Colorado once again breaks tourism records with 31% increase in travelers in the last decade
Colorado hosted 93.3 million visitors who spent $28.3 billion in 2023. Spending by tourists supported 188,000 jobs and generated $1.8 billion in state and local tax revenue in 2023.
Chris Dillmann/Vail Daily archive
The Colorado tourism industry is still on a tear. Since 2010 — minus the global meltdown in travel during the pandemic years — Colorado has hosted record numbers of visitors leaving record-setting amounts of cash in their wake.
A total of 93.3 million travelers in Colorado spent $28.3 billion in 2023. Both those numbers are all-time highs. For reference, that compares with what was then a record in 2014, when 71.3 million visitors spent $18.6 billion in Colorado.
There are more travelers spending more in Colorado than ever before, according to Longwoods International, a visitor research firm that began tallying the impacts of U.S. tourism in the 1980s. Colorado was the first state to engage Longwoods to survey visitors in 1986.
“It’s great to keep it moving in the right direction,” said Tim Wolfe, the head of the Colorado Tourism Office.
Longwoods’ 82-page 2023 report identifies travelers who came to Colorado after seeing an ad campaign or promotional materials promoting the state as a vacation destination. The Colorado Tourism Office spends $12.7 million a year on media advertising, with $11 million of that directed toward the state’s 12-year-old “Come To Life” campaign and the remaining spent on the office’s “Do Colorado Right” ads, which this year, for example, focused on how to stay safe in Colorado with messages that promote life vests around the state’s lakes and fire safety when camping.
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