This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
It might be summer, but hotels at Utah mountain resorts still managed to fill almost two-thirds of their rooms nightly during July.
That positive finding from the Rocky Mountain Lodging Report coincides with information from DestiMetrics, another Denver-based company that tracks the lodging industry, that mountain resorts across the West are drawing almost as many visitors now in summer as in winter.
"Occupancy rates for summer 2015 reached 92.5 percent of occupancy rates for the winter of 2015-16," said Tom Foley, DestiMetrics' operations director. "As we track occupancy figures likely to set another record in the summer of 2016, we'll look for that gap between summer and winter occupancy to get even closer."
One major difference between the two, however, involves how much hoteliers can charge in summer as opposed to winter. Right now, summer nightly rates are just 57 percent of what property managers at the 290 companies that DestiMetrics tracks at 19 resort communities in Utah and five other Western states.
During July, the Rocky Mountain Lodging Report noted, Utah's resorts filled 65 percent of their rooms nightly for an average nightly rate of $154. While the occupancy rate topped the nightly average for the first seven months (54.6 percent), the rate obtained by hoteliers was markedly below the year-to-date average of $239.
Hotels in Salt Lake County and across the state were down slightly in July from the same month a year ago.
Statewide, hotels filled 78.4 percent of their rooms nightly last month, down from 79.4 percent a year earlier. That leaves the year-to-date occupancy average at 71 percent, nearly identical to 71.2 percent a year ago.
In Salt Lake County, July's occupancy level was down 1.7 percent to 80.2 percent. For the year, hotels filled 74.9 percent of their rooms compard to 75.9 percent in the first seven months of 2015.