$80-Million Super Bowl Weekend in Southland : It’s Kickoff Time for the High Rollers

The corporate jets have landed. The champagne is flowing. And, naturally, it’s the hottest ticket in town.

Super Bowl Weekend, and its attendant high rollers, have arrived.

“These are the big spenders and they spend a lot of money to come here and have a good time.”

Having said that, Susan Cox, public relations director of the Greater Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau, then pondered the inevitable question: What will these high rollers spend here over Super Bowl Weekend?

“About $80 million over three days,” was her best megabuck guess, at the rate of approximately $550 or more a person. “That’s not bad.”

Based on the last three Super Bowl events in New Orleans, Palo Alto and Tampa, Fla., however, Pete Abitante, the National Football League’s information director, believes the economic fallout is more in the $90-million to $120-million range.

Whatever the case, if these estimates are even relatively close, it’ll mean that more cash will be pumped into the Southern California economy from one sports event than the gross national product of some countries.

In short, the Super Bowl, the sixth held in the Los Angeles area, translates into big dollars and big business for hotels, restaurants, other tourist-oriented businesses and souvenir hawkers--including some con artists selling unlicensed cups, mugs and other memorabilia.

About 75% of this cash will be spent by out-of-towners, the balance by Southern Californians, Cox estimated. The vast majority of visitors, she added, will be staying for a three-day weekend.

Most of the 70,000 hotel rooms in the Los Angeles area were booked solid and have been for a year or more, their sales representatives said.

Economic benefits from the game between the New York Giants and the Denver Broncos, however, appear to be spread unevenly around the vast Southern California landscape.

Bill Snyder, president of the Anaheim Visitor and Convention Bureau, forecast that the Super Bowl will generate approximately $10 million in that urban area alone.

That’s because the teams, the news media and many officials associated with the Super Bowl event have chosen to make Orange County their headquarters even though the Rose Bowl is about 40 miles away in Pasadena.

Several Orange County hotels are packed, including the Westin South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, where the Giants are staying; the Newporter Resort in Newport Beach, filled with Bronco players and their fans; and the Anaheim Marriott where many NFL officials and media are bedding down.

The situation was the same in Los Angeles where, for example, Susan Sweeney, sales director for the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, said the hotel’s 453 rooms had been booked for more than a year by football team owners and their entourages.

“This is a very good piece of business for all of us,” agreed Georgiana Francisco, spokeswoman for the Century Plaza Hotel, whose 1,072 rooms are sold out to football, corporate and television network clientele.

But ironically, Pasadena, the site of the game, probably will make the least from it, about $2 million, according to William Turley, president of that city’s Chamber of Commerce.

“The (Super Bowl) functions here are very limited,” Turley said in projecting the figure, which was about the same as the take from the Rose Bowl game held there on New Year’s Day.

Since blue chip tourists need blue chip transportation, limousine services were doing a land-office business.

Johnny’s Huntington Limousine Service in Pasadena filled a 60-car order for executives from several corporations, according to owner Johnny Thompson. Ten limousines alone, at a rate of $45 an hour, were reserved to shuttle corporate executives to parties at the La Quinta Hotel near Palm Springs, he said.

In terms of concentrated business over a few days, an elated Thompson said, “It’s wild.”

Caterers also were seeing green, as in dollars.

Parties Plus, a big Los Angeles catering operation, for example, is handling the traditionally lavish National Football League party at Universal Studios today, expected to be attended by 3,500 people. “It’s a mega-party,” owner Michael Loshin said.

Besides hotels, Super Bowl dollars will be spent in restaurants and shopping sprees--not only by the 104,000 who will jam Pasadena’s Rose Bowl on Sunday, but by flocks of others attracted to the hyped-up event.

“Thousands of people come to the city on game day just to be involved in the festivities,” the NFL’s Abitante said.

Additionally, Colorado Gov. Roy Romer suggested that the economic fallout from the Super Bowl can be a two-way street.

The governor, who will be at the game and who is spending the weekend in Southern California, said in a telephone interview that he plans to talk up the economic potential of his state during a round of Super Bowl soirees.

The message, he said, will be that “we do things other than football,” the recently elected governor said. “There is a kind of parochialism in New York” toward Colorado, he added.

New York Gov. Mario Cuomo has no intention of attending the game, a spokeswoman said. “He’s a Buffalo Bills fan,” she said.