Now is the Time to Plan Your Visit to America’s Popular National Parks (for Next Summer)
Early planning is the key to seeing America's iconic national parks on your terms.
The Friday before this year’s Memorial Day set a record for domestic air travel as almost three million passengers went through TSA screening. With inflation rates dropping and COVID in the rear-view mirror, it appears that we are headed for another highly active summer travel season.
The increase in travel during the summer has an especially high impact on visits to some of the country’s most popular national parks. Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming may get fewer than 50,000 visitors per month during the winter, but monthly visits can top one million in the summer. Glacier National Park in Montana has fewer than 25,000 visitors monthly between November and March, but visits swell to 750,000 per month or more in the summer.
As you can imagine, prices for flights and accommodation rise in the summer months with the jump in demand to visit these great parks. Rooms at normally budget friendly brands like Holiday Inn Express, Hampton Inn, or Hyatt Place can approach $400 per night. Last summer, Ms. Optimizer and I spent over $300 for a night at a Super 8 in Kalispell, Montana (a 40-minute drive from the western entrance to Glacier National Park).
So, where does the points and miles game fit into visiting these parks during high demand periods? Unfortunately, it is difficult to get exceptional value from travel rewards when visiting some of the popular national parks. Most hotel chains and airlines have dynamic pricing with points and miles that mirrors demand. Also, at least in remote parts of the western United States, the properties of major hotel chains are hard to find.
The best advice I can offer is to make your plans as early as possible to take advantage of any points and miles opportunities that might be available to you. As always, determine if the redemption is worthwhile or not. For our trip to Glacier National Park last summer, we were able to get an acceptable redemption on United Airlines (1.6 cents per point) but struck out when trying to get free rooms for either Glacier or Yellowstone.
While it is very difficult for me to admit this as an apostle of travel rewards, an excellent solution for accommodation is to pay actual money and book your rooms inside the national parks. There are several good reasons to do this:
- First, these rooms tend to be less expensive, and sometimes much less expensive, than comparable properties outside the parks. It is possible to get a room that will accommodate a family of four for under $300 in parks such as Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Glacier. The reason is that accommodations inside these parks are operated by concessionaires who have been awarded contracts by the National Park Service. While I am not familiar with the contracts, they seem to come with price controls.
- Staying inside the parks saves the time and hassle of driving to the park every day, negotiating policies for when you can and cannot enter, and waiting in long lines to enter.
- Often the properties inside the park can be very close to key areas. For example, the Yavapai Lodge at the Grand Canyon is within walking distance of the Canyon’s southern rim. Lodges at Yellowstone can put you close to the iconic Old Faithful geyser. The Bryce Canyon Lodge is about a five-minute walk from the famous Bryce Amphitheater which is populated by the famous and picturesque “hoodoos.”
Above, I suggested booking early to get any benefit from the points and miles game. This would mean booking hotels a year in advance and flights when they become available (usually about 11 months in advance). The same advice applies to booking accommodation inside the parks. The National Park Service websites for national parks that have lodging in the park will direct you to the websites run by the lodging concessionaires. Many properties are run by Xanterra or AraMark.
For booking rooms, a typical pattern is that availability for a given month opens on the first day of that month in the previous year. As an example, if you would like to stay in Glacier National Park in July of next summer (2025), all the July 2025 rooms will become available for booking on July 1st of this year. You can book starting at midnight (local time for the park of interest) on the first of the month. My experience is that rooms can be in high demand even one year out and they start to disappear quickly.
While there are excellent points and miles strategies for many of the trips we take, they do not always work out for some of America’s iconic national parks. Even so, these parks are a national treasure, are worth visiting, and deliver excellent value. And remember, when paying for lodging, be sure to use a credit card that has spending bonuses for hotels or travel purchases.
What have been your experiences with utilizing points and miles for visiting national parks?
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