2.4 Million Park Visits: Starved Rock STR Report, Ottawa Proxy

Thomas Garner
Aug 16
14 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Starved Rock on the Illinois River, LaSalle County, Illinois

Starved Rock State Park sits in La Salle County, and the Governor and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources named it the most-visited of the state's 290 state parks in a May 9, 2025 release. The figure they printed was 2.4 million visitors in 2024. Illinois Beach was second at 2 million. Statewide parks and historic sites together cleared 41 million. Those counts measure park attendance. They do not measure short-term rental revenue, destination spend, or tax remittance, and this page will not pair 2.4 million with a host payout as if the two objects were the same.

AirROI's Ottawa, Illinois page, updated August 8, 2026 and covering August 2025 through July 2026, is the lodging file this report opens. It shows 161 listings, a $236 average daily rate, 34.0 percent occupancy, named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 typical annual revenue, $80 RevPAR, and a 46-day lead time. There is no dedicated Utica AirROI page. Ottawa is the proxy, not North Utica and not a countywide occupancy series. Chicago sits about 91 miles and an hour forty-five via I-55 and I-80, plus thirty to forty-five minutes on a weekend; caption Chicago as origin, not as the published market year.

A second vendor snapshot, AirDNA, prints a different n and a different yield: 250 listings, about $26.4K typical annual revenue, 50 percent occupancy, and a $245 ADR. This report will cite both files and will not average them into a comfort midpoint. Median month on the AirROI Ottawa file is named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31. That is the number a buyer should carry into an underwriting memo. The rest of this cluster keeps clerks, canyon copy, and the park-attendance release in their own boxes.

One Ottawa proxy, 161 listings, no midpoint

AirROI's Ottawa page is a city file. It is not a Starved Rock Country file, not a North Utica file, and not a La Salle County file. The n is 161, and the average daily rate is $236. Occupancy is 34.0 percent. Typical annual revenue is named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31. RevPAR is $80, and average lead time is 46 days. Those six numbers travel together. A host who lifts $236 and leaves 34.0 percent on the table is writing a brochure. A buyer who lifts named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 and forgets the n is writing a memo the lender should send back. Cite the update date with the numbers: August 8, 2026, trailing August 2025 through July 2026.

AirDNA is a different vendor with a different n. That snapshot prints 250 listings, about $26.4K typical annual revenue, 50 percent occupancy, and a $245 ADR. 161 and 250 shouldn't be averaged, the named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 and $26.4K shouldn't be midpointed, and 34.0 percent shouldn't be blended with 50 percent, or $236 with $245, and the result called the Starved Rock market. Two dashboards can look at overlapping doors and still disagree on who counts as active. This page will print both. It will not invent a third file that makes the two look like they already agreed.

The Ottawa file is mostly entire homes and mostly houses, with two-bedroom stock as the largest bedroom slice and a meaningful three-plus-bedroom tail. Average stay prints 4.2 nights. Superhost share is high and the rating average is 4.81, which is a review bar, not a yield. Professionally managed share sits at 39.1 percent, Guest Favorite at the same print, and licensed share at 23 percent. AirROI labels regulation Moderate, and that badge is a vendor label. It is not a Village of North Utica license, and it is not a reason to skip the.permitdesk.

Median month is named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31

The mean and the median are both on the same AirROI page and they do not tell the same story. Typical annual revenue is named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31. Typical monthly revenue, the median month, is named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31. Top-quartile months print named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31. Bottom-quartile months print named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31. The top ten percent of months print named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 or more. A buyer who underwrites named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 because a canyon photo looked expensive is not reading the file. Carry both tails. Price the middle.

Median occupancy is about 33 percent, and median ADR is about $197. Those sit under the file averages of 34.0 percent and $236. The gap is not huge on occupancy and it is real on rate. Entire-home houses with two bedrooms will not book like a three-plus-bedroom river house, and neither of them should inherit a Lake Geneva nightly number. Lake Geneva is a different market. If you have seen $480 used as a luxury-lake ADR in another cluster, leave it there. This Ottawa file's average is $236 and its median is $197.

Theinvestmentpost is where those two sentences belong in a memo. Thestartuppost is where a new host learns not to budget a pool-house fantasy against a named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 median month. This market report's job is narrower. It prints the spread so the rest of the cluster has something true to argue from. Do not flatten named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31, named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31, and named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 or more into one shrug that says the market pays about twenty thousand.

August June July not a generic Midwest winter

AirROI's peak-three revenue months on the Ottawa file are August, June, and July, in that order as the vendor ranks them. The soft months are January, March, and December, and january is the lowest. That is a canyon-and-river summer peak, not a ski-town winter and not a generic Midwest story in which the holidays do the heavy lifting. Hosts who import a Wisconsin lake calendar or a Michigan dune calendar onto this file will overprice January and underprice the weeks when the canyons are actually full of boots.shoulderpost is the calendar without a fake winter death.

Ice in the sandstone canyons is a real guest search and a real weather event. It is not an occupancy series this file printed. Do not Keep that ice-canyon season lifts January as if AirROI had broken the month into freeze weeks and thaw weeks. The vendor gave a low month. It did not give a waterfall-ice ADR. Lead time across the file is 46 days, which is enough runway to price a June weekend in April and not enough runway to pretend December books like August if you only remembered to cut the rate on the first.

Trail hours at Starved Rock are 7 a.m, and to sunset. That constraint does not change because a listing is empty in March. Guests who come for the eighteen sandstone canyons still leave when the light leaves. A host who writes come-for-the-ice copy without a weather hedge is selling a photograph. A host who writes that summer is the only season is arguing with August, June, and July being a peak-three, not a monopoly. Carry the peak, and carry the floor. Leave out unverified a month-by-month occupancy table this pass did not open.

Richard Allen 58 is not invisible

The manager table on the same Ottawa page is not an empty field. Richard Allen shows 58 listings and named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 in trailing revenue on that snapshot. Evolve shows one listing, named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31, a $204 ADR, 38.5 percent occupancy, and a 3.80 rating. Those are two different operators, and one is a local-scale book. One is a single door. Professionally managed share at 39.1 percent already tells you this is not a pure owner-operator town, and 58 listings is not a rumor you can ignore when you Keep a sentence that says no property managers work here.

Do not turn Richard Allen into a franchise territory and do not turn Evolve into a market. Search the live pages the week you cite them. A 161-listing file can still have one cleaner with three logins and a Saturday phone that already answers.DIY versus hirepost is the craft gap: what you still do yourself, what you hire, and why fee-math starts at named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 a month rather than at the top-decile named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 print. Superhost share at 74.5 percent is the other half of that bar. A new listing is being measured against a field that already knows how to collect reviews.

Kishauwau Country Cabins is not in that manager table. The Lodge is not in that manager table. They are competitor inventory of a different kind, and the next section keeps them out of the AirROI n. What belongs here is simpler. If you are buying another door in a county where one name already holds 58 on the vendor page, you are not entering a quiet cottage market. You are entering a file that already has scale. Price and photograph as if someone professional will be on the same search page Saturday morning.

Kishauwau and the Lodge are not AirROI

Kishauwau Country Cabins is a family-run cabin operation on 55 acres, seventeen cabins, open since 1986, and not third-party-managed. The property states there is no in-cabin Wi-Fi; office Wi-Fi only. That is a product fact, not a smear. A short-term rental that wants the remote-worker month has to prove the opposite, which is why theremote-workerpost treats Wi-Fi as evidence rather than as a badge. Kishauwau is the cabin standard guests already know how to spell. It is not one of the 161 AirROI Ottawa listings you get to average into named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31.

Starved Rock Lodge is a CCC building from 1933 to 1939, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. It is a bookable building with its own restaurant and its own events, including the Trolley Trio Progressive Dinner with August Hill and Lone Buffalo. Dinner-only was listed at $130 per person on the lodge page this pass; the desk number on that page is ; recheck dates before you Keep them into a listing. The Lodge is not an Airbnb comp. Do not put its stone lobby in your photo set and do not put its dinner price in your ADR.

Illinois River Winery and Matthiessen State Park sit in the same guest weekend and they also sit outside the AirROI n. Eighteen sandstone canyons and trail hours from 7 a.m. to sunset are park facts, not listing amenities you invented. A visitor itinerary is allowed to walk those pins in one day. This market report is not allowed to treat them as extra doors inside the 161. Competitor set and vendor set are different objects, and keep the names. Keep them out of the occupancy percentage.

Clerks do not merge

Village of North Utica is one government. Ordinance 2020-01, dated February 27, 2020, and carried in Am Legal as Title 3 Chapter 12, requires a license to operate a vacation rental unit. The village posts the ordinance PDF, a bed-and-breakfast / hotel / vacation-rental application, and a hotel-motel tax return with a new form dated 4.1.26. Fees and caps were not transcribed from the scanned PDF this pass. Confirm them with the clerk. Do not paste a dollar you found on a Facebook thread into a startup budget and call it the village fee.

Village of Utica is a different board. A Shaw Local story dated December 16, 2022 described an ordinance overhaul, an one-million-dollar insurance requirement, authority to raise the hotel-motel tax then set at 5 percent, and a limit that puts vacation rentals in commercial or historic districts and on rural parcels of five acres or larger. The moratorium was described as lifting in January 2023. Confirm the live code. City of La Salle posts a 5 percent hotel/motel tax on rentals for bookings on or after April 1, 2019, at lasalle-il.gov. Ottawa, Oglesby, Peru, and a countywide ordinance were not opened this pass. Absence is not unregulated.

Illinois Hotel Operators' Occupation Tax is a state desk. IDOR materials for FY 2025-28 describe hosting platforms as re-renters beginning July 1, 2025. Confirm IDOR. That tax is not a village permit and it does not replace North Utica's license or Utica's district-and-acreage lines. AirROI's Moderate Keep does not merge those clerks. The permit page is the window; this report only refuses to treat Ottawa, North Utica, and Utica as one zoning sentence. Pin first. Then call the desk that actually answers for that published market year.

2.4 million is park attendance

The May 9, 2025 Governor and IDNR release is the attendance source this cluster will keep citing. Starved Rock State Park in La Salle County recorded 2.4 million visitors in 2024 and was the most-visited of Illinois's 290 state parks. Illinois Beach was second at 2 million. Statewide parks and historic sites together were more than 41 million. Ask what the figure measures before you paste it into a pitch deck. It measures people through a park gate, or the state's way of counting those people. It does not measure nights booked in Ottawa, and it does not measure dollars spent in Utica. It does not measure hotel-motel remittance.

No official Starved Rock Country visitor-spend dollar was opened this pass. That absence is the entire point of thetourism datapost. Leave out unverified a county spend, a destination spend, or a sentence that says hosts captured some share of 2.4 million. Do not put 2.4 million next to named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 as if the park count were a trailing-twelve for the 161-door file. A park can be the most-visited in the state and a median listing can still print named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 in a soft month. Those facts can sit in the same paragraph only if you say what each one is.

Chicago remains the named origin in the guest file , 96.5 percent domestic, with Chicago and Evanston on the origin line , and the drive is about 91 miles. That is demand geography. It is not a second attendance study. Guests who leave the city for sandstone canyons are the reason the park prints a large number and the reason a two-bedroom house has a Saturday. They are not a reason to treat park attendance as coverage for afinancememo. Lenders fund houses. They do not fund a Governor's press release.

What this page will not do

This page will not average AirROI and AirDNA. It will not treat Ottawa as North Utica. It will not invent an Utica-only occupancy series. It will not pair 2.4 million park visits with named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 as if they were the same object. It will not invent a Starved Rock Country spend dollar. It will not transcribe North Utica fees from a PDF this pass did not type out. It will not declare Village of Utica's 2022 overhaul to be the live code without a clerk call. It will not treat AirROI's Moderate badge as a permit. It will not treat Kishauwau or the Lodge as rows in the 161.

It will not import a Lake Geneva $480 ADR except as a contrast that Lake Geneva is a different market. It will not Keep an ice-canyon occupancy series. It will not tell a remote-work host that 4.2 nights is a month. It will not tell a lender that park attendance is a T12. The rest of the cluster keeps those hedges on the buy box, the packet language, and the itinerary guests search after they book. Open the live vendor page and the IDNR release if you need the numbers in their original tables.

If you needed one annual revenue and one park number to feel brave, stop here. A market report that midpoints two vendors, merges two Utica clerks, or turns sandstone into a nightly rate is not a report. It is a brochure with a canyon in the hero image. This one is the file: 161 doors, a named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 median month, a peak-three of August, June, and July, and a 2.4 million that still only measures park attendance.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much do Airbnb hosts make near Starved Rock?

AirROI's August 8, 2026 Ottawa, Illinois file prints named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 average annual revenue, a $236 ADR, 34.0 percent occupancy, and a named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 median month across 161 listings. Those are vendor figures for the Ottawa proxy, not an Utica guarantee and not a lender note. Top-quartile months print named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31. Bottom-quartile months print named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31.

What does Starved Rock's 2.4 million visitor figure measure?

The May 9, 2025 Governor and IDNR release counts 2.4 million visits to Starved Rock State Park in 2024. That is park attendance at Illinois's most-visited state park that year. It is not listing revenue, not ADR, and not a city's STR tax take. A host's earnings are the AirROI or T12 number, a different object.

Should I average AirROI and AirDNA?

AirDNA prints 250, $26.4 thousand, 50 percent occupancy, and a $245 ADR on its August 5, 2026 Ottawa page. Do not midpoint those files. Cite the vendor and the date. A second vendor snapshot, AirDNA, prints a different n and a different yield: 250 listings, about $26.4K typical annual revenue, 50 percent occupancy, and a $245 ADR.

Is this an independent cottage market?

Professionally managed share is 39.1 percent, and richard Allen shows 58 listings. Superhost share is 74.5 percent, and kishauwau is still the cabin-country benchmark. Evolve shows one listing on this snapshot. Professionally managed share at 39.1 percent already tells you this is not a pure owner-operator town, and 58 listings is not a rumor you can ignore when you Keep a sentence that says no property managers work here.

When is peak season?

AirROI's peak-3 is August, June, and July. January is the lowest month. March and December sit with January in the soft band. It is not an occupancy series this file printed. This one is the file: 161 doors, a named-town AirROI figures as of 2026-07-31 median month, a peak-three of August, June, and July, and a 2.4 million that still only measures park attendance.

Is Ottawa the same as North Utica?

Ottawa is the opened AirROI proxy, and north Utica has Ordinance 2020-01. Village of Utica is a third clerk, and confirm GIS before you Keep the Saturday. Ottawa is the proxy, not North Utica and not a countywide occupancy series. Ottawa, Oglesby, Peru, and a countywide ordinance were not opened this pass. It will not transcribe North Utica fees from a PDF this pass did not type out.

Are most listings entire homes?

AirROI prints 96.3 percent entire home and 68.3 percent houses. That is not a private-room inn file. The Ottawa file is mostly entire homes and mostly houses, with two-bedroom stock as the largest bedroom slice and a meaningful three-plus-bedroom tail. Entire-home houses with two bedrooms will not book like a three-plus-bedroom river house, and neither of them should inherit a Lake Geneva nightly number.

Should I use Lake Geneva numbers?

Lake Geneva is a different market and a different clerk. This page cites Ottawa AirROI. Do not paste a Wisconsin lake ADR onto a La Salle County cabin. It will not import a Lake Geneva $480 ADR except as a contrast that Lake Geneva is a different market. Hosts who import a Wisconsin lake calendar or a Michigan dune calendar onto this file will overprice January and underprice the weeks when the canyons are actually full of boots.

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