Those who hoped the Sundance Film Festival would promote Estes Park as a primary event location when the festival moves to Boulder in 2027 left the Visit Estes Park Fall Roundtable on Tuesday morning disappointed.
“I don’t know right now about any expansion beyond Boulder,” said Jeff Levine, arts marketing and communications leader for the Sundance Film Festival coming to Boulder in January 2027. “From what I’ve been told, we have plenty of venues,” Levine told an audience of about 70 people attending the roundtable.
Levine and Charlene Hoffman, Visit Boulder’s CEO, were the primary speakers held in The Pavilion at The Stanley Hotel. The Boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau, popularly known as Visit Boulder, led the effort to attract the Sundance Film Festival to the city last year.
Although direct promotion of the community isn’t currently planned, Hoffman told the audience that Estes Park businesses have the opportunity to attract festival attendees for day trips and overnight stays.
“Sometimes they’ll watch a film in the morning and have the rest of the day free,” she said. Other festival attendees might see a film at night, leaving the daytime open for exploring, she added.
“I would recommend thinking about how you can attract people to Estes Park.” When contemplating opportunities, Estes Park businesses should consider logistics and transportation methods for getting people to the area.
Hoffman told the audience that promoting Boulder to Sundance as a prime location for the festival involved providing information about services and amenities available to attendees.
One element of the proposal focused on the number of lodging facilities within a 40-mile radius of the city, as well as the number of restaurants and the types of food available to festival patrons and artists.
“We knew that Boulder did not have a hotel capacity for 30,000 or 35,000 visitors,” Hoffman said. In preparation for hosting the festival, Visit Boulder has mapped out all the available hotel rooms and included details on the estimated travel time from each hotel to the festival.
Hoffman said Visit Boulder has been working on lodging prices and working with the City of Boulder to create a short-term residential lodging license that would cover events such as the Sundance Film Festival.
The new lodging license is due for its third reading before the Boulder City Council in October.
Hoffman said lodging owners in the festival area who are considering charging high room prices – $1,000 to $1,500 per night – are likely to lose business.
Visit Boulder has put together a partnership agreement in which hoteliers have committed to selling rooms at a fixed price for a period of 10 years. “That really is the foundation for what kind of partnership” Visit Boulder is building for the festival’s future in Boulder. The agreement provides hotel owners with the opportunity to sell approximately one-third of their available rooms at market rates.
The film festival dates back to 1978 with the founding of the Utah/United States Film Festival in Salt Lake City. In 1981, the late Robert Redford established the Sundance Film Institute to showcase, support, and discover independent filmmakers and storytellers, and moved the festival’s operations and activities to Park City.
Boulder’s selection as a site for the prestigious event followed a proposal from Visit Boulder. The Stanley Film Center, the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, the Colorado Office of Film, Television, and Media, and a regional coalition of partners, including the City of Boulder, the Boulder Chamber, and the University of Colorado Boulder, supported the proposal.