L.A. Hotels Dealt a Setback With the Home Team Rams in the Super Bowl

In recent years, hotel owners have commanded less pricing power as short-term rental operators expanded the lodging supply. Now, with the Rams playing in Super Bowl LVI, that means thousands of fans can drive from home to the game rather than requiring a hotel room.

This year, plenty of Los Angeles hotel owners expect to sell out over Super Bowl weekend. But they aren’t anticipating as much demand leading up to and after the game and won’t be able to dictate the terms as much as they might have if both teams’ fan bases were traveling to the city.

Kevin Escoto, general manager of the DoubleTree by Hilton Los Angeles-Commerce, is expecting to fill up this weekend. But he lowered the hotel’s minimum-stay requirement last week to three nights from five and reduced rates slightly to between $300 and $400 a night.

“I am a Rams fan so I am secretly rooting for them,” Mr. Escoto said. “From the hotel side, it’s obviously not a win for us.”

This game marks the second straight year in which the host city had only one team visiting. Last year, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs in Tampa.

It is hardly all bad news. Hotel-analytics firm STR anticipates near-record average daily room rates of $445 for the nights of Feb. 11-13. Occupancy is expected to reach 89% and revenue per available room, a key profitability metric for the industry, is forecast near $400 a night.

“The Super Bowl attracts a lot of people regardless of which teams are playing,” said Blake Reiter, STR’s director of custom forecasts.

If those projections prove accurate, Los Angeles would notch the second-highest average-daily room rates on record for Super Bowl host cities, after Miami in 2020.

Still, a pandemic-prompted trend of last-minute hotel bookings is keeping Los Angeles hotel owners on edge.

“It’s just been a little nerve-racking,” said Michele Mainelli, senior-vice president for revenue management at Island Hospitality Management, which runs the Hilton Garden Inn location in Marina del Rey, Calif. “We’re constantly watching the booking pace and making pricing decisions based on how much demand is coming.”

Before the pandemic, hotels in host cities sold blocks of rooms to fans traveling in groups months ahead of the Super Bowl, said Ms. Mainelli, whose company manages hotels across the country. This year, with less than two weeks until kickoff, bookings were just starting to pick up in Marina del Rey, she said.

Average rates for four-star hotel rooms in Los Angeles could peak at $1,345 this weekend, according to projections from data-analytics company Sport Management Research Institute. That is a healthy improvement from the $812 nightly rates top Tampa hotels sold for last year, when the country was gripped by a deadly winter wave of coronavirus infections. But Los Angeles room rates aren’t expected to come close to the record highs seen in Miami in 2020, just before the pandemic hit, when luxury bookings averaged $2,294 a night.

Pebblebrook Hotel Trust, which operates nine luxury hotels in Los Angeles, is anticipating rates of more than $800 a night over Super Bowl weekend, said Chief Financial Officer Raymond Martz.

Still, Mr. Martz said he doesn’t think the city’s hotels will sell out, in part because the football festivities are spread across the city, with the game kicking off at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., while the NFL’s Super Bowl-themed convention will be held in downtown Los Angeles.

The city’s hotel industry was hit hard by the pandemic, but a recovery has been gaining steam. December occupancy was only 6.6% lower than 2019, according to STR, and the average daily room rate that month was 8.9% higher than two years earlier.

Write to Kate King at [email protected]