The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“It’s very typical in a snow-hangover year”
by Katherine Nettles
Looking ahead to winter, Gunnison County leaders are preparing for the possibilities of continued flat tourism revenues, and hoping the Super El Nino strikes heavily in the north valley to bring in more visitors and more overall stoke.
The Gunnison Valley Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) and Gunnison County Tourism and Prosperity Partnership (TAPP) are working out the details of visitor expectations and flight schedules into the Gunnison-Crested Butte Airport (GUC) from December through March. During the RTA’s regular board meeting last month, the board heard from several sources that winter is so far looking lean among visitor plans, and people may be waiting to see if, and where, the snow lands across the Rocky Mountain West.
TAPP executive director Andrew Sandstrom said visitation to the Gunnison Valley has been slightly down this late summer and fall and it appears that is the current outlook for winter. “Visitation was definitely down in July,” he said. “But we saw lodging tax collections up in both Crested Butte, Mt. Crested Butte and the county will also likely be up,” he said as numbers get reconciled after some late reporting. “Things like restaurants were down,” he said, which tracks with TAPP location tracking that showed fewer visitors. He said August visitation volume was also down from last year, which may have been related to earlier school starting dates in Texas. He said there was a little uptick in early September, and then late September was showing about flat with 2025.
Looking ahead at the winter, “We’re pacing slightly behind in December, then flat to slightly up in January and February, and slightly down in March. We did launch our full winter marketing campaign a little over a week ago,” said Sandstrom. He said this includes flight messaging and the hope is to get people filling air seats from Chicago, Denver, Houston and Dallas.
Air service
RTA air consultant Bill Tomcich said August summer flight data isn’t quite finalized yet but will be record-breaking either way. American Airlines did report a 79% load factor out of Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) for August after reporting an 89% load factor in July, “which is really extraordinary for new, daily non-stop service from DFW,” said Tomcich. “They’re clearly going to be very pleased with that.” Tomcich said United Airlines didn’t appear to be too affected by the new competition from American out of DFW. “They were down a little bit,” he said.
Boutique airline JSX reduced capacity into GUC with American in the market but still ran an 80% load factor. United will continue to run three flights daily from Denver through October 25, and then will drop to twice daily flights for November through mid-December. “Then the full winter schedules are set to take place on December 17,” said Tomcich.
American plans to double their frequency this winter, maintaining two flights daily from DFW for the entire winter, which would be a capacity increase of 59%. Tomcich said American is known for making tweaks as things get closer and could make capacity reductions later.
In a memo accompanying his presentation, Tomcich noted, “All told, GUC is currently scheduled to see a 14% increase in total seats this winter versus last—the only mountain town scheduled to receive double-digit growth over last year at this point.”
United plans to keep its three daily flights through Denver this winter, and its Houston flights the same with one daily flight from December 17 through March 27 supported through a minimum revenue guarantee (MRG) with the RTA. United service for Chicago is expected to remain the same as last year with weekend-only flights over the holidays, in February and March and a break in January. Tomcich said that was “disappointing news” resulting from the US Department of Transportation having not approved an amended grant.
The original grant was issued in 2001 to support summer American service from DFW to GUC, and it is approaching expiration. Tomcich said American then came in at their own risk and no longer needs that grant for GUC.
“The good news is we ended up getting what the grant was supposed to do, which is service out of DFW.”
The hope is to get additional funding support for Chicago in the future.
Tomcich said the more immediate hope is that a Super El Nino weather system will impact central and southern Colorado positively. “Winter bookings are soft across the industry,” said Tomcich. “It’s very typical in a snow-hangover year,” he said.
“There’s definitely a lot of pent-up skier demand,” he said. “And clearly they’re not booking yet, throughout the entire industry. There are a lot of skiers out there waiting to see who really is going to get the snow this winter and we’ll see a surge when that happens.”
