Downtown New Orleans hotels decorated for Super Bowl LIX on Friday, January 24, 2025. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
Downtown New Orleans hotels and parking areas decorated for Super Bowl LIX on Friday, January 24, 2025. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
Pedestrians walk along Canal Street by the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel on Friday, July 7, 2023.
Crews unload stages and flooring outside the Caesar’s Superdome in preparation for Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans on Monday, January 6, 2024. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
Downtown New Orleans hotels decorated for Super Bowl LIX on Friday, January 24, 2025. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
A room at the Motel 6 in Gentilly, with a view across the Interstate 10 expressway to the Industrial Canal, probably isn’t everyone’s idea of $625-a-night luxury lodgings, but for Super Bowl LIX weekend it might just be a bargain.
Terence Adams, a Detroit Lions fan from suburban Farmington, Michigan, made his original hotel booking last year, right after Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas, and he was confident that this would be his team’s year. After the Lions lost to the Washington Commanders in the divisional playoff last week, his plans changed.
“Since I don’t see myself going to New Orleans anymore, I have these rooms available for any Chiefs, Bills, Eagles or Commanders fans who will be going for the good of the cause,” Adams said.
He is offering four “king” rooms, which feature two double beds and Motel 6’s standard orange franchise décor, at $2,500 per room for four nights through Feb. 10. He said he’s had a lot of interest from fans waiting to see if their teams makes it to the big show.
Downtown New Orleans hotels and parking areas decorated for Super Bowl LIX on Friday, January 24, 2025. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
With few of the city’s 44,000 hotel rooms still available for the days around the Feb. 9 Super Bowl, last-minute bookings are going for more than $1,000 per night for standard rooms, even outside Orleans Parish, according to booking agents.
“It’s a supply and demand issue when it comes down to the Super Bowl,” said Travis Tague, general manager of the Omni Royal Orleans in the French Quarter and current president of the Greater New Orleans Hotel and Lodging Association.
“This is a great opportunity for New Orleans and the hotels to capitalize on a once-in-a-decade event,” Tague said.
All big events push New Orleans prices higher, but the Super Bowl is unique. The NFL requires that a large number of host city hotels commit a year in advance to providing up to 90% of their rooms for big blocks of guests that include NFL staff, the two teams that will compete, sponsors, media, and halftime entertainers and their large contingents.
That means a large percentage of rooms are taken off the market early and Super Bowl host cities often see record daily rates for the long weekend, as Las Vegas did last year.
Pedestrians walk along Canal Street by the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel on Friday, July 7, 2023.
The average daily room rates for the New Orleans Super Bowl won’t be known until late February, but they are likely to equal or exceed the record rates seen for the three-day Taylor Swift concert series last October at the Caesars Superdome, which was part of the pop star’s Eras Tour, said Colin Sherman, director of Hospitality Analytics at the CoStar Group, which tracks industry data.
“The last Super Bowl in New Orleans (in 2013) was the previous record until Taylor Swift came along,” Sherman said.
The average room rate in New Orleans for Swift’s three-day visit was $435 a night, compared to the previous record $390 when the Baltimore Ravens beat the San Francisco 49rs in the Superdome more than a decade ago. Sherman said it looks like the average will be above $500 for this year’s Super Bowl, though that would fall short of last year’s Las Vegas average of $692.
“Las Vegas became the new benchmark for Super Bowl hotel rates,” said Kyla Moore, an analyst at Expedia Group who follows industry trends. It was the first time the Super Bowl was held in Sin City, which had just completed its $1.9 billion Allegiant Stadium.
The exceptionally high average rates in Las Vegas also were driven by the city’s “robust hotel inventory”—it has more than 100,000 rooms in the core “Vegas Strip” area alone—as well as all the other sports, gambling and entertainment options on offer.
Still, the average room rates for Las Vegas or New Orleans don’t tell the full story, as surge pricing for individual rooms booked at the last minute are many times higher.
Crews unload stages and flooring outside the Caesar’s Superdome in preparation for Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans on Monday, January 6, 2024. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
The average rates tracked by CoStar and Expedia are for the “core” hotel inventory in the most desirable areas of New Orleans, like the French Quarter, and Central Business and Warehouse districts. They don’t capture outlier hotels—like the Motel 6 rooms being offered by Adams—nor the bed and breakfast operators and short-term renters that get in on the act last minute.
With two weeks to go, Moore said the highest rates for rooms available were in the Central Business District, averaging $1,200 a night, whereas the best deals were in New Orleans East and Slidell.
The Holiday Inn on Frontage Road in Slidell was still offering rooms at just under $600 a night for Super Bowl weekend, according to Derek Lee, a booking manager for IHG, which owns Holiday Inn, Candlewood Suites and more than a dozen other hotel franchises.
But staying on the south shore carries a big premium, Lee said. Guests wanting to be no further than the Holiday Inn on North Causeway in Metairie would have to pay nearly $1,200 a night for a standard king room.
“It was the same kind of numbers for the Taylor Swift concert,” he said.
New Orleans also has a quirky hotel sector compared to other Super Bowl hosting cities, with a much larger number of smaller boutique hotels and hybrid guesthouse type lodgings.
Moore said that notable examples of these include Roomza New Orleans, which converted the 200-year-old Melrose Mansion on Esplanade Avenue into a guesthouse with 21 suites, with names like the Kitty Room. There were just two suites left at $3,169 per night, she said.
Another hybrid option is 888 Baronne St., which had 10 of its 60 apartments left for Super Bowl weekend, ranging from $18,751 to $19,391 for the three-day booking. The latter is a penthouse with a balcony and can sleep up to 12, including the pull out sofa bed.
Email Anthony McAuley tmcauley@theadvocate.com.
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