This western city is at the center of the 'cowboy core' travel trend

Frontier and 'cowboy core' tourism continues to drive traveler numbers in 2025.

Jun 7, 2025 - 14:58

This western city is at the center of the 'cowboy core' travel trend

While the extensive lore around the cowboy life has drawn travelers to the American West for centuries, the modern term "cowboy core" has continued riding a long peak amid the cultural influence of Beyoncé's "Cowboy Carter" album and the finale of the popular Paramount show "Yellowstone" over the last two years.

Google Trends data shows that searches for "cowboy core" periodically spike during popular travel periods. Plus, flight-booking platform Skyscanner found that 44% of surveyed U.S. residents were interested in vacations involving riding horses, staying at a ranch, and learning about cowboy history.

Sometimes referred to as "frontier tourism," cowboy core has repeatedly emerged as a travel trend both in 2024 and 2025.

Don't miss the move: SIGN UP for TheStreet's FREE Daily news

Long a cowboy destination, Scottsdale sees popularity spike from cowboy core

Traditionally, the "Wild West" has been a fluid term used to refer to an area spanning Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. Incorporated in 1951 with the slogan "The West's Most Western Town," the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale has long leaned into its history as a crossway for cattle ranchers, cowboys, and Native Americans to drive tourism in the modern era.

The city's Old Town is marked with a large historic sign of a cowboy with a lasso and retains many of the core elements of an old Western settlement, such as a main street of wooden houses that in the 19th century were used as trading posts. Today the area offers a mix of trendy restaurants and tourist shops that sell artifacts and the silver and turquoise jewelry with which Arizona is associated.

Established in the building that once held the Farmers Bank of Scottsdale, the Rusty Spur Saloon is at once a popular country music bar and a registered landmark for its history as the first pub in the city.

Tourists from around the country and the world turn to Scottsdale as the most obvious place to experience the cowboy core vibe. Statistics from the city show that an average of 11 million tourists come to Scottsdale in a given year.

Numbers broken down for 2023 show that 4.8 million of them stayed overnight, while 1.5 million came from outside the U.S.

Scottsdale is also a popular starting point on a wider Wild West tour, as at least 4.5 million visitors came from different parts of the U.S. and passed through Scottsdale for the day.

Due to the extreme temperatures the Sonoran Desert can reach during the summer, peak visiting period for Scottsdale is November to April, when temperatures average somewhere between the 60s and low 70s (between 15°C and 20°C).

The city is also home to a number of historic hotels that immerse travelers in Southwestern charm. Located just outside of Scottsdale in the celebrity-favored Paradise Valley, the Hermosa Inn was initially built as a private studio when Alonzo "Lon" Megargee, a Philadelphia resident who was drawn to Arizona to create art featuring cowboys and Native Americans, purchased six valleys of ranch land in 1935.

Hermosa Inn is a historic inn located just outside of Scottsdale, Arizona.
Image source: Hermosa Inn

As Scottsdale looks into 2025, both uncertainties and opportunities emerge

The Hermosa Inn's later owners transformed it into a guest house and boutique hotel that leans heavily into both the artistic studio and cowboy history. It features 43 expansive hacienda-style homes and a property marked by paved pathways, gardens full of cacti and blooming desert flowers, and a design accentuated by exposed adobe and hand-painted Mexican tiles.

More on travel:

Although Scottsdale is internationally recognized as a cowboy core destination, it has been a time of uncertainty for both the city's and the state's tourism industry, especially amid the Trump's administration anti-immigration focus and choice to pick fights with countries like Canada.

The Arizona Office of Tourism in 2023 recorded 822,500 Canadian visitors, who are Scottsdale's second-largest international tourist group after Mexico, while the 1.6 million international visitors brought in a collective $1.3 billion to its economy during the same time period.

Concerns over the international tourist drop seen since the start of 2025 continue to ricochet across Arizona's tourism industry, but given the amount of infrastructure it has to provide travelers with a quick-stop Western experience, Scottsdale remains a top destination for those seeking a cowboy core trip.