Bay Area hotels can bank on some California love this week.
Super Bowl LX will take place on Feb. 8 in Santa Clara, California. The NFC champion Seattle Seahawks will face the AFC champion New England Patriots.
Colin Sherman, director of hospitality analytics for Texas and the U.S. South for CoStar Group, joined the CoStar News Hotels podcast to contextualize the Santa Clara and San Francisco markets and share some expectations on how hotel demand will play out in these cities this weekend.
Santa Clara has been performing better than some of its peer hotel markets, Sherman said. Year over year in December, Santa Clara hotel revenue per available room was up 4%, average daily rate rose 3% and occupancy increased 1%.
"The transient and group demand have definitely expanded from that corporate base, which is helping improve their activity overall. You also have this large return-to-office trend in the past years, which has also fueled that midweek rise in transient demand," he said.
Like past host markets for the Super Bowl, hoteliers in the region will have the pricing power to push rates well above their usual marks. But with a top 25 market such as San Francisco nearby and the sheer hotel room supply of the Bay Area in its entirety, the Super Bowl likely won't have the same impact on Santa Clara as a compressed market such as New Orleans or Las Vegas.
When Santa Clara previously hosted the Super Bowl in 2016, the San Francisco hotel market saw a larger lift in demand than the host city, Sherman said. There's even more reason to believe this could be the case this time around, with San Francisco hosting the Pro Bowl and Super Bowl Experience at the Moscone Center during the week leading up to the game.
Plus, public transit options will be available in full force between the cities this weekend.
"Transit was such a huge influence and a huge factor, because in 2016, there were 15,000 plus Caltrain riders on Saturday, close to 10,000 on the VTA into the stadium and the BART was pushing, at the time, one of its highest ridership dates ever," Sherman said. "That same setup is in place for 2026 and it absolutely supports San Francisco's pricing power when fans can stay there for the night life ... and hop on a train to the game and then go back that same night."