The National Parks' Lodging Problem

Above, how does $600/night to stay at Yellowstone's Old Faithful Inn sound to you? Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Years ago, my family and I stayed at Zion National Park Lodge and Bryce Canyon National Park Lodge. At the time, I never heard any complaints of any high lodging prices from my parents.

But that was then.

Today, concessionaires who run national park hotels and lodges seem to be gouging the public with outrageous prices of accommodations.

The National Parks Traveler reported:

There are, across the National Park System, rising lodging rates that likely block a wide segment of Americans from experiencing a night or two in the some of the system's most iconic lodges and cabins. Places like Lake Hotel and the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone, El Tovar at the Grand Canyon, the Ahwahnee in Yosemite, Cavallo Point at Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Jenny Lake Lodge in Grand Teton, the Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier.

These are places where nightly rates can quickly climb past $400, with some approaching and surpassing $1,000 a night, depending on the season and occasion. And with the National Park Service's willingness to allow concessionaires to charge whatever the market will bear for some accommodations, rates will only go higher.

But where do you — can you? — strike a balance between a company's right to make a profit and the right of Americans to visit the national parks their tax dollars help support?

That question surfaces in the wake of a story from WyoFile, a nonprofit news organization in Wyoming, that looked at the cost of spending a night in one of the historic lodges in Yellowstone National Park. In roughly half the lodging rooms in the park, at the Old Faithful Inn, Lake Hotel, and Canyon Village, the Park Service lets concessionaire charge whatever they can get. That approach has led to dizzying nightly rates that have climbed above $400 a night — a 55 percent increase in just the past five years — at the historic Old Faithful Inn, according to WyoFile.

"Sadly the average American will be priced out of our national parks," wrote one Traveler follower on Facebook after reading the Wyofile story.

The practice to let concessionaires charge whatever they like for some lodgings dates at least to 2017, when it surfaced at Yellowstone as part of an unannounced five-year pilot project.

To read more, go here.