How Does the Super Bowl Affect Host City Tourism?

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.

Automated summary

The study finds that the impact of the Super Bowl on hotel room rentals is heterogeneous across host cities, with less actual gain in rentals than expected. The benefits are not always in areas close to the stadiums, and most of the revenue increase comes from higher room rates, raising concerns about economic leakages from regional economies.