…a runaway economic booster, maybe all this sports booster stuff is way, way oversold. The news from Miami:
The gap between economic expectations and reality for Super Bowl XLI could be even wider for South Florida, one of the country’s largest hotel markets and biggest vacation destinations. Hotels that were hoping for sky-high Super Bowl rates months ago now are cutting prices to sell rooms, travel packagers said.
In October, the Crowne Plaza Sawgrass Mills offered a $699 Super Bowl rate; last week, the room was going for $436. At South Beach’s Sagamore, bungalows for Super Bowl weekend were selling for $3,700 a night in October, making last week’s $1,995 daily rate seem a bargain by comparison. …
”Our prices have been dropping,” said Anbritt Stengele, president of Sports Traveler in Chicago, whose Super Bowl packages are selling for $5,600 a person, down from $6,300. “I heard some people that say they’re sitting on up $55,000 worth of inventory that they bought from hotels and can’t unload onto fans.”
So there is overpricing, which we know from the Bobcats experience is a chronic problem with sports marketing. But there is also the element of sports, in this case Super Bowl, biz driving away other business. Having one big event in Miami, or Uptown, depresses the turnout for other events.
This is seldom factored into all the glowing estimates of economic impact of a particular event or venue.
