Businesses Asked to Avoid Price Gouging for Super Bowl
San Diego companies are being asked for written promises that they will refrain from gouging visitors during Super Bowl week in January.
As a sweetener, they are being offered free marketing assistance.
The program--called Super Host Merchant Program--is sponsored by the city’s Super Bowl Task Force and other business officials and grew out of a proposal, since dropped, for a city ordinance that would have made price gouging during Super Bowl week illegal.
In April, the task force, a nonprofit corporation set up to promote the National Football League championship game to be held here Jan. 31, proposed the ordinance in an effort to block the kind of price gouging that has taken place prior to some previous Super Bowls. Many of the problems have arisen from the re-selling by agents and brokers of reservations for hotel rooms and transportation services.
San Diego City Atty. John Witt drafted a model anti-gouging ordinance to cover the Super Bowl and other special events and circulated it for review by City Council members. But the task force asked last month that it be withdrawn after several hotel owners protested that it could be the “first step along the path to price controls,” Peg Nugent, the task force’s associate executive director, said Friday.
The program is similar to a campaign conducted in Tampa, Fla., host city for the 1984 Super Bowl. Nugent said the success of Tampa’s program was a big factor in Tampa’s being awarded the 1991 Super Bowl.
San Diego tourism officials, who project that the game will pump $150 million into the local economy, say the host program is a way of trying to ensure that the Super Bowl returns to San Diego.
“The National Football League has made it clear that a host city’s ability to hold down prices is an important part of the (Super Bowl host city) bidding process,” Nugent said.
Merchants who sign up as “super hosts” will agree to keep prices of products and services consistent with those that apply during non-Super Bowl weeks. In return, they will receive a certificate for window display that will identify them to visitors.
The program will be advertised on radio and television, in newspapers, on billboards and in taxicabs during the week before the game. In addition, the program will be promoted in thousands of transportation guides, calendars of events and San Diego information brochures that will be mailed to Super Bowl ticket holders six weeks before the game.
Word of the program was disclosed in a letter mailed by the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau Thursday to local hotels, restaurants and other tourism and service companies.
Chamber of Commerce Vice President Gary Bonelli said the chamber hopes that at least 1,000 merchants will sign up for the host program.
