Anita Beasley saw a moose, her calf and waterfalls during a boat tour on St. Mary Lake inside Glacier National Park in Montana last September. A teacher and reading specialist for 35 years, Beasley, now retired, lives in South Carolina and has mobility issues. The boat trips enabled her to enjoy parts of the park she could not hike to.

Beasley, her husband and three sons have been visiting national parks for more than 20 years. Glacier, with its melting glaciers, alpine meadows, carved valleys, and lakes, shows up on their top five list of favorite national parks. But after spending about $4,600 last fall (three rooms for six nights), they do not plan to return. They can’t afford to.

“The higher costs this year won’t stop us from going to others, but we will have to remain on a tight budget to keep traveling to the parks. When we started, we would have a week-long trip and not spend near what others spent going to Disney World with their families, but Glacier seemed much closer to the cost of going to a resort park,” she said in an email.

National park visitors can keep their expenses down by buying annual and senior passes, camping, and picnicking. But the privatization of park lodges — occurring since the National Park Service’s (NPS’s) inception — has made stays inside the parks unaffordable for many visitors.

The Paradise Inn at Mount Rainier National Park will cost you more than $300 a night/Rebecca Latson file

Lodging costs “price lower income families out of the national parks and make it very challenging for people to visit our parks,” said Jackie Ostfeld, the Sierra Club’s campaign director for their program, Outdoors for All.

Costs are not preventing people from frequenting the national park; more than 325 million visits were tallied in 2023. Of the 13 million individuals who overnighted in parks last year, almost 3 million stayed in lodging run by concessioners, according to NPS data. But lodging stays are not in everyone’s budget.

“You know, the parks are for everybody, but yet they’re not because they are pricing people out. You can get through the gate, and you can do stuff and enjoy the park for relatively little money. But the lodging part, unless you’re camping, the lodging’s prohibitive,” said Bruce Andersen, a retired U.S. Forest Service environmental planner now living in southwestern Colorado.

Room and cabin rates start at $150 per night at Glacier National Park, said Gina Icenoggle, the park’s public affairs officer in an email.  But next August the price will soar to $766 per night at Many Glacier Hotel, located in the park’s northeastern area, known as the “Switzerland of North America.”  Beasley lucked out last fall — she paid $279 for one night’s stay.

Steep prices are not stopping people from making reservations, oftentimes a year in advance. Of the 114,718 stays in lodging at Glacier in 2023, all but 5,328 were in units managed by the Xanterra Parks and Resorts, Inc., a NPS park concessioner owned by the oil and gas corporation, Anschutz.

Assuming each stay cost a minimum $150 — many rooms cost more —  Xanterra would have received $16,408,500 in revenues. Not all is profit. Of total annual gross receipts, Xanterra is required to pay a 2.0 percent franchise fee and make a 2.35 percent annual contribution to a maintenance and reserve account, said Icenoggle.

In addition, Xanterra “is responsible for the upkeep of over 130 buildings assigned. These buildings can be very complex and expensive to maintain to the standards expected by the National Park Service, some of which are National Historic Landmarks. Most operate seasonally, limiting the time window in which the concessioner can earn revenues sufficient to maintain the facilities. These factors are taken into consideration when setting the franchise fee and maintenance reserve fee,” said Icenoggle. The amount Xanterra paid for upkeep in 2023 was not made available, and the company did not respond to emails.

Concessions contracts across the National Park System (for lodging as well as food, retail, guide and outfitters’ services) generated about $1.4 billion in gross revenues in 2015 and paid about $104 million in franchise fees to the Park Service, according to the Government Accountability Office.

“Fees and other concessions are critical to supporting park operations, however, they shouldn’t increase barriers to such a degree as to make these places — protected for all Americans to experience — inaccessible for some people to visit,” said Emily Douce, deputy vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association.

Sarah E. Light, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has a suggestion to make lodging affordable for all: The Park Service could “require concessioners to reduce fees or adopt a sliding scale of fees to encourage visitors from underserved members of the community.” She discussed this recommendation in her article, National Parks, Incorporated, published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review in 2020.

It is not known if NPS has tried this approach; neither the agency nor Xanterra responded to the Traveler’s inquiries. 

Jenny Lake Lodge carries the most expensive nightly cost for national park travelers/Rebecca Latson

From the beginning, private entities operated in parks. In 1918, Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane described his vision to National Park Service Director Stephen Mather:

“Low-priced camps operated by concessioners should be maintained, as well as comfortable and even luxurious hotels wherever the volume of travel warrants the establishment of these classes of accommodations … All concessions should yield revenue to the Federal Government, but the development of the revenues of the parks should not impose a burden upon the visitor.”

The earliest visitors traveled to the parks by train and stayed in grand hotels, such as the Old Faithful Inn and Grand Canyon Lodge, financed by the railroads.

“National parks at the time were a luxury because you had to have the time and the money to go on that kind of a vacation,” said Ethan Carr, the author of Mission 66, a book about the program the Park Service started in 1956 to modernize the National Park System, including building roads, motels, hotels, campgrounds and shopping centers to meet the huge wave of automotive tourism after World War II.

Today, the Concessions Management Improvement Act authorizes the concessioners and the Park Service to enter into 10-year-long contracts. The contract’s term can be extended up to 20 years if the contract conditions, such as planned construction of capital improvements, warrant an extension. The Park Service sets the lodging rates based on market forces or a comparable financial analysis. 

Prices have increased significantly the past five years, as evidenced by the General Services Administration’s (GSA’s) lodging rates for federal employees staying in Flathead County, Montana, where Glacier is located. The GSA’s per diem lodging rate has skyrocketed 159 percent from $94 in 2018 to $243 in July and August 2024, said Icenoggle.

National park lodges are costly to operate due to their remote location, making it expensive to bring in supplies, and the need to house employees, said Megan Lawson, an economist with Headwaters Economics, a Montana-based independent, nonprofit research firm.

The chart below shows the prices next summer for some of the most expensive park lodging — most costs are more than what a stay at a hotel in New York City would cost during the same time period but without the view a park lodge often offers. 

Xanterra holds contracts to manage lodges on the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park and at Grand Teton, and Yellowstone, in addition to Glacier. The company also owns the Oasis lodgings and golf course on an inholding at Death Valley and operates hotels outside Grand Canyon and Rocky Mountain national parks.

Other major concessioners include Aramark Sports and Entertainment Services, LLC operating in Big Bend, Glacier Bay, Mesa Verde, and Olympic and Yosemite national parks, and Delaware North at Grand Canyon, Sequoia & Kings Canyon, and Shenandoah national parks.

All three concessioners are major corporations:

• Xanterra posts almost $1 billion in top-line revenue and has 8,000 employees, reports Travel Weekly, a news source for the travel industry.
• Aramark’s consolidated revenue in Fiscal Year 2024 is $17.4 billion, according to Morningstar.
• Delaware North’s revenue was $4.38 billion last year, reports Forbes.

Concessioners also manage food operations at the park. While researching her book, Eating in National Parks, Kathleen LeBesco found food ranged in price from fairly affordable typical fare at grills and cafes to super expensive cuisine at Jenny Lake Lodge in Grand Teton National Park, where the lodge's prix fixe meal costs $125 for adults and $70 for children. (Jenny Lake lodging guests have their breakfast and dinners covered in the nightly lodging cost)

“Luxurious, possibly; affordable, definitely not. I’ve never eaten there — I’ll need a raise first,” she said in an email.

Generally speaking, LeBesco describes national park faire as lackluster. Except for the pork osso bucco (braised pork shank over mash potato and spiced carrots) she enjoyed at the Old Faithful Snow Lodge in Yellowstone National Park costing $32 back in 2022, most park food tastes similar to hospital cafeteria food, she said.

Andersen, the retired U.S. Forest Service environmental planner, has a recommendation to keep dining in park lodges affordable: eat your main meal of the day at lunchtime, when entrees generally cost less than they do at dinnertime.

“We especially liked going to lunch” at Zion Lodge, Old Faithful Inn, Jackson Lake Lodge and Bryce Canyon Lodge, he said. “You’d get the elegant dining experience even though you were dirty and sweaty and in shorts and a raggedy T-shirt. You go in and get served by a waiter in a white shirt and black pants and linen napkins. It’s just a nice experience."

LeBesco believes national parks are missing opportunities to use food and foodscapes as a vehicle to interpret the parks’ heritages in displays, exhibits, ranger programs and restaurants.

“I would love to see some kind of incentive or encouragement when the concessions contracts are written to get the concessioners to take this on,” she said.

Meanwhile, there are concerns that privatization could expand during the next Trump administration. During Trump’s first term, there was an effort to raise entrance fees at 17 national parks by 200-300 percent, said Ostfeld.

“That proposal did not go anywhere,” in part because polling showed a fee hike would prevent low-income people from visiting national parks, she said.

But the Trump administration could try again.

The Sierra Club sees efforts to privatize national parks and public lands as a threat to parks’ democratization; with privatization comes a profit motive that does not exist in national parks funded exclusively by taxpayers.

“We want to make sure our parks and public lands are affordable and visited by all. They are our shared lands and our shared heritage,” said Ostfeld.

Or the Trump family could try to locate a hotel in a national park.

“Whether Trump would be able to put his hotels inside a national park isn't clear. It would be a tragedy if his presidency led to our national parks becoming playgrounds for the rich, instead of widely available, affordable and open to the public,” said Ostfeld.