, Breckenridge short-term rental properties saw average daily rates remain fairly flat year-over-year up until April. Key Data statistics showed that the average daily rate dropped from $284 to $244 year over year. He said this 15 percentage point drop is fairly significant and was largely due to the timing of Easter.
Executive director of the Summit Alliance of Vacation Rental Managers Julie Koster said the data she finds to be the most telling of how busy the ski season was is lodging tax data.
Breckenridge requires hotels, motels, bed and breakfasts, property management companies and homeowners who short-term lease their properties to collect sales tax and public accommodation tax. The town often refers to these as the short-term lodging tax.
Breckenridge collects a 3.4% public accommodation tax and a 2.5% sales tax on all sales of lodging services.
Koster said she finds this data set to be more encompassing, as it does include insight into hotels and motels bookings that would have been left out of the data Key Data and DestiMetrics collects.
The most up-to-date information Breckenridge has on net taxable lodging sales is from February. The town’s data showed properties generated $46,896,490 in December 2022 and $43,986,908 in December 2023 in net taxable lodging sales. The town saw $47,461,191 in January of 2023 and $45,878,546 in January 2024 in net taxable lodging sales, which is a 3.33% drop year over year. In February 2023 the town recorded $45,736,673 and in February 2024 it reported $40,937,923. February’s net taxable lodging sales saw a 10.49% drop year over year.
As far as visitation numbers for Breckenridge Ski Resort, its owner Vail Resorts generally keeps those stats for individual resorts close to the chest. Vail Resorts did recently release visitation stats that encompassed how many visitors all 37 of its North American ski resorts had. The Colorado Sun reported March 18 that skier visits are down 9.7% across the 37 North American resorts that Vail Resorts owns.
