Northern Michigan’s short-term rentals are headed toward their busiest fall color season on record, even as summer bookings slipped. AirDNA projects that reservation nights across the 10-county northwest Lower Michigan region will exceed 100,000 for the first time during the autumn foliage season.
The forecast represents growth of roughly 37 percent from four years ago and a projected year-over-year increase of about 8.5 percent. AirDNA shared the data with The Ticker.
Bram Gallagher, director of economics and forecasting for AirDNA, defines the approximate "leaf peeping" season as September 29 to November 8. During that window, the region recorded about 73,000 reservation nights in 2022, 80,000 in 2023, 90,000 in 2024 and 92,500 last year.
Autumn gains contrast with a softer summer
The fall surge stands out in a year when northern Michigan’s vacation rental market has otherwise lost some ground.
According to Gallagher, reservation nights showed no significant growth during the first 20 weeks of 2026, while summer activity fell slightly compared with last year. Fall bookings, however, are pacing significantly ahead of 2025. The three consecutive weekends highlighted in the source report were each running 10-20 percent ahead of last year.
August, the region’s peak month for vacation rental activity, had 8,829 active short-term rental listings, down 1.8 percent from last year’s 8,990. Reservation nights also declined, from 151,387 last year to 144,701 this year.
Those declines followed an almost across-the-board record-breaking year for local short-term rentals in 2025.
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Outdoor travel fuels demand
Gallagher says AirDNA has tracked a substantial increase in fall color tourism since the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Getting out there and doing natural outdoor recreational stuff became a huge trend when people were trying to escape infection, and that trend continues to this day", Gallagher says. "I think right now, as people are trying to get away from screens, or as they are looking for affordable things to do, they’re finding that looking at leaves and celebrating the changing of the seasons is pretty cheap."
Gallagher also points to inflation and high gas prices as factors behind travelers’ choices.
"We know people are looking for cheaper vacations, or are traveling closer to home", he says.
The increase extends beyond northern Michigan. AirDNA reported last month that, "across 19 fall foliage markets" in the eastern and midwestern United States, nights booked for fall color season "are pacing 9.8 percent ahead of last year." The Appalachian South leads the growth, with bookings up 15 percent year-over-year.
"Our theory is that a lot of the traditional northeastern New England leaf peeping markets are essentially full, so we’re seeing demand spill over into other markets that maybe haven’t been as focused on fall color tourism in the past", Gallagher tells The Ticker.
A larger role for fall
The longer-term figures show how "intense" northern Michigan’s short-term rental growth has been since before the pandemic, Gallagher says, particularly during autumn.
In October 2019, AirDNA tracked 5,273 short-term rentals, 36,531 reserved nights and $7.9 million in revenue. Last October, available listings reached 8,332, a 58 percent increase in six years. Reservation nights rose to 78,517, up 115 percent, while revenue reached $23,575,887, up 198 percent.
For October this year, AirDNA projects 84,629 reservation nights across the region.
Fall now accounts for 11.2 percent of northern Michigan’s short-term rental activity, compared with 46 percent for summer. Winter and spring have lost ground in recent years as autumn’s share has increased.
"There’s just been a lot of extra demand in the fall, and your region has absolutely been increasing the availability of STRs into the fall season to meet that demand", Gallagher says.