How Does the Super Bowl Affect Host City Tourism?

Abstract

This paper uses a unique dataset containing more than eight years of daily data to examine the effect of the Super Bowl on hotel room rentals, rates, and room revenue in four recent host cities. The findings include (1) the net gain in rentals is considerably fewer than the gross number of rooms rented, (2) benefits are heterogeneous across cities, (3) the areas that benefit are not always those located close to stadiums, and (4) nearly 90% of hotel room revenue gained is because of increased room rates which means concerns about leakages from host cities’ regional economies are salient.