Where should I stay for Sundance 2027?

The short version: Boulder if you can afford it and booked early, the towns north and east of it if you did not.

Why Boulder itself is hard

Boulder has about 2,900 hotel rooms in total. That is the whole supply for a ten-day festival that moved from a resort town built around exactly this kind of event. Lodging prices in Boulder drew enough concern that it became a story in the local press months before the festival.

The official festival lodging site gives a sense of the spread. At the time we checked, listings ran from about $50 a night in Longmont — a little over $500 for the full ten nights with taxes and fees — up to $3,636 a night for a five-bedroom house in Boulder, which is north of $38,000 for the same stay.

Where people are actually looking

Boulder Reporting Lab, citing Airbnb, found searches for the 2027 festival dates up more than 100% in Louisville, Nederland, Longmont, Lafayette and Erie — against just 10% for Denver. That gap is the story: people are not spreading out across the metro, they are clustering in the ring of towns close enough to commute from.

The overflow is real and already priced in, so “nearby town” does not automatically mean cheap any more — it means available.

Base	Drive to Boulder venues	What you get
Boulder	walk or free HOP bus	no commute; highest price; least availability
Louisville	~20 min	last RTD stop before Boulder proper
Lafayette	~20 min	on the new airport bus route
Longmont	quick ~25–30 min run	largest town, most restaurants and tasting rooms, BOLT bus until ~1:25am
Erie	~25 min	quietest, least transit
Nederland	~40 min, mountain pass	cheapest, hardest in snow

Drive times are normal-conditions estimates between downtowns. Nobody knows yet what festival week does to them — this is Boulder’s first Sundance.

If you are looking at Longmont

Longmont is where this guide is based. It has the most rooms and the most places to eat of the northern options, and Hotel Longmont opened downtown in late summer 2026 — the city’s first boutique hotel, 84 rooms at 508 3rd Ave, with a rooftop restaurant called Longmont Supply. National chain hotels fill in around it across the city.

The venues are a quick run down the Diagonal, and the BOLT bus covers it until roughly 1:25am on weekdays, so an evening screening does not oblige you to drive. How far Longmont is from the venues has the routes and the bus times.

Book through lodging.sundance.org or the hotel directly.