The NBA Playoffs represent a period of rapid travel and swift booking, bolstering fan attendance and hotel performance in host markets. The 2023 postseason, culminating in June with the first championship for the Denver Nuggets, offers the first glimpse of demand in a post-quarantine NBA.
Now as the hotel industry drives toward recovery, analysts can begin to understand what good to great performance looks like in the post-COVID world. That's a time when “fans in seats” can more reliably translate to guests in rooms, free of “the bubble” that negated any travel benefit in 2020 and shifted to attendance restrictions and public concern the following year.
For this study, STR, CoStar's hospitality analytics division, focused on the four markets that hosted NBA Conference Finals matchups: Boston, Denver, Los Angeles and Miami. Of the 83 games — not including play-in games — that tipped-off in these playoffs, 43 were between these markets.
Boston and Miami have matched up in the conference finals the past two years. Inversely, neither of the Western Conference teams had a notable run last summer, with Denver bowing out in the first round. And both L.A. market teams missed the postseason altogether.
As the bulk of visiting attendees will prefer to book stays within a relative walking distance of the arena, we focused this analysis on the respective central business districts and downtowns.
Miami, one of the first markets to show appreciable recovery post-quarantine, struggled to replicate that same performance in 2023. During April and May, downtown Miami hotel performance trended downward in all key indexes compared to 2022, most notably in revenue per available room. The Boston, Denver, and L.A. hotel markets, meanwhile, each exhibited marked improvement.
For a more granular look, we narrowed our focus to the impact of game days while also accounting for “shoulder” days — prior to, between and after game days — as teams, staff, production crews and dedicated fans commonly book hotel stays beyond game days.
Despite the decline in RevPAR, downtown Miami hotels still benefited from robust performance on game and shoulder days. On game days, local occupancy posted a double-digit improvement over last year as well as the best game-day ADR of the markets analyzed.
On the other side of that coin is Boston. Despite an overall boost during the observed period — with strong performance in RevPAR, average daily rate and occupancy — year-over-year improvement was limited due to the impact of Celtics home games in 2022. This does not assert a downturn for the area, as the central business district still exhibited solid performance, with 84.1% occupancy and ADR of $335 on game and shoulder days. Contrary to signaling muted performance, this may be indicative of the Boston hotel market’s performance ceiling.
Looking westward, the Los Angeles central business district relished the opportunity to play host, with a year-over-year occupancy improvement of 16%. Shoulder days proved to be the strongest point, as L.A. was the only one of the four markets to post double-digit, year-over-year occupancy gains on shoulder days.
On the champions' home turf, hotel performance metrics may not have jumped off the page, but Denver performance was solid all around. Unlike Boston, Denver was able to pair a year-over-year boost in occupancy with double-digit gains in RevPAR on game and shoulder days. The traditionally “midsized market” posted game-day occupancy of 79.7% during the playoffs, second only to Boston.
Denver serves as a great example that consistent, well-rounded performance is the best path to prominence.
Nathan Rael is an account manager with STR, CoStar's hospitality analytics division. Daryl Cronk is CoStar’s director of hospitality market analytics.