Lodging in the National Park System isn't getting any less expensive. Singer Cottages at Olympic National Park rented for nearly $400 a night this year/Rebecca Latson file

If you stayed in a national park lodge this summer, you already know.  If you haven’t visited a park lodge for several years, and are in the planning stage for next year, be prepared for sticker shock, because overnight stays in many national park lodges won’t be cheap.  We’re not referring to nearly $1,000 nightly (plus $105 in taxes) this past summer for a one-room cabin in Grand Teton National Park’s Jenny Lake Lodge or $1,200 for a suite in Yosemite National Park’s Ahwahnee Hotel. These upscale lodges are meant for wealthy travelers rather than middle-income families.  

While national park entrance fees remain one of America’s great travel bargains, it has become increasingly expensive to spend a night in the majority of national park lodges. Consider paying $290 to $350 nightly (plus taxes and fees) for a night in Thunderbird Lodge on the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, $400 for a Singer Cottage with one queen bed in Olympic National Park’s Lake Crescent Lodge, or $765 for a Deluxe Lakeside room in Glacier National Park’s Many Glacier Hotel. Perhaps even more staggering, a canvas tent with a single light bulb but no heat or electrical outlet is priced at $180 plus tax for summer 2025 in Yosemite’s Curry Village.

Commercial facilities within national parks are government-owned, but privately-operated. The National Park Service (NPS) solicits proposals from private companies to operate park gift shops, restaurants, lodges and other commercial facilities. Lodge contracts generally cover a period of 10 years, at the end of which a new prospectus is issued for bidders seeking to operate the facility for the following ten years. Contracts are quite detailed and typically include required repairs, renovations, fees to be paid to the park and more. While private companies manage national park commercial operations, NPS superintendents retain general oversight of prices visitors are charged for lodging, food and other items sold within their park.

Short seasons, such as the roughly three-month season for the cabins at Tower-Roosevelt in Yellowstone, can make it tough for concessionaires to make ends meet/Rebecca Latson file

Financial Trip Lines

Multiple factors contribute to the costly rates travelers pay for lodging in the national parks. Facilities at many parks must cope with limited seasons. Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier National Park is generally open from late May through mid-September, four months during which the operator strives to generate revenue for an entire year. Yellowstone’s Old Faithful Inn welcomes guests approximately five months each year. A smaller Yellowstone lodging facility, Roosevelt Lodge and Cabins, is typically open for only three months. Operating a business profitably during such short seasons is likely to require lofty prices.   

Both the National Park Service and its concessionaires find it expensive to maintain and operate historic facilities in isolated locations. Park facilities are often quite old and require hefty maintenance expenses.  Yosemite’s Wawona Hotel (which will close in December for an indefinite time) dates from the 1870s, while Yellowstone’s Old Faithful Inn and Grand Canyon’s El Tovar are each approaching 120 years of age. Glacier’s Many Glacier Hotel and Lake McDonald Lodge are not far behind. 

Wawona Hotel is closing for repairs/NPS file

Historic buildings require continual maintenance combined all too frequently with major expenditures for repair of foundations, plumbing, roofs, electrical wiring and more. When historic facilities are in isolated locations, maintenance expenses can be even more burdensome. North Cascades Lodge in Lake Chelan National Recreation Area is located at the north end of a 55-mile-long lake and has no road access. Imagine the cost of roofing a building or stabilizing a foundation. 

Work on historic structures must often meet requirements that significantly increase cost. Check the design of shingles on the cabins and main lodge at Bryce Canyon National Park and consider the extra expense of roofing these buildings. The National Park Service spent more than $30 million over 11 years for restoration work on Yellowstone’s Old Faithful Inn and millions more to update Lake Hotel. Tens of millions of dollars were spent on foundation and renovation work at Paradise Inn in Mount Rainier National Park. 

Costs are magnified when facilities must be partially or totally closed with no revenues coming in either for the park or the operator. The Chateau at the Oregon Caves in Oregon Caves National Monument has been closed since 2018 for renovation work that uncovered structural issues. There is no current timetable for when the lodge may reopen, meaning the facility may fail to produce any revenue for over a decade.

National parks are frequently in scenic, but isolated locations that entail an above-average risk of property loss due to natural disasters.

• Yellowstone’s Old Faithful Inn was nearly lost in 1988 to a destructive wildfire. 
• Drakesbad Guest Ranch in Lassen Volcanic National Park suffered extensive damage including the loss of several lodging units during a 2021 wildfire that closed the property for four years. 
• Rockslides, flooding and wildfires have on occasion overwhelmed commercial facilities in Yosemite National Park’s busy Yosemite Valley. 
• The lodging complex in Everglades National Park was destroyed in 2005 by hurricanes Katrina and Wilma and only recently reopened with a new lodging facility built of storage containers.
• Kalaloch Lodge in Olympic National Park was forced to remove 10 of its most popular cabins in 2024 following winter storms that battered the Pacific coastline on which the cabins were located.

Nature can be especially destructive in areas where many of America’s national park lodges are located.

Parks Not Immune From Inflation

The expense of maintaining national park lodges helps explain the high prices visitors must pay for guest rooms, but doesn’t fully account for substantial rate increases occurring at many of the lodges.  That the expense of staying in park lodges has been increasing should come as no surprise: consumers have been suffering rising prices for everything from eggs to autos. However, rate increases at many national park lodges have significantly outpaced growth in overall consumer prices.  

A guest room in Kachina, one of six lodging facilities on the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, nearly doubled in price ($210 to $400) between 2014 and 2024. This represents an annualized increase of 6.5 percent during a period when overall consumer prices increased less than 3 percent annually. Currently, rooms in Kachina are available for $346 for a July 2025 stay. The tent in Yosemite’s Curry Village mentioned earlier and priced at $175 this past summer rented for $40 a night 25 years earlier during our 1999 visit. This equates to a 6.1 percent annual increase during a period when consumer prices grew at 2.5 percent annually.  

Not all park lodge room prices increased at such lofty rates.  Kiva rooms (formerly designated Standard rooms) at Far View Lodge in Mesa Verde National Park rented for $96 during our 1999 stay and were priced at $176 per night for 2024, an annual increase of 2.5 percent, the same as the rate of increase in the consumer price index. Unfortunately, cost increases in Mesa Verde are the exception, rather than the rule.

The accompanying graph illustrates the degree to which national park lodge guest room price increases have outpaced: 1) increases in overall consumer prices and, 2) a St. Louis Federal Reserve index of room costs at hotels and motels. The national park lodge index is based on room rates at a sample of 21 lodges visited by the two of us beginning in 1999, the initial year we began tracking room prices during travel to the parks.  Lodge prices for 2024 were gathered during late winter and early spring of the same year.  The sample represents approximately a quarter of the lodges in America’s national parks. 

Each data point is calculated using the same room class for the observation period. For example, the same room category was used for Mesa Verde’s Far View Lodge for the entire 25 years. Room rates for the overall sample increased approximately 170 percent during the past two-and-a-half decades, while consumer prices and the cost of hotel and motel rooms increased by 91 percent and 87 percent, respectively.  Based on the sample, the last 25 years have seen national park room rates increase at approximately double the rate of both consumer prices and public lodging at hotels and motels. 

It's The Economics

Why such a major jump in prices for national park lodging?

A basic principle of economics (if there is such a thing) is price tends to rise when quantity demanded increases more rapidly than quantity supplied. The principle applies to national park lodging as well as a loaf of bread or a pound of hamburger. Many national parks have experienced substantial increases in visitation at the same time the supply of available guest rooms has barely budged. The number of guest rooms available in Yellowstone National Park’s nine lodges is approximately the same today as 25 years ago. During the same period, annual visitation increased by nearly 50 percent, from 3.1 million to 4.5 million. Visitation to Zion National Park nearly doubled during the last 25 years without an increase in lodge rooms.  Bryce Canyon represents another national park in which lodge rooms remained unchanged while visitation more than doubled. 

Putting new shingles on the cabins at Bryce Canyon can be an expensive proposition/Kurt Repanshek file

Increased demand for an unchanged number of rooms permits park management, along with its private concessionaires that operate the lodges, to increase room rates and still remain fully booked. Keeping in mind park superintendents have the ultimate say over pricing of guest rooms, economic forces in national parks can be offset by policy decisions.

Lodging concessionaires in the national parks since 1998 have been required to check room rates of comparable facilities outside their parks as part of justifying to park authorities their own proposed lodging rates. Locating comparable facilities can be difficult or even impossible in some of the more remote national parks like Glacier Bay, Big Bend, and North Cascades. 

In 2017 the National Park Service quietly introduced a new system for pricing guest rooms at selected park lodges by designating categories of rooms as either core or non-core. Rooms designated core would continue to be priced utilizing the existing system of basing room rates on the cost of comparable rooms outside the parks. Rooms designated non-core would be priced at what the market would bear.  Within the latter category some lodges or room groups in a particular lodge would be subject to major price increases and likely vary in price throughout the season or even during a particular day, depending upon demand. This system has long been utilized by most hotel chains in pricing their guest rooms. Try booking a room in Indianapolis during the week of the Indy 500.

The bottom line is that under the revised system of pricing travelers can expect a continuation of significant increases in room rates in national park lodges so long as park visitation continues strong.

Paying The Parks

As mentioned, national parks collect a franchise fee from concessionaires for commercial use of park facilities. Whether a concessionaire sells firewood, rents bicycles, offers trail rides, operates a restaurant, or rents lodge rooms in a national park, the park collects an agreed upon cut of the money collected.  The fee included in the contract is generally stated as a percentage of gross revenues collected by the concessionaire. A National Park Service prospectus seeking proposals typically specifies a minimum percentage rate, while making clear a bidder may offer a higher rate to boost the chance of winning the contract.  

The most-recent prospectus issued by the National Park Service soliciting proposals for operating lodging and food service in Zion National Park stipulated a minimum fee structure of 12 percent of the first $5 million collected, 25 percent of the next $15 million collected, and 30 percent of all revenues above $20 million.  With a NPS forecast for 2025 of $20 million in revenues, the park could be expected to siphon off 19 percent of the concessionaire’s revenues.  The contract also required an additional 5 percent of revenues be diverted for repair and maintenance and 3 percent of revenues contributed to a component renewal reserve for non-recurring expenses such as major plumbing or foundation work. Overall, the concessionaire will be required to turn over approximately 30 percent of total revenues, or $6 million annually, to the park. According to the National Park Service prospectus, Zion’s motel units will be classified as core, while higher-demand cabins will be considered non-core. 

The cabins at Zion National Park rent for whatever the market will bear/Rebecca Latson file

Concessionaires required to turn over a relatively high percentage of revenues to a park can be expected to seek increased prices for their products and services. For lodges this translates to higher room rates along with increased prices for food sold to park visitors.  While park superintendents retain authority over prices charged by the park concessionaires, higher prices for lodge rooms produce additional revenue for the park as well as the concessionaire. Everyone benefits from increased prices ... other than park visitors who end up with thinner wallets and lighter purses.

In theory, large price increases for a good or service should stimulate an increase in supply.  In the case of park lodges this would entail construction of new lodging inside the parks, an unlikely prospect.  Imagine the public uproar and lawsuits if the National Park Service proposed construction of major new lodging facilities in Yosemite Valley or the Old Faithful area of Yellowstone. 

Busy parks sometimes attract visitor facilities on private land nearby park entrances. The town of Tusayan has grown near Grand Canyon’s South Rim entrance station where scheduled bus service into the park is available.  West Yellowstone just outside the west entrance to Yellowstone offers numerous hospitality services. We have found staying outside the parks, no matter how near the park entrances or how nice the facility, doesn’t offer the same experience as an overnight stay inside the park.

In the absence of new in-park lodging capable of absorbing the increasing demand for guest rooms, national park room prices are likely to continue outpacing increases in consumer prices.  If so, more and more Americans will find themselves priced out of stays in their own national parks, with park lodging allocated to families with the financial means to afford increasingly expensive room and food prices.

Many readers will likely call attention to our omission of avoiding high lodge prices by camping. Camping is certainly a lower-cost option for many individuals and families. The two of us enjoyed camping in the national parks for more than 40 years, but our small tent is now gathering mold in the attic. We found sleeping on the ground in a tent isn’t as much fun once you reach your 80s and must walk up a hill to the bathroom in darkness at 11 a.m. and 3 a.m. 

David and Kay Scott are authors of “Complete Guide to the National Park Lodges” (Globe Pequot).  They live in Valdosta, GA.  Visit them at blog.valdosta.edu/dlscott.