Steamboat Chamber event offers winter business perspective

Hours before a wintry storm system approached the Steamboat Springs area Monday evening, members of the local business community gathered at a local hotel to hear about an economic forecast compiled for the upcoming season.

“We are looking solid, it is comparable to years past, we are not seeing a huge dip or a huge increase either way,” said Steamboat Chamber Executive Director Sarah Leonard.

Leonard spoke at a Steamboat Chamber event hosted at the Holiday Inn with presentations delivered from local officials including Janet Fischer, who directs airline programs for the Steamboat Ski Resort, and Yampa Valley Regional Airport Director Kevin Booth.

For this coming season, YVRA will host flights from six major airlines to include nonstop flights to major airports including Atlanta, Nashville, Boston and Fort Lauderdale.

While the flight routes remain strong, Fischer explained that arriving seats for Southwest Airlines are expected to drop from 64,000 last year to roughly 51,000 this winter.

“Southwest is going through some challenges, mainly because their aircraft are predominately 100% Boeing — they don’t have any mixture of aircraft types, and Boeing is having some issues right now,” Fischer said.

With the sustained capacity at the airport, Booth discussed planned upgrades to the airport grounds that he hopes will help handle the added volume.

Booth explained that the airport paid $1.5 million for a study to consider recent passenger volume growth rate to create a projected rate that would require additional infrastructure for the 75,000-square-foot premises.

The airport manager said the firm hired to explore the expansion designs would complete their work by the end of 2025. “At the beginning of 2026, we need to bid, and we are going to be prepared to bid to expand our terminal,” he said.

In 2024, Booth said passenger enplanements are expected to jump to near 238,000, up from the roughly 214,000 recorded by the end of 2023 — both annual records.

“We had a really good growth period … and now we have kind of plateaued from a world record — for us, a world record — so that is really not a bad thing,” said Booth.