Forty Years in Park City.
Eleven Days in Boulder.
The Sundance Film Festival runs 21 to 31 January 2027, and for the first time in its history it is not in Utah. Boulder has it on a ten-year agreement, backed by matching thirty-four-million-dollar packages from the city and the state.
What changes for anyone travelling to it is the geography. Park City spread the festival across a resort county. Boulder fits roughly a dozen venues inside a two-mile radius, with festival headquarters at the Hotel Boulderado, half a block off Pearl Street.
Eleven Days. The First Six Matter Most.
The programme is front-loaded, and the published schedule says so plainly. World premieres run Thursday 21 January through Tuesday 26 January. The gala is Friday the 22nd. Awards are announced on Friday the 29th, and the online window opens on the 28th and runs to the close on the 31st.
That shape sets the arrival pattern. The premieres, the industry crowd and the dinners sit in the front block; the back half of the festival moves increasingly to a screen. If the trip is about being in the room when a film lands, it is a 21 to 26 January trip.
The Festival Week at a Glance
Eleven days, and the first six carry the premieres.
World Premieres
21 to 26 January
The front half of the festival carries the premieres, with the opening gala on 22 January. This is the window the industry flies in for, and the one where lodging and departure slots are tightest.
Opening Weekend
23 to 24 January
The first weekend is the heaviest arrival and departure churn of the eleven days. If your dates can move at all, the Monday and Tuesday following it are materially easier on both ends.
Awards
29 January
Awards are announced on the 29th and the festival runs through the 31st. The back half is quieter, cheaper to sleep in, and the films are all still screening.
Three Thousand Rooms. A Festival Built for Far More.
Boulder has somewhere under three thousand hotel rooms. The last Park City edition drew 85,472 people, roughly 28,000 of them from out of state. That arithmetic is the story of this festival, and it is already visible in the market — hotels inside the city are showing blocked or sold across the festival dates, whole-home listings have run past five thousand dollars a night, and Sundance’s own lodging guidance suggests four-night minimums on a one-bedroom and up to eleven nights on a four-bedroom house.
Visit Boulder’s position is that the town is not full, and that hotels are holding inventory back while they finalise pricing and allocations. Both things are true at once. That is precisely the situation where booking early, through someone who is watching it, is worth something.
Why Fly Private to Sundance
Timed to the Premieres. Parked Twenty-Five Minutes Out.
Timed to the Front Block
The world premieres run 21 to 26 January and the industry books around them. A charter puts you in for the days that actually matter and out again, without committing to a nine-night minimum on a house you would barely see.
Vetted the Way You’d Expect
Every operator we use is ARGUS TripCheq or Wyvern vetted, and we re-check on the day of the flight. January on the Front Range means de-icing, low ceilings and upslope snow. Those are the conditions where operator quality stops being an abstraction.
Four Fields, One Broker
Boulder has an airport that cannot take your aircraft and three within the hour that can. Knowing which one to file for, in January, is most of the job. We arrange — you fly.
The Screenings End. The Evening Is the Festival.
Sundance has always done its real business after the credits roll. In Boulder that happens on Pearl Street and up on the Hill instead of across a resort county, and the whole festival sits inside about two miles.
It also makes the day trip viable in a way Park City never did. Rocky Mountain Metropolitan is roughly twenty-five minutes from downtown Boulder, with no curfew and no slot system, so a late departure after a nine o’clock screening is an ordinary request rather than a negotiation.
That matters more than it sounds. Lodging is the hardest constraint on this edition, and flying in for two days and back out again is the one way around it that does not involve staying in Longmont.
Pass details are announced in September 2026, with passes on sale in October.
Book your private jet todayWhere to Stay
Festival headquarters is the Hotel Boulderado on 13th Street, open since 1909 and half a block off the Pearl Street Mall. It sold to AJ Capital Partners in 2025 and is expected to join the Graduate by Hilton collection after a renovation, so check the name on your confirmation.
St Julien Hotel & Spa on Walnut Street is the town’s established luxury address — 201 rooms, a 10,000 square foot spa, one block from the Mall. Limelight Boulder opened on University Hill in September 2025 with 252 rooms, and is the largest all-electric hotel in the United States. Its house car covers a two-mile radius, which is to say every festival venue.
For something smaller, The Bradley Boulder Inn has twelve rooms on 16th Street, adults only, half a block from Pearl. Colorado Chautauqua rents cottages at the foot of the Flatirons and stays open through winter, though it is self-catering rather than full service.
The honest position: Boulder holds under three thousand hotel rooms and much of that inventory is blocked or sold for the festival. Visit Boulder maintains that hotels are still staging their release rather than selling out. If nothing in town works, the Four Seasons Denver is forty-five minutes away on flat highway — and for a client arriving by air, that is a shorter transfer than it sounds.
Where to Eat
Frasca Food and Wine on Pearl Street holds a Michelin star and won the 2025 James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant, which makes it the strongest dining credential in Colorado. It releases tables about sixty days out, on Sundays at 11am Mountain, with a deposit — so festival week goes live on the Sundays of late November 2026. Be waiting.
Its farm-driven sibling Bramble & Hare on 13th Street carries a Michelin Green Star, as does Blackbelly, Hosea Rosenberg’s restaurant and working butcher out on Conestoga Street in east Boulder — not walkable, worth the car. Basta on Arapahoe and Cozobi Fonda Fina on Walnut both hold Bib Gourmands.
Corrida on Walnut is Basque, upstairs, with the Flatirons out the window. The Boulder Dushanbe Tea House on 13th was hand-carved in Tajikistan and shipped to Boulder by its sister city, and is worth an hour whatever you think of tea.
Where Boulder actually eats: The Sink on the Hill has been open since 1923, and Robert Redford swept its floors as a CU student — it sits four blocks from a festival venue. Lucile’s Creole Cafe downtown does the beignets, Il Pastaio on Arapahoe is twenty-odd years of house-made pasta in a strip mall and weekdays only, Rincón Argentino does sixteen kinds of empanada, and Moxie Bread Co in North Boulder is the bakery locals name first.
One January note: the Boulder Farmers Market does not run in winter. For provisions, Blackbelly’s butcher counter or Dry Storage, which mills its own grain, are the substitutes.
THE AIRPORTS PEAK USES
Four fields serve Boulder, and the one with the town’s name on it is the one you cannot use.
BDU — Boulder Municipal. Three miles from downtown, and not an option. The runway is 4,100 feet with 3,900 usable, the field sits at 5,288 feet, and the pavement is rated to 16,000 pounds on a single wheel. Fifty-nine aircraft are based there and none of them are jets. Glider operations run all day and powered traffic gives way to them. Visiting college teams playing at CU fly into Denver for the same reason you will.
BJC — Rocky Mountain Metropolitan, Broomfield. This is the answer. A 9,000-foot main runway at 5,673 feet elevation, rated to 150,000 pounds dual-tandem, with a tower, an ILS and US Customs on the field. Signature and Sheltair both operate here and both de-ice — redundancy you do not get at a single-FBO mountain field. No curfew, no slot system, only a voluntary Fly Quiet programme. Roughly twenty-five minutes to downtown Boulder.
One caution at BJC: Jefferson County holds no aircraft parking itself, so every tie-down and hangar runs through those two FBOs. In festival week that is the thing to book first, and it is the reason to call early rather than in January.
APA — Centennial. Ten thousand feet, twenty-four-hour customs and five FBOs, but it sits southeast of Denver, so a Boulder trip crosses the entire metro. Note the published limit: below 70,000 pounds maximum takeoff weight, or Stage III up to 75,000, with exceptions only by the executive director. Quiet hours run 2200 to 0700.
DEN — Denver International. Sixteen thousand feet of runway and a Signature facility on the field, so it takes anything. The right call for a group above Centennial’s weight limit, for an ACJ or BBJ, or when a heavy upslope event is in the forecast and you want the airport with twenty-four snow trucks. Forty-five minutes to Boulder on flat highway.
January on the Front Range. The counterintuitive part is that winter helps your performance — on a cold morning at Broomfield the density altitude sits at or below field elevation, and the penalty everyone worries about is a July problem. What January costs you is contamination and ceilings. The disruptive pattern here is upslope snow, which loads the foothills fields harder than the plains ones, and it is the single reason to keep Denver in the plan as an alternate.
Worth saying plainly, because it is the difference clients feel: Broomfield is mountain-adjacent without mountain operating rules. No 95-foot wingspan limit, no 2300 curfew, no requirement that your captain have landed there within the year. Aspen has all three.
Booking Windows and Pricing
Passes and packages go on sale in October and single tickets in early January, which is when the lodging and the aircraft both start disappearing. If your dates are fixed to the premiere weekend, book the aircraft on the same call as the room rather than after it.
Pricing from Peak is all-inclusive, which means the quote is the number. No membership fees, no annual dues, no initiation. You pay for the flight, not the privilege of asking about one.
Empty legs are worth asking about here. The Denver corridor runs hard all winter and repositioning legs into the Front Range are more findable than in most markets, if your dates can flex by a day either side. Our current list is on the empty legs page.
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Sundance Charter Questions, Answered
Which airport is closest to the Sundance Film Festival?
Rocky Mountain Metropolitan (BJC) in Broomfield, roughly twenty-five minutes from downtown Boulder. It has a 9,000-foot runway, a tower, an ILS, US Customs on the field and two FBOs that both de-ice. Boulder Municipal (BDU) is closer at three miles, but its runway and pavement rating rule out jets entirely. Denver International (DEN) is forty-five minutes out and is the right answer for larger aircraft or a difficult forecast.
When is the 2027 Sundance Film Festival?
21 to 31 January 2027, in Boulder, Colorado. World premieres run 21 to 26 January, the gala is on the 22nd, awards are announced on the 29th, and the online window runs 28 to 31 January. This is the festival’s first edition outside Utah.
Why did Sundance move from Park City to Boulder?
Sundance signed a ten-year agreement with Boulder, backed by matching thirty-four-million-dollar packages from the city and the state of Colorado. The practical difference for attendees is scale: Park City spread the festival across a resort county, while Boulder fits about a dozen venues inside a two-mile radius, with headquarters at the Hotel Boulderado.
How far in advance should I book a private jet to Sundance?
As early as you can fix your dates. Pass details are announced in September 2026 and passes go on sale in October, which is when demand becomes visible. The constraint at Broomfield is not the runway, it is aircraft parking — Jefferson County holds none itself, so every space runs through the two FBOs. Six to eight weeks out is comfortable; four is tight.
Can I fly in and out the same day for a screening?
Yes, and for this festival it is a genuinely sensible plan. Boulder has under three thousand hotel rooms against an event that drew over eighty-five thousand people in Park City, and lodging minimums of four to eleven nights are common. Broomfield has no curfew and no slot system, so a departure after a late screening is an ordinary request.
Does Peak charge membership fees?
No. There is no membership, no card and no initiation fee. You pay for the flight, quoted all-in, and nothing else. We arrange — you fly.
