Tampa inns hope to achieve pre-pandemic reserving throughout Tremendous Bowl

Some apartments on Airbnb cost thousands of dollars for the weekend.

TAMPA, Florida – With the Super Bowl less than two weeks away, book hotels. Even with limited fans, tens of thousands of people will travel to Tampa to be at or around the event.

“You just want to be here. You want to be a part of everything,” said Santiago Corrada, President and CEO of Visit Tampa Bay.

The company tracks hotel stays and other metrics for major events. They hope the Super Bowl will safely bring hotel stays back to pre-pandemic levels.

“I would like to see the occupancy in the 90s-80s-90s, during that week before the Super Bowl and the Super Bowl, so we can beat last January,” Corrada said.

Last January, hotel occupancy was 73%, its highest level in January.

Today the hotel occupancy is 53%. Much lower, especially considering one of the greatest events of the year is around the corner.

In the past few years when Tampa hosted the Super Bowl, hotels were fully booked and visitors had to look elsewhere.

“In the past, we didn’t have enough rooms in Hillsborough County to accommodate all of the visitors coming with a Super Bowl, so we’ve seen people book rooms as far as Orlando,” Corrada said.

But hotels are definitely starting to book as we get closer to game day.

“I’ve found that the hotel inventory is very low and people want to come but can’t find nice places to stay,” said Emily Pariseau. She is a travel consultant who lives in an apartment in Tampa.

When she saw the demand increase, she decided to review the hosting of her apartment.

“My roommate and I both have families in town, so we’ll have to stay somewhere else. And we kind of looked around and thought we have a cute apartment, maybe people want to stay here. “

What she found was that people would be willing to pay a lot of money to use their apartment for the weekend.

“We were shocked. We bet [our apartment] I’ve been on Airbnb for less than 12 hours and received a thousands of dollars offer that we never expected in a million years. “

The couple decided to turn the offer down to ensure they had all of the cleaning supplies and items necessary to accommodate people. They’ll be listing again soon when the demand is likely to be even higher.

“And I think we’ll wait until Monday morning, we’ll put it back up, if we get a big offer we’ll take it and if not we’ll just forget it,” said Pariseau.