The Super Bowl has historically brought immense hotel demand to each host market, providing hotel owners the opportunity to push average daily rates well above standard pricing.
With the big game this year in Santa Clara, California, the annual spike in Super Bowl hotel demand is expected to be no different, according to hoteliers in the Bay Area.
Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, is the stage of Super Bowl LX between the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots on Sunday, Feb. 8.
Not only is the game a rematch of a past Super Bowl matchup from a little over decade ago in 2015, but it's also a return to the host market from exactly a decade ago in 2016.
Hotels expect high-scoring affair
On the gridiron, the Seahawks ranked as one of the top defenses in the league this season, preventing opponents from putting points on the board. The Patriots ranked as one of the top offenses in the league, led by their quarterback and MVP candidate Drake Maye.
Hoteliers in the Bay Area will relate more to Maye and the Patriots' high-scoring offense this weekend.
Lara Stabell-Gibb, vice president of revenue and digital strategy at OTO Development, said the hotel development and management company's hotels in the region are seeing strong demand for the week and weekend of the Super Bowl. OTO Development manages seven hotels in the Bay Area, including two that are less than a 10-minute drive from Levi's Stadium: the Homewood Suites San Jose North and the Hilton Garden Inn Sunnyvale.
Silicon Valley is known for its high activity around technology businesses, making the region a hotbed for corporate travel. Stabell-Gibb said OTO's hotels haven't had to sacrifice any of their typical weekday corporate business. The company's hotels located on the fringes of Santa Clara have seen a demand uptick as well.
"We were able to get more rate for these outlier areas, and there was a lot of group [demand] out there to be had that were willing to stay, not necessarily directly in San Jose and Sunnyvale," she said.
Leisure guests anticipating the Super Bowl started booking their hotel rooms more than a year ago, and that business has complemented the corporate and group travel business now on the books, she said.
Stabell-Gibb called this Super Bowl "probably one of the more successful for a region that I've seen in the last few years."
Weekends in the Silicon Valley are typically dry periods for hotel demand, said Justin Gammon, regional director of operations at Driftwood Hospitality Management. Hosting the biggest individual sporting event of the year changes that, though.
Driftwood manages the Sheraton San Jose Silicon Valley, about a 13-minute drive from Levi's Stadium. Gammon said the hotel had a 50% base of group business on the books Thursday through Sunday, which has helped push average daily rate.
He said the Super Bowl has brought significant group demand to the region, whether it's media teams or groups in town for related events.
"That compression is not exclusive to our hotel. A lot of hotels in market have that group base, and that group base is providing a lot of opportunity, a lot of compression on the remaining inventory, allowing hotels to sell at rates that they typically wouldn't sell out on a weekend in that market," he said.
Compression happens in a market when the demand for hotel rooms far outpaces the supply, allowing hoteliers to price remaining rooms at outsize rates.
Hotel demand isn't just spiking near the stadium during Super Bowl week. San Francisco is enjoying outsize demand as the host of the Super Bowl LX Experience from Feb. 3-7 and the Pro Bowl on Feb. 3 at the downtown Moscone Center.
Brett Brown, general manager of the 96-room Hotel Emblem in San Francisco, said his property had "quite a bit" of group demand on the books ahead of the matchup finalizing related to the game. He said the property has a couple of sold-out nights leading up to the game on Sunday.
The 411-room W San Francisco is seeing similar success, said Jeff Ossenkop, general manager of the property.
"We are seeing tremendous demand," Ossenkop said. "Most of the market is extremely compressed, and this property is fully committed when it comes to occupancy, and I think that's probably the case with most of the hotels downtown."
Occupancy on the books takes a dip on Super Bowl Sunday in San Francisco, Brown said, perhaps indicating hotel guests are mostly in town for the auxiliary events rather than the game itself.
"Those folks are not necessarily staying for the actual game itself, or if they are going to the game they're leaving right after. That's kind of the pattern we're seeing. Year over year though it's a huge increase," he said.
Better than nostalgia: A look back at 2016 results
Bay Area hoteliers are joining in on the 2016 nostalgia trend.
Super Bowl 50 between the Denver Broncos and Carolina Panthers took place in Santa Clara 10 years ago. According to CoStar data, hotel room supply is up 15.3% in the market compared to its 2016 levels, currently sitting at 40,429 rooms.
Stabell-Gibb said the Super Bowl in 2016 similarly presented the market with significant demand from Friday through game day on Sunday, but the week leading up to it was a dud compared to this year.
"There was none of that business pre- and post-[game]. This year, it's pre and post and during, and it's all over Silicon Valley, which I'm really grateful for," she said.
Expectations were really high for the Super Bowl the last time it came through Northern California, and they weren't necessarily met across the board.
"The expectations were much higher that year, and it didn't pan out for everybody. That was the general consensus," Brown said.
The NFL bringing the Super Bowl Experience to San Francisco this time around — as well as hosting the Pro Bowl in the same market as the Super Bowl for the first time — helped bring the neighboring market more into the fold, Ossenkop said.
"Compression in the city seems to be the focal point where people come pre-game. What makes this year uniquely different is the fan zone ... having that right outside our front doors is going to make a big difference with how busy our outlets are," he said. "I'm betting that the city impacts are going to be pretty significant compared to 2016."