Hoteliers in the Tampa, Florida, market enjoyed bolstered rate performance over Super Bowl weekend. However, the impact was certainly not what hoteliers had expected when Tampa was originally designated the Super Bowl LV host city back in 2017.
Daily data from STR, CoStar's hospitality analytics firm, shows that Tampa's hotel market achieved average daily rate of $246 and occupancy of 82.4% for the full Super Bowl weekend — inclusive of Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights — resulting in revenue per available room of $203.
For the equivalent weekend in 2020, which was just before the domestic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was felt in earnest, Tampa achieved an ADR of $149 and occupancy of 82.2%. An event like the Super Bowl will typically have a categorical effect on a market’s ADR; however the COVID-affected Super Bowl LV fostered year-over-year ADR growth of 64.5% and ostensibly flat occupancy.
While the market overall posted ADR of $246, this was largely driven by the performance of the Tampa central business district and airport submarket, where Tampa Bay’s Raymond James Stadium is located and which achieved ADR of $385. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Tampa’s Tarpon Springs and North Shore submarket recorded ADR of $134 — a more than $250 difference.
The submarket that includes the stadium was also the clear leader in hotel occupancy, but those results were less disparate, with a higher degree of parity across submarkets. The central business district and airport submarket has nearly 26% of the market’s rooms, making it Tampa's largest submarket. The balance of the Tampa market’s rooms — the other 74% — combined for an aggregate Super Bowl weekend performance of 78.9% occupancy and $189 ADR.
[Markets and submarkets in this story are defined according to STR criteria.]
The two-week lead-up to the Super Bowl has historically been fruitful for the host city’s hoteliers, both in terms of occupancy and ADR — albeit to a lesser extent — with team personnel, media and fans arriving in advance of the big event. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was certainly evident in this regard.
In the two weeks prior to the Super Bowl — Monday, Jan. 25, through Thursday, Feb. 4 — the Tampa market experienced hotel occupancy of 57.8% and ADR of $121. Comparing these metrics to the equivalent time span the year before, this year’s performance equates to year-over-year occupancy and ADR declines of 26.9% and 16.8%, respectively.
The impact of the pandemic is evident when comparing Tampa’s performance to that of prior Super Bowl host cities. Tampa’s ADR of $246 represents the lowest weekendlong ADR since Dallas in 2011, which achieved an ADR of $207. However, the 82.4% occupancy achieved by Tampa hotels is in the middle of the curve compared to that of other recent host cities.
Perhaps the most telling metric demonstrating the pandemic impact on the Super Bowl weekend is year-over-year RevPAR percent change — comparing hotel revenue of the equivalent weekend in the prior year to the revenue achieved over Super Bowl weekend.
No Super Bowl in recent history had resulted in less than a doubling of hotel RevPAR over the prior year. Dating back to 2011, when the event was in Dallas, the lowest Super Bowl weekend year-over-year RevPAR change was the 114.6% growth experienced in 2014 when New York was the host city. In fact, other than for New York in 2014 and Miami in 2020, RevPAR tripled year over year at a minimum for host-city hotels.
If we also exclude the 2016 Super Bowl in the San Francisco and San Jose market, every other recent Super Bowl generated at a minimum quadruple the RevPAR of the prior year. Comparatively speaking, with effectively flat occupancy, Tampa hotels' year-over-year RevPAR growth of 64.9% this year was nearly entirely driven by rate.
Overall, the Super Bowl impact to Tampa’s hotel performance certainly appears muted relative to that of previous years, but, all factors considered, it was a needed win for the market and the U.S. hotel industry.
Blake Reiter is director of custom forecasts at STR.
This article represents an interpretation of data collected by CoStar's hospitality analytics firm STR.