The Sheridan Rodeo Week Booking Curve, 2022–2026

How far ahead does Sheridan book for rodeo week? Most travel advice answers with a slogan: "book early." We can do better, because we have five years of our own reservations. This page shows how the booking curve for rodeo week has actually moved from 2022 to 2026, what we can and cannot say from it, and exactly how it was built.

The curve, year by year

Each line below shows the share of a year's final confirmed rodeo-week nights that were already booked at a given distance from the night itself. Read a line left to right and it climbs toward the whole year's total. A line that sits higher on the left means guests committed earlier that year.

Guests are booking earlier

The clearest shift is in the median lead time, the point by which half of a year's nights were already booked. It was 40.5 days in 2022, 22.5 in 2023 and 49.5 in 2024. In 2025 it jumped to 90 days, and in 2026 it held at 83. Two years is not a trend line, and 2024 is a thin year, but the gap between roughly three to seven weeks and roughly twelve weeks is large enough that we do not think it is noise.

The 60-day column tells the same story. In both 2025 and 2026, 57% of the eventual nights were booked by that point. In 2023 it was 30%.

Six months out, almost nothing is booked

At 180 days, the share booked was 0% in 2023 and 2024, 4% in 2026, 5% in 2022 and 7% in 2025. Rodeo week does not fill from the far end. The real movement happens between about 120 and 30 days out, where the lines climb steeply. That window is when most of a year's nights get claimed, and it is where the year-to-year differences are widest: at 30 days out, the share booked ranged from 45% (2023) to 80% (2024).

The last week still matters, unevenly

Subtract the 7-day column from 100 and you get the share of nights booked inside the final week. In 2023 it was 37%, far above every other year: 8% in 2022, 9% in 2024, 16% in 2025 and 9% in 2026. So 2023 was a late year, and it is also the year with the lowest cancellation rate in the set. We are reporting both facts and are not claiming one explains the other.

The year that does not fit, and why we say so

2024 looks like an outlier. Only 7% of its nights were booked at 120 days out, then 42% at 90 days and 80% at 30 days, the steepest climb of any year. It is also the smallest year in the set, with 23 confirmed reservations across 74 nights. With that few bookings, a handful of multi-night stays landing in the same fortnight can bend the whole line. We have plotted it dashed and left it unsmoothed, because a chart that quietly evens out its weakest year is more persuasive and less honest than one that shows it. If you want a cautious reading of the pattern, lean on 2022, 2023, 2025 and 2026, and treat 2024 as a reminder of how much a small year can swing.

Cancellations

Across the five rodeo weeks, 15.6% of reservations that reached a confirmed or canceled outcome ended up canceled, roughly one in six. Individual years ranged from 8.1% to 20.7%. These are counts of reservations. The export does not tell us when in the run-up a cancellation happened, so we cannot say how much of the cancelled inventory was rebooked.

What this means if you are planning a trip

The 97th edition runs July 14–17, 2027. If the recent pattern holds, a large share of the nights that will eventually book are already committed about three months out, and by 30 days out that share has usually reached somewhere between 45% and 80%. That is a share of what eventually booked, not a count of what is left, and availability depends on the home you want and the dates you need. What the curve does say is that waiting until the final month is a real gamble in a year like 2024 and a smaller one in a year like 2023.

We will re-run this analysis after the 2027 rodeo week at exactly the same checkpoints, so that next year's line can be laid directly over these five. When the sell-out and rate cuts are added, they will follow the same rules: percentages, no dollar figures, and no cut published unless it covers at least ten homes.

Method

Source. Wyo Stays' own Guesty reservation export for the five rodeo weeks, 2022 through 2026: 337 records, with guest names, emails and phone numbers never included.

Window. Each year is the seven nights, Sunday through Saturday, of the week containing the rodeo's performances. Stays that begin earlier or run later are clipped to those seven nights.

What counts. Only reservations with a confirmed status. Inquiries, holds, expired, declined and closed records are excluded. Two confirmed records with a zero accommodation fare (one in 2024, one in 2026) are kept in.

Booking date. The date the booking was created on the channel where the export has one, and the Guesty creation date otherwise. A handful of Guesty creation dates are import artifacts, which is why the channel date is preferred.

The curve. For each night, we compute how many days before that night the booking was made. The percentage at D days is the share of the year's final confirmed nights booked at least D days out. It measures booking pace against that year's own final total. It is not an occupancy rate, because we do not divide by available inventory. Cancelled reservations drop out, so the curve describes bookings that held.

Privacy and thresholds. Figures are portfolio-level. Every year rests on at least 17 homes, above our floor of 10, and no cut below that is published. The set of homes changed from year to year as the portfolio changed, so the lines compare years of the same business, not a fixed set of properties. Percentages are rounded to whole numbers. Nothing is smoothed. No addresses, listing names, dollar amounts or comparisons with other operators appear in this analysis.

Limits. One operator's reservations in one market. Small years: 2024 has 23 confirmed reservations, and the others range from 43 to 68. Treat the year-to-year differences as signals to watch, not settled findings.