My employer has recently warned us to delay business travel to Dallas until after the Super Bowl, because of the shortage of hotel rooms that week. That seems reasonable.
However, what does this line mean? “All of the hotels in the [Dallas-Fort Worth] area have had to guarantee the Super Bowl Committee 90% of their rooms from January 31 to February 7th.” Is there some kind of contract? How does it work? Or is this just a sloppy way of saying that 90% of rooms are already booked?
What I think it means is that in exchange for holding the super bowl there and standing to make shittons of money, the hotels in the area have agreed to not release 90% of their hotel rooms unless it’s for Superbowl visitors.
I doubt that 90% of the rooms are already booked, seeing as the teams have yet to be decided. Sure, there are some wealthy people that go to EVERY Superbowl, but by and large the people that go decide after the AFC/NFC championship games are played.
This brings up some interesting logistical questions. Do they have to add a checkbox for the online travel sites registration screens - “Are you attending the Super Bowl?” Or do Orbitz and Expedia not get a crack at the Super Bowl hotel rooms?
And what’s to keep people from fibbing the question to get a reservation? Will somebody at the hotel be asking to see your bowl tickets? 
I ran a search on Orbitz for rooms in Dallas from Jan 31-Feb 7. There was nothing listed about the Superbowl.
I did a quick search for downtown Dallas hotels and used the Adolphus. They are booked from Feb. 3-6, so there could be places filling up or over 90% capacity as of now.
I doubt it. There are a lot of people who go to the Super Bowl cities in hopes of scoring tickets when they get there. From what I understand, tickets for the game are given out on a lottery basis to season tickets holders of the participating teams and unless you’re willing to shell out a couple of grand for a ticket service, they are otherwise pretty hard to come by. A lot of people just pin their hopes on getting a halfway decent deal from a scalper when they actually get to the city.
The vast majority of Super Bowl week hotel visitors aren’t fans there for the game, they’re corporate. And they probably booked their rooms 12 months ago.
Just what does ‘corporate’ mean in this context? Working for NFL pro football, or what?
If you doubt 90% of them are already booked, spend a few minutes at expedia or travelocity. The rooms are all booked by travel agencies months in advance, who offer them as part of SuperBowl packages. You can’t get a room on your own now (and probably not a flight, either).
What’s different about the Super Bowl from other sporting events is that the whole week is essentially a mega-convention for the league and it’s corporate sponsors. Everything is booked – every conference room, every restaurant, every rental car. I covered several as a reporter, and there’s nothing comparable. Not even the Olympics.
The point about the 90% guarantee is that they aren’t supposed to book other events, and they aren’t supposed to hold rooms open.
The NFL, the television networks, the advertisers, the advertisers’ clients, etc. Now - a lot of those clients are going to be fans. If Chicago makes it to the Super Bowl, you can bet a shitload of Budweiser distributors from Chicago are going to get their hands on tickets. And those client/fans are probably going to be on their own to get hotel rooms for the most part (or, Budweiser will have booked a bunch of rooms that the client/fan will have to pay for individually).
I’m anxious to see how it all works in person next year here in Indy. Several new hotels downtown were built specifically for the Super Bowl. The convention center just reopened today after a giant expansion, and a few days ago the University of Indianapolis just inflated their new football facility that will be used by the NFC team.
Only a minority of the tickets to the Super Bowl go to the participating teams (which then distribute them to their fans, usually via such a lottery). I’m a Packer season ticket holder; in seasons in which the Packers advance in the playoffs, they’ve held that lottery. The only year in which I “won” the lottery was after the '95 season, but they lost to the Cowboys in the NFC Championship Game that year.
According to this FAQ from Super Bowl XLIII (a few years back):
- Each participating team gets 17.5% of the tickets. As Cowboys Stadium seats ~80,000, that’d be 14,000 tickets per participating team
- Each of the other NFL teams (except for the host team) gets 1.2% of the tickets (960)
- The host team (Cowboys) gets 5% (4000)
- The remaining 25% or so are controlled by the NFL, and go to sponsors, affiliated companies, the broadcast networks and other media, the host organizing committee, and charities.
So, if I’m following you, the NFL wants the hotels to sell 90% of their rooms far in advance, mostly to travel agents who will resell them as packages. Because Superbowl week is a big football industry extravaganza, the NFL has the leverage to get the hotel chains to do what it wants. If they don’t comply, the NFL could threaten not use that company for any of its presumably numerous room reservations in the future. Is this right? I know nothing about the business side of hotels or football.
How is enforcement handled? Does the NFL demand to see the hotels’ records? More importantly, why does it matter? It’s not like a hotel is going to refuse to rent rooms during a massive event.
I was kind of wondering about that too. Also, does this apply to budget places like Motel 6, Super 8 and Econo Lodge in addition to the Marriotts, Sheratons and Hiltons? Howabout mom & pop type places or the shitty little no tell motels in the sketchy parts of town?
That’s usually all dealt with in the city’s proposal to host the Super Bowl. They come forward with a proposal to the NFL, which contains, at minimum, those 90% type numbers from the hotels in the city, along with a crap ton of other amenities and various dealings that would be attractive. The NFL wants to be assured that they and their sponsors are going to be pampered, well cared for, and comfortable the entire time.
We are having the NHL all star game next month. They booked up 100% of 5 hotels for that, they are all high end places. I don’t know how they distributed the rooms but I know many of the tickets also go to sponsors, just like the Super Bowl. I think the media get rooms too but they are not included in those 5 hotels.
Sorry, I phrased that poorly. I meant 90% aren’t booked by the people themselves. They’re already held by agencies/corporate types/etc.
Exactly so. The host cities have to put together the entire package to convince the NFL that they’ll be able to pull off the event (and it’s not just the game itself, but tons of parties, media events, the fan expo that occurs in the week before the game, etc.). A big part of that is being able to promise that all the visitors will be able to get nice hotel rooms, reasonably close to the stadium. In order to handle the Super Bowl, you need to be able to handle an influx of 75,000 people or more (not just the out-of-town ticket holders, but also the media, the support staffs for the secondary events, etc.)
ISTR that, when Jacksonville hosted the Super Bowl a few years ago, they had to bring in several cruise ships to serve as temporary hotels – compared to the other traditional host cities (New Orleans, Miami, Los Angeles, etc.), Jacksonville is a relatively small city, and isn’t nearly the tourist attraction otherwise. They simply didn’t have enough “standing” hotel rooms available.
It’s one reason (along with the crappy weather) why the Super Bowl will never be held in Green Bay. There simply wouldn’t be enough “quality” hotel rooms within even a two-hour drive of Lambeau Field to satisfy the NFL.
So it’s a three-way negotiation.
Local government agrees to have enough resources to handle security, traffic, etc. and in return gets a huge tax boost from visitors.
Local businesses agree to reserve enough facilities and goods for sale to exclusively to visitors (both ticket holders and industry people) and in return get a really good sales week.
The NFL agrees to hold the game there, and in return gets some level of assurance that the paying customers and insiders will have a good experience.
If things were instead handled in a half-assed way, there could be enough unhappy customers that the NFL’s brand could be damaged and people might not shell out quite as much money for Superbowl tickets next year. Not to mention that the city is unlikely to get another shot at hosting it for a long time.
Is this more or less the idea?
Well hotels and contracts vary. Having worked in hotels, a 90% guarantee is just that. A hotel certainly isn’t going to hold off selling rooms if they can. Hotels overbook and if they can’t honor the room they send them someplace else or negotiate a settlement.
Some convention WILL audit the hotel books if they are being billed for unused rooms. This is usually effective for avoiding to pay for unused rooms as hotels usually will not provide a guest list for proof rooms were occupied.
Business avoid high convention times in cities not because of the lack of rooms but usually because the demand is so high the hotel can charge much, much more for the room.
So your corporate office is probably saying, “Don’t go to Dallas, because there’s a shortage of room and if you go the Super Bowl weekend, you’ll pay $500/room. If you go the week after you’ll pay $100/room”
Exactly.
People keep asking how it’s enforced. It’s not a matter of enforcing anything. The local hotels have agreed to hold rooms open as part of the agreement for the Super Bowl to come to their town. I can’t conceive of any reason why a hotel would choose
not to participate. “Corporate fat cats on all-expenses-paid junkets? Keep 'em out of here!”
All the NFL wants is to keep other big events from being scheduled at the same time, because that puts a strain on resources. The league can ask for those kinds of concessions because they’ll bring about 200,000 people to town for the week, and generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the local economy.
And anyone who’s been to a Super Bowl (or lived in a host city) can attest that very few of the folks in town come from the cities of the participating teams… I’d guess maybe ten percent.
People are asking how it would be enforced because the way it was presented in the OP would require enforcement and more. Say I own a 400 room luxury hotel in Dallas. Who exactly can prevent me from renting those rooms to the National Association of Chiropractors? No one- not the city and not the NFL. Now if I signed a contract with the NFL in say ,2007 agreeing to hold 300 of those rooms until Sept 1,2010 in return for a guarantee that the NFL will take at least 150 of those rooms then they can require me to keep those rooms available until 9/1/10. No hotel is going to say "Keep the corporate fat cats out " but neither will they turn away 300 rooms of chiropractors and meeting space and catering because they might possibly rent some unknown number of rooms to Superbowl attendees.
According to this article, it seems the only rooms that were held are those that the NFL expects to use, they appear to have been held by individual hotels based on individual contracts and I’m sure the hotels got some sort of guarantee.