kenbo

Wow...I wonder how much other Hilton properties cost that are in the vicinity.

pauleeepaul

I went to the SB a few years ago last minute and stayed in the only room I could get- a flea bitten crack motel 45 minutes from the stadium for $350 per night.

Monday night the rate went back down to the $49 market rate.

pinniped

Those *both* seem like off-peak periods for many big cities.

My NYC hotel room this past week was downright cheap - $157 for a midtown Marriott. While I know August brings a lot of international tourists to NYC, the business travelers avoid it if possible...my nastiest hotel bills from Manhattan always seem to be April-May and Sept-Oct.

I suspect a lot of cities have a similar pattern with their biggest conventions and whatnot.

And since nothing else is really going on in the first week of February, the city that hosts the Super Bowl is going to get hosed bad in this survey.

Bonehead

I'm shocked that journalists wouldn't cross-check the results when a city shows such a huge jump in year-over-year hotel rates.

Cymro

Homewood Suites SJC
From $521
Per Night (USD)
AAA RATE
or 30,000 HHonors Points

1.73c/point....

sethb

I actually find the upgrade unsurprising. The hotel is full, of course, but there probably aren't that many high-level HHonors members there.

I know I've always gotten the best upgrades when a hotel is full of a group that doesn't include many elite members.

seavisionburma

That article was well spotted/remembered by NoStressHere...
And it does seem pretty idiotic - surely a quick search on "events in XXX in February 2016" might have flagged it

Total shame there is no comment section below that article - would be great to tell Nadja Brandt that she's been outed on Flyertalk some 8 months after her well researched expose was published

KenTarmac

I had a similar experience in Pittsburgh a few years ago. There was a Taylor Swift concert in town, I was in the area on business, and the downtown DoubleTree location was full. I landed the Presidential Suite as my upgrade.

Brendan

All it is saying is that it will sell you HH points at the crazy price of 3 cents each (after a cheaper price for the first several thousand) to fill up your points deficit! Combining that with the insane point-prices of "premium" rooms = . . .

docbert

Got to love it when they forgot to block the points stays. I scored a 20k points rate in Vegas on the night of the Mayweather/Pacquiao fight last year, when even the cheap rooms in the city were starting at about $500.

KenTarmac

I'm pretty sure HHonors has no black out dates. We landed a room on points in downtown Boston on the 4th of July a few years ago with no issues.

Edit: Yup, looked it up. No blackout dates.

https://hiltonhhonors.com/landingpages/nobods.aspx

YMMV ...

http://elliott.org/blog/is-hilton-hh...-pledge-a-lie/

NoStressHere

Anyone with half a brain would agree.

If the reporter did not notice it, the editor should have jumped on it and said: "Gee, I may have failed math, but something here does not seem right".

So obvious.

Firewind

Same with the hotels in Manchester and Concord, New Hampshire - where it's slim pickin's anytime - across the primary election. Plus they all had a three-night minimum at the special rates.

docbert

You're presuming they didn't notice.

An article that shows a large increase like this gets a lot more clicks than one that shows a small increase...

iflyjetz

I can comment on that.

My daughter and I went to the SB this year last minute - I promised her a couple of years ago that we'd go to the SB the next time the Broncos made it. Needless to say, I hadn't planned on attending this year; it was a very pleasant surprise.

I started shopping for hotel, rental car, airfare ~10 days prior to the SB. Plan was arrive Sat AM, depart Monday AM.

Airfare
I didn't need an airline ticket since I'm an airline employee. My daughter was able to book 1st flight out of DEN to SFO via PHX with American for $170. Her outbound flight was OAK to MSY via PHX with Southwest for about $280 (she had prior plans for Mardi Gras in New Orleans). I jumpseated into SFO out of OAK for free.

Ground Transportation
Found a rental car for 2 days out of FO all in for ~$155. We decided to cancel it and just go with Uber. Cost ~$35 to Santa Clara. Once we got to Santa Clara, I checked into renting a car for a day from San Jose Airport ... $23 all in ($12 plus all of the fees, taxes) for one day. We Lyfted from Santa Clara Sunday night to the OAK airport Hilton for ~$35.
The rental car enabled us to go to a couple of restaurants that my daughter really wanted to go to - she had been a traveling nurse at Stanford a year earlier so had a couple of favorite spots that we ate at.

Hotels
I've got multiple statuses (HH Diamond, Mar LT Plat, Hyatt Diamond, SPG Plat, IHG Plat) so I looked for 'best deals'. Our plan was to stay in Santa Clara Sat night and near OAK airport Sun night due to a very early flight for my daughter.
All Hilton and IHG properties near the SB were way too expensive. I would have preferred a Hyatt property but none of those were competitive with Marriott and SPG.
I swapped refundable rates (24 hr cancellation) between Marriott and SPG - rates were ~25,000 Marriott points or ~16,000 SPG points for properties within 3 miles of the stadium.
On Friday (2 days prior to game and last chance to cancel without penalty), I cancelled our Springhill Suites San Jose airport reservation and planned on booking Aloft Santa Clara for 16,000 points (nightly rate was ~$490). While midway through the booking, the nightly rate dropped to $149 so I booked it.

Our OAK airport reservation was similar as far as changing hotels and rates. I ended up getting the Hilton Oakland Airport for $142 AAA rate.


So everything but the SB ticket was pretty darned cheap. I'm sure a lot of reservations/block sales were cancelled last minute which helped.
I was hoping to get a room at the Hyatt, Marriott, or Hilton which are next to the stadium, but the only rooms available were at the Hyatt and they only dipped below $1000 for the night briefly while I was looking. The Marriott and Hilton were sold out. I was REALLY hoping for the Marriott since that's where the Broncos were staying.
We tried to get into the Marriott on Saturday but there was security everywhere, including security guards across the street trying to blend in with the foliage.

Super Bowl Tickets
I kept watching ticket prices, even called a few scalpers. I finally decided to buy our tickets through Stubhub because they included a pregame party at Great America. I picked up our tickets at ~8AM the morning of the game for ~$2500 apiece ($5855.49 all in) for Section 415, row 23 (4 rows from the top). We found ourselves in this picture: https://gigapixel.panoramas.com/superbowl/50/
The tickets were about as cheap as I'd seen any for 'legit' tickets where I didn't have to worry about the authenticity of them. And other pregame tailgate tickets were looking like they were running around $700 so getting the Stubhub pregame tailgate included was a great deal.


It wasn't a cheap experience (about $7K all in for the two of us), but we had a great time. I'd highly recommend doing it once in a lifetime. And it was actually pretty fun to 'wing' the event.