The outcome of Las Vegas' first Super Bowl between the NFL's Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers is far from clear, but one thing is: the house always wins.
In this case, it's the city's hotels that have a guaranteed victory.
Sunday's Super Bowl LVIII will be played at Allegiant Stadium in Paradise, Nevada, home of the Las Vegas Raiders and just south of the Las Vegas Strip. Hotel rates this weekend in Las Vegas are forecast to average $573, which would set a record, according to data from STR, CoStar’s hospitality analytics firm.
Miami's hotels currently hold the record with ADR of $559 when the Florida city hosted the game in 2020, which was also a matchup between Kansas City and San Francisco. The Chiefs prevailed 31-20.
“If you were just looking at demand and average daily rate, I would — in Vegas terms — bet that they will have the highest-performing Super Bowl that we’ve seen from what we’ve tracked,” said Emmy Hise, senior director of hospitality market analytics at CoStar Group.
What sets Las Vegas apart from other recent Super Bowl host markets is the sheer amount of hotel room inventory in a fairly close radius to where the game will be played. The city has the largest room inventory in the U.S., and the Las Vegas Strip is the largest submarket at 107,223 rooms. The next closest submarket is in Orlando, with 50,121 rooms.
Inglewood, California — a suburb of Los Angeles — hosted the Super Bowl in 2022. Los Angeles has the fifth-highest hotel room inventory in the U.S., but it’s spread out across 10 submarkets whereas Las Vegas is comprised of only three.
It’s not just the amount of rooms, though; it’s also the type of rooms. The Strip, which is about a 10-minute drive north of Allegiant Stadium, represents 64% of Las Vegas’ hotel room inventory, and 55% of those rooms are in the upper-tier classes, Hise said. There isn’t a luxury hotel within a five-mile radius of SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.
There’s enough hotel supply in Las Vegas for high rollers who aren’t even attending the game to enjoy the atmosphere of the Super Bowl.
A year ago, for Super Bowl LVII in Glendale, Arizona, “everyone stayed in Scottsdale, because that’s where all the luxury hotels were, and then drove to Glendale. When it was at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, everyone stayed in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, because again, that’s where all the luxury hotels are,” Hise said. “Now you have hotels that are right there, so it might draw demand even from people not going to the game because they’re still in the thick of everything that’s going on.”
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority is projecting the Super Bowl will have more than $600 million in total economic impact, including 350,000 hotel room nights booked, 330,000 incoming visitors the week of the game and 5,000 full- and part-time jobs generated, Rebecca Lane, public relations manager for the LVCVA, said in an email.
Last year’s Super Bowl generated $1.3 billion in economic activity for the state of Arizona, according to an independent study conducted by Arizona State University.
Property Preparations
In Vegas, everybody has to watch everybody else.
Joe Masi, senior vice president of operations at Remington Hospitality, which manages the Embassy Suites by Hilton Las Vegas, said in an email that the property initially set its rates at $799 per night but had to modify based on softening market demand. Super Bowl ticket prices, along with hotel room rates, started off too high, he said.
“[A] majority of the casino/hotel rates fell along with the ticket prices as a trip of a lifetime became outrageously expensive for most fans,” he said. “The hotel continuously monitored the entire Las Vegas market for compression over the last several months based on proximity to Allegiant Stadium and The Strip and adjusted rates accordingly.”
The Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino is “pretty much sold out” for the weekend, said Gordon Prouty, vice president of public and community relations at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino. The resort increased its rates based on occupancy and demand, settling in at the mid-$500 mark for its signature premier rooms.
Any sellout weekend merits a lot of preparation before the fact, but there’s added pressure to keep a hotel at tip-top shape to ensure a premier guest experience, Prouty said.
The Embassy Suites by Hilton Las Vegas will be hosting a watch party for its guests in its atrium. The Westgate puts on an annual Super Bowl watch party in its ballroom, which accommodates more than 1,000 guests. That event, along with seating in the property’s sportsbook and International Theater, is expected to be sold out.
Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino is home to the SuperBook Westgate Las Vegas, with more than 30,000 square feet and a 220-foot-by-18-foot 4K video wall. Prouty said the sportsbook expects to set a record handle — the amount of money wagered — for a second consecutive year this Super Bowl.
According to a recent survey conducted by the American Gaming Association, a record 67.8 million Americans are expected to bet on the Super Bowl, totaling an estimated $23.1 billion gambled. This means that properties in Las Vegas with sportsbooks can look forward to healthy ancillary revenues from gamblers on the Strip.
Las Vegas is always a popular Super Bowl destination for football fans for gambling and viewing experiences, but Prouty said he wondered if there would be a drop in demand from fans not attending the game because of the action on the Strip. That hasn’t been the case.
“It’s typically a sellout weekend for us without the game being played here because a lot of people look at it as: 'If you can’t be at the Super Bowl, Vegas is the place to be,'” Prouty said. “I wondered if the game being here would have any impact on that, [if it] would keep people away because there’s so much going on around it. It’s been, as far as I’m concerned, the opposite.”
The Super Bowl is the biggest sporting event hosted by the city to date, but Las Vegas has some recent high-profile hosting experience. The first iteration of the Formula One Las Vegas Grand Prix took place on the Strip this past November, which boosted hotel performance in the market.
The difference is the overall impact, Prouty said. Hotel performance on the Strip strongly benefited from the F1 race, but properties and businesses outside of it struggled due to construction.
“The Super Bowl has a much more positive impact on everybody here in Las Vegas,” he said. “Formula One was great for some of the properties, particularly if you’re right on the Strip, but a little bit more of a challenge for properties that weren’t.”
Prouty said lessons learned from F1 will be applied to the next iteration of the race, but the Super Bowl is a whole different event that can’t be compared to anything else. And all projections are pointing to Las Vegas hitting the jackpot hosting its first Super Bowl.
“This is what we do here in Las Vegas. Our biggest challenge was what can we do together as a community to make this the best Super Bowl ever?” he said. “I think when we are sitting here at the same time next week, there’ll be a lot of people that will say that this was the best one.”