The recipe was there for the busiest summer in Traverse City history. Preliminary numbers offer conflicting reports about how things actually shook out.

Speaking to the Traverse City Business News at the outset of summer, Trevor Tkach, president and CEO of Traverse City Tourism, predicted a summer for the record books. Cherry Capital Airport (TVC) was coming off a record-breaking 2025, Traverse City was preparing to celebrate 100 years of the National Cherry Festival, and the nation’s 250th birthday was looming.

“I was extremely bullish,” Tkach tells The Ticker three months later. “I really was anticipating a lot of road trips, some big domestic travel increases, and maybe even a little bit of a bump in international tourism.”

In some ways, Tkach says those expectations were justified.

“June was a little bit slower than we had hoped, but July started off with a bang,” he says. “Fourth of July was phenomenal, and we had great, great numbers during Cherry Festival. Looking at our data, there was no doubt a big surge of visitation for that holiday weekend, and I can also tell you it was the most popular Fourth of July event we’ve ever put on over West Grand Traverse Bay.”

“I’ve never, ever seen it so busy on the Fourth of July,” Cherry Festival Executive Director Kat Paye told Northern Express last month. “Every area had lines, and I’ve never seen a line that long out of the souvenir tent.”

BATA also set a single-day ridership record on July 4, of 7,126 riders.

Despite the big boom of Independence Day, Tkach says summer as a whole was smaller than expected – at least on the tourism front.

“In mid-July, we got hit with the wildfire smoke, and that led to cancellations from some visitors,” he says. “We ended up with a little bit of a dip in July year over year – at least, that’s how I’m interpreting the data.”

That data includes preliminary occupancy numbers from local hotels and short-term rentals, foot traffic metrics from around town, and industry statistics measuring area travel demand. All of the above, Tkach says, “dipped a little bit” in mid-July, when northern Michigan’s skies turned hazy and the local Air Quality Index soared into hazardous levels unprecedented for the region.

Early analysis of “smoke week,” which left Michigan with some of the worst air quality on the planet from July 14-20, estimated $4 billion in economic losses statewide. More recent studies put the impact closer to $7 billion, between cancelled events, business closures, and reduced commercial traffic. Traverse City saw its own deluge of cancellations that week, including film screenings at the Cherry Bowl Drive-In, food truck service at The Little Fleet, Traverse City Horse Shows events, and the Tour de Tart bike race.

“I think those estimates on statewide losses are probably fairly accurate,” Tkach says. “If anything, I'd guess they're a little low, because I think there's a lot of other indirect spending that occurs with the visitor economy that sometimes we don't fully take into consideration in these moments. And it’s also not replaceable. You can't get back any of the special outdoor activities that were planned for that weekend. Those were just lost.”

Overall, Tkach says it was an “A-minus” summer, down from last year’s grade-A performance.

“We’re just lucky the smoke didn't last longer,” he says, noting it “could have been truly devastating” if it had struck during Cherry Festival or the second annual Traverse City Food & Wine Festival in August.

TVC had its own dip compared to last July, tallying 149,016 travelers for the month – down 2.7 percent from last year. July 2025 was the busiest month in airport history.

Nevertheless, Autumn MacClaren, TVC’s director of air service development and marketing, says summer 2026 could still “meet or surpass last year’s record-setting performance overall,” depending on still-not-finalized August numbers. While TVC saw a slower Cherry Festival week than last year and experienced a “modest dip” during smoke week, MacClaren says traffic “rebounded later in July and accelerated into August.” She adds that Fourth of July and Cherry Festival are “not typically the peak of our summer travel season” anyway.

One place where this summer felt as busy as ever? On local roads, which were left gridlocked thanks to the missing Beitner bridge, the Hammond Road closure, and other planned and unplanned road closures.

“It was really a fight,” Grand Traverse County Road Commission Manager Dan Watkins says of this road construction season. “We had that huge snowstorm in March, went right into the flooding issues, and then dealt with multiple water main and sewer main breaks. We’ve been pushing hard to get a multi-year plan out, but having to focus so much on the day-to-day challenges has really, really made that difficult.”

Regarding Hammond Road – which was supposed to reopen by the start of the school year – Watkins says the project faced issues with funding, weather, and even unexpected underground discoveries.

“We’ve been finding weird utility issues,” he says. “All over the county – and I don't know where these companies come from, but they must work in the middle of the night – someone has been running fiber and other things right underneath the road. When you start to open that road up, you've got these utilities that you had no idea were there. Those slowed us down a lot.”

Watkins says the new timeline for Hammond to reopen is the end of this month. The Beitner bridge, meanwhile, is on track for completion “by the end of the year.”

Asked whether the Beitner detour, along with roundabout construction at Interlochen Corners, meant a slower year for the Interlochen Center for the Arts summer concert series, Director of Communications Maureen Oleson says the concerts still tallied a total of 59,482 attendees – roughly in line with a typical summer.