Williams already has substantial hotel and RV capacity serving the Grand Canyon tourist market. The short-term rental market is not filling a gap — the gap does not exist.
| Property | Type | Rooms / Sites |
|---|---|---|
| Grand Canyon Railway Hotel | Hotel | 298 |
| Holiday Inn Express & Suites | Hotel | 81 |
| Best Western Plus Inn of Williams | Hotel | 80 |
| Comfort Inn Near Grand Canyon | Hotel | 74 |
| Days Inn by Wyndham | Hotel | 73 |
| Travelodge by Wyndham | Hotel | 41 |
| Super 8 by Wyndham (West) | Hotel | ~40 |
| Canyon Motel & RV Park | Hotel/motel | 18 |
| Red Garter Inn | Hotel | 4 |
| Rodeway Inn & Suites Downtowner | Hotel | 16 |
| Hotel/motel subtotal | ~725 rooms | |
| Grand Canyon Railway RV Park | RV park | 124 sites |
| Railside RV Ranch | RV park | 96 sites |
| Canyon Motel RV spaces | RV park | 47 sites |
| Williams / Circle Pines KOA | RV/campground | est. ~100 sites |
| Grand Canyon Gateway RV Park | RV park | ~50 sites |
| Dogtown Lake Campground (Kaibab NF) | Campground | 54 sites |
| RV/camping subtotal | ~470 sites | |
| Total existing tourism capacity | ~1,195 beds/sites | |
| Whole-home residential STRs | Removed housing | 176 units |
Independent data from the Arizona Office of Tourism quantifies how Williams STRs compare to the regional lodging market. This is the single most important metric for whether STRs are serving unmet tourism demand — or just holding housing off the market.
| Sector | Geography | Occupancy | Avg Daily Rate | RevPAR | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hotels & motels | Coconino County | 59.9% | $141.92 | $84.98 | CoStar, Q4 2025 |
| Short-term rentals | Coconino County | 54.6% | $292.09 | $159.58 | AirDNA, Q4 2025 |
| Short-term rentals | Williams, AZ (this dataset) | 47.9% | — | — | STR Watch, Apr 2026 |
Source: Arizona Office of Tourism quarterly lodging reports. Hotel/motel data provided by CoStar; STR data provided by AirDNA. Reports available at tourism.az.gov/research-statistics/.
| Zone | Whole-home STRs | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| North Railroad | 32 | Pre-code construction on contaminated ground (bunker oil). Environmental liability. |
| East Kaibab / Rt 66 | 9 | Working-class neighborhood, direct displacement of existing residents. |
| City Center | 47 | Historic residential; highest conversion rate. |
| GCRW Zone | 26 | Near Grand Canyon Railway depot; most legitimate tourism supply. |
| Golf Course Area | 17 | Owner-occupied baseline; low conversion rate. |
| New Spec (I-40) | 37 | Built as investment inventory. High vacancy — speculation, not tourism. |
| Outside City / Unverified | 5 | Listings outside Williams proper; likely misrepresented. |
| Commercial Glamping / RV | 32 | RV park spaces, camper trailers, and novelty accommodations (cabooses, bunkhouse suites) listed as Airbnb "entire home." Not residential housing — excluded from displacement metrics. Their presence on Airbnb reflects oversupply in the commercial RV and hospitality sector, not a shortage of tourism accommodation. |
Whole-home units effectively removed from housing while generating minimal tourism value.
Workers cannot afford to live in Williams. They drive in from Flagstaff, from Ash Fork, from an hour away — or they don't come at all. Every small business owner in this town is doing the math on it.
Housing that should shelter the people who work here instead sits available 52% of the time on Airbnb, generating returns for owners who are not here, while the workforce that staffs every business on Route 66 drives in from an hour away — or doesn't come at all.
I built this dataset because I grew up here and I know what the numbers mean. The data is public. The pattern is not subtle. It is time for the city council to answer for it.
Independent confirmation of the housing removal picture, from the U.S. Census Bureau.
| Category | Units | Pct of total housing |
|---|---|---|
| Total housing units | 3498 | — |
| Occupied | 2611 | 74.6% |
| Vacant (all reasons) | 887 | 25.4% |
| For rent | 0 | 0.0% |
| For sale | 28 | 0.8% |
| Seasonal / recreational / occasional use | 666 | 19.0% |
| Other vacant | 182 | 5.2% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2022 5-year estimates, Table B25004 (Vacancy Status), ZCTA 86046. Data is publicly available at data.census.gov.
Sedona, Arizona — another small Arizona tourist town, another place where short-term rentals consumed the housing stock while the county talked about reining it in.
Sedona's city council eventually passed code allowing workers to legally sleep in their vehicles. Not as a stopgap. As policy. Because there was no other way to staff the restaurants, shops, and hotels that the town's entire economy depends on.
That is not a worst-case scenario. That already happened, in this state, in a town that looks a lot like Williams.
The STR market in Williams is not as saturated as Sedona's — yet. The county keeps talking about reining it in. The data here exists so that conversation has something to land on before Williams runs out of workers willing to drive an hour each way to serve tourists who stay in houses where workers used to live.
Listing data: Discovered daily via Airbnb public search API (Williams AZ bounding box, zip 86046). Availability derived by probing 12 date windows across the next 90 days — listings appearing for a given date are available; absence indicates booking or block.
Owner mailing addresses: The Coconino County parcel roll (owner name, mailing address, year built) is legally public record under ARS §39-121. That data is coming. A formal public records request is in process. When the assessor CSV arrives, the California owner percentage and out-of-state investor metrics will be populated automatically. The following data sources were investigated and found to be inaccessible without that request — each representing a layer of friction on data the public is legally entitled to:
The difficulty of accessing data that is legally public record is itself part of the record. The footwork required to obtain it is documented here deliberately.
Whole-home = listing type "Entire home/apt" — units that would otherwise be available as full residential rentals. Resident-months = cumulative sum of active whole-home units per day divided by 30.