I'm pleased to announce this is my fifth Super Bowl (covering it from afar in terms of hotel data. Yeah, I know. Just as good as being there).
I read a lot about football, and I am always interested in articles about the numbers surrounding the sport. So you can imagine how curious I was to see this Deadspin article regarding Fox Business Channel's report that Super Bowl attendance is actually dwindling. The talking heads reveal shocking data confirming that stadium attendance for the big game peaked at more than six figures when Dallas hosted in 2011, and has declined back into the 70,000-person range since. They posit only the marquee teams remain a draw, and even Super Bowl parties are siphoning away game attendance.
You see how easy it is to mislead with data?
They neglect to mention, as Deadspin actually points out, the Super Bowl is always sold out, and attendance is limited to stadium capacity. Dallas had the highest attendance simply because its stadium had the most seats in it.
No, the impact from the Super Bowl isn't dwindling, and now that the Pro Bowl is hosted in the same city as the Super Bowl (one week earlier), the host city has plenty to cheer about. To boot, Phoenix also was host to the Waste Management Open during this same time, a major PGA event.
Let's look at the host-city hotel performance for the past five Super Bowls to see the impact, first for the weekend of the Super Bowl itself, and then for the two weeks leading up to the game.
Phoenix recorded the second highest overall occupancy for Super Bowl weekend, beat out only by New Orleans (which has about half the room supply to fill). Yet, we all know Phoenix is already busy in February, right? New York City had a low occupancy compared to the other host cities, but also had a much greater number of rooms to fill.
New Orleans wins hands down here, with a Super Bowl weekend rate of nearly $400. Phoenix is not far behind, but Dallas certainly is, with a rate just more than half of what New Orleans achieved. Both the New Orleans and Indianapolis markets benefit from having a relatively small room supply base compared to the other, larger destinations.
And looking at increases versus the prior year, the winners and losers shift a bit.
Indianapolis experienced an astounding 1,000%-plus increase in revenue per available room during Super Bowl weekend, more than double the next highest increase (Dallas). This makes sense: Of the five markets, Indianapolis is slowest in early February, so it has a lower basis from which to climb. Dallas and New Orleans also experienced relatively soft weekends the year prior to the Super Bowl, while New York City and Phoenix were somewhat busier.
Two weeks leading up to Super Bowl
Looking at the markets for a full two weeks prior to and including the Super Bowl, we see yet another story. Keep in mind that 2015 was the first year the Pro Bowl was held in the same host city as the Super Bowl, one week before.
Phoenix had a two-week occupancy of nearly 80%, well above all other markets. Again, Phoenix is typically busy in the winter, but clearly the Pro Bowl and the Waste Management Open helped fill rooms. (As an aside, check out “Super Bowl yields ancillary revenue for hotels” by HNN’s Shawn A. Turner for more on what Phoenix-area hotels did this year to maximize revenue)
New Orleans and New York City ran neck-and-neck for the two weeks leading up to their Super Bowl hosting, with Phoenix a close third. As with the rate for the Super Bowl weekend, Dallas was the laggard here, with its two-week rate about half of what the leader achieved. But clearly these markets achieve disparate rates from one another throughout the year, so the true winner is measured best by percent change, not absolute performance.
Of the five host cities, New York City and Phoenix had the highest occupancy for the last two weeks of January the year prior to the Super Bowl (69% and 67%, respectively), so these are markets already fairly busy in the winter. Thus, gains are more difficult to come by, especially compared to a location like Indianapolis, which only had 43% occupancy in the last two weeks of January the year before the Super Bowl.
Although cities normally soft in the winter will always see more year-over-year gain from the Super Bowl, an 86% two-week RevPAR gain for Phoenix is impressive, and it was surely further bolstered by the Pro Bowl. Overall, Phoenix was in the middle of the pack for growth resulting from the Super Bowl compared to the four previous years. The gains in Phoenix were even greater than Dallas, despite the huge drop in game attendance! (Yes, I'm talking very sarcastically directly to you, Fox Business Channel...)
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