For those of you who aren't aware, which I'm guessing is most, the hotels news team here at CoStar is based in Cleveland, Ohio.
This has been the case for as long as we've existed, going back to our pre-CoStar days as Hotel News Now.
So it's been interesting to watch in the last couple of weeks where the state of the hotel industry has become a much bigger talking point here in Cleveland.
The context behind this starts with the fact that developers officially broke ground on a new $2.4 billion stadium for the Cleveland Browns. Unlike the existing lakefront stadium, the new facility will be outside of the city proper in Brook Park, Ohio — near the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport — and will be domed.
That last detail is an important one because it has given rise to some local hope that, despite Cleveland's generally unpleasant February weather, the city could play host to a Super Bowl one day in the not-too-distant future.
Various locals have supported this hope, with Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine now saying he's hopeful the new stadium will allow the city to host both the NFL draft and a Super Bowl.
One person who hasn't been as supportive of the idea is NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, whose opinion likely weighs heavily on this particular decision.
When asked directly about the prospects of a Cleveland Super Bowl, he didn't outright shut the door, but the one-item to-do list he gave the city to make that more plausible is not as achievable or reasonable as the average Clevelander might realize. Essentially, he said, the city needs to double its hotel stock and improve travel infrastructure, noting the smaller current Super Bowl markets have well over 40,000 rooms.
“I don’t know what the number is here. I think it’s about half that, roughly," he said. "And it’s also the quality of hotels, but also the airport’s a really important issue. And I think the airport from what I understand is going to be part of the development here and part of that opportunity. So there’s a chance here for this to be the transformational type of project that converts and has more events that people need to come to and hotels start to develop. The airport expands and you get that kind of infrastructure.”
For saying he didn't know in real time, his estimate seems to be pretty on the nose.
Right now, CoStar data has Cleveland at 23,442 rooms. For comparison's sake, here are the last five Super Bowl host markets' room counts:
- San Francisco/San Mateo: 55,439
- New Orleans: 43,403
- Las Vegas: 165,839
- Phoenix: 73,616
- Los Angeles: 114,160
Still, there seems to be some level of optimism here that this isn't an insurmountable obstacle and just something the city can plan around and overcome. I'm sure I don't have to tell those of you in our audience that adding more than 20,000 rooms to a small city like Cleveland all in the matter of a few short years probably isn't going to make it a particularly attractive place to own or operate.
If you were to do that, theoretically, it'd put Cleveland roughly on par with a market like Detroit, which has 48,627 rooms and has in fact hosted a Super Bowl in the past. The only problem there is Detroit hovers around 60% occupancy, while Cleveland sells about the same ratio of its rooms, despite having half as many.
I don't have an MBA, but from what I understand about supply and demand — and basic math — all of that adds up to some pretty dark days for Cleveland's hoteliers.
There's been some talk about temporarily supplementing supply with cruise ships, which is indeed a path coastal markets have taken in the past for a short-term boost in room count. But the logistics of bringing thousands of rooms via ship on to what could very likely be a frozen lake seems... challenging? That's the nicest way I can put it.
But alas, this still might be the most straightforward path to getting "Cleveland" and "Super Bowl" in the same sentence.
Let me know what you think on LinkedIn or via email.
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