Tourist-Poor January Saved by Super Bowl

Fans in town for the Super Bowl spent heavily enough on meals, lodging, goods and services to help the county’s tourism industry overcome the negative effects of bad weather and a lackluster meeting and convention schedule during January, according to Dal L. Watkins, president of the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Total visitor spending during January rose by a whopping 28.6% to $234 million during January, thanks largely to the weeklong influx of visitors drawn by the National Football League’s championship game.

However, the total number of visitors to San Diego during January increased by only 5% to 2 million. The total number of overnight visitors rose by only 2.4% to 675,000.

“Without the Super Bowl, January (spending totals) would have been down from the 1987 level,” Watkins said Monday. “One thing this (increase) shows is that even though the Super Bowl is all hyped up, people do come and they do spend.”

Total visitor spending increased dramatically despite hotel occupancy rates that fell by 9.4% to 62.3%. Watkins linked part of that decline to the fact that San Diego’s number of hotel rooms increased during the past year with the opening of several new hotels.

The Super Bowl created a pair of unexpected results for the county’s tourism industry, according to Watkins: The number of visitors staying in private homes was believed to have increased fairly dramatically, and an unexpectedly high number of people came to town only for Super Bowl Sunday.

The Super Bowl pumped an estimated $65.6 million into the local economy, according to a report issued last month by the NFL, the San Diego Super Bowl Task Force and Convis. That report indicated that the game generated an additional $70.6 million in so-called indirect spending, bringing the Super Bowl’s total economic impact on San Diego to $136.2 million.

The city’s tourism industry, which relies heavily on visitors from Los Angeles and San Francisco, was hurt by bad weather during the first three weeks of January, Watkins said.

“If people in those two cities hear that there’s good weather, they’ll come down,” Watkins said. “But there were an awful lot of people who didn’t come” to San Diego during January, which was unseasonably cold.

San Diego’s January spending totals might also have been hurt by fears that the county’s tourism industry would be overwhelmed by the Super Bowl.

“It’s not been documented, but it’s possible that there’s an automatic aversion to a city with a mega-event going on,” Watkins said. “Rather than take the chance, (some visitors might have) decided to stay home and come when it’s less crowded.”

However, Watkins described the off month as “a blip on the screen, not anything significant based on what I’ve heard from people about February and March.”