What a Game-Weekend Hotel Room Actually Costs

The short answer

New Orleans’ whole hotel market averaged $810 a night on Super Bowl LIX game night. Las Vegas hit $808 on its Super Bowl Sunday, a continental-U.S. record. Masters week in Augusta runs more than six times the week after. Real published figures below, each with its source and its catch.

Why this piece exists

Ask the internet what a hotel costs on a big sports weekend and you get advice. Book early, expect surges, rates are dynamic. We’ve written that article ourselves, and it’s good advice. But nobody hands over the actual figure, even though the hotel industry publishes it. STR and CoStar put event-weekend performance in press releases. Tourism authorities publish monthly rate data. Local reporters get the numbers on the record.

So this is the numbers piece. Every figure below comes from public reporting, named and dated. Where a market doesn’t publish, the cell says so instead of guessing.

First, what these numbers are not

One honest paragraph before the table, because a big number without its caveat is worse than no number.

ADR means average daily rate: all the room revenue a market took in, divided by all the rooms it sold, over some window. Three things follow. It’s an average across every property, so the airport motel and the five-star tower are in the same figure. It’s a market number, not a quote, so the room you actually want on the peak night sits above it, sometimes far above. And the window matters enormously. A monthly ADR smears a three-night spike across 28 nights, which is why a “monthly” event number always looks tamer than the game night buried inside it. You’ll see that blur demonstrated with real data in the F1 section.

Read every figure below as a floor for the peak night, not a price you can book.

The board

Now the stories behind the rows, because half of these numbers don’t mean what they appear to mean.

Three Super Bowls, three different lessons

New Orleans, February 2025. A week before the game, STR forecast the Friday-through-Sunday market ADR at $444 with RevPAR of $393, per Hotel Dive’s February 6, 2025 report. The actual game night, per CoStar’s later analysis: $810 market ADR at nearly 96% occupancy, a 51% RevPAR jump over the same night a year earlier. Part of that gap is the window, a weekend average against the single hottest night. Most of it isn’t. In a small, compressed market, the last stretch of a marquee event runs hotter than even the professionals model it.

Las Vegas, February 2024. STR’s January 29, 2024 forecast called for a $573 weekend ADR, the highest of any Super Bowl on record. The actuals beat it everywhere: $739 Friday, $758 Saturday, $808 Sunday, per STR’s February 23, 2024 recap, with the Saturday and Sunday both setting continental-U.S. records. Strip properties averaged $962 on game night, which STR described as more than $700 above that Sunday’s baseline. Over 413,000 rooms sold across the three nights.

Here’s the cleaner before-and-after, straight from the tourism authority. The LVCVA’s February 2025 executive summary shows what the game was worth: February 2024, with the Super Bowl in it, citywide ADR of $248.35. February 2025, without it, $186.16, a 25% drop the LVCVA attributes directly to the Super Bowl comparison. One football game moved the average of an entire month, in a 150,000-room market, by a quarter.

San Francisco, February 2026. CoStar’s December 16, 2025 forecast projected a February ADR of $293.69, up 37% year over year. The actual, per CoStar’s April 2, 2026 monthly release: $274.69, up 28.1%, with occupancy up 17.8% to 72.4% and RevPAR up 51%. Best numbers of any top-25 market that month, and still short of the forecast. Worth noting against history: CoStar’s own comparison shows the 2016 Super Bowl 50 weekend ran a $453 three-day ADR in the same city. Ten years later the game returned and the market, with more rooms and less business travel, couldn’t reach its old peak.

F1 Vegas, or how a monthly average hides a spike

This row exists mostly to prove the blur point with one market and two data windows.

STR measured the inaugural 2023 Las Vegas Grand Prix at a $502 market ADR across the race event, per its January 2024 release. The LVCVA’s monthly number for that same November: $249.31, itself a record month. Same city, same November. The race nights ran double the month that contained them, and if you’d budgeted off the monthly figure you’d have been $250 a night short. Any time you see a “monthly” event statistic, assume the peak nights inside it look like this.

The other half of the F1 story is that event pricing corrects. November 2024’s citywide ADR fell 20.3% to $198.72 as the race’s novelty faded, per LVCVA data reported by KLAS on December 31, 2024. On the advertised-price side, VegasInsider’s tracking of Booking.com race-weekend stays shows the same slide: about $2,314 in 2023, $1,373 in 2024, $1,036 for 2025. We documented the fan-level version in the F1 Vegas price collapse. Big supply plus a repeating event equals a market that learns.

Louisville, where the average and your room part ways

The Derby row carries the single most useful caveat in this piece. Lighthouse, the hotel-analytics firm, measured Louisville’s actualized Derby-weekend market rate at $347 a night for 2024, against $249 in 2023. Those are still the most recent actualized Derby figures anyone has published; Lighthouse’s last public read, in late April 2025, had that year’s Derby Friday and Saturday advertising at $393 and $413. Modest, right? Barely 2x a normal city.

Now the on-the-ground version. On May 1, 2024, Louisville Tourism CMO Stacey Yates told Louisville’s WAVE News that only 3 to 4% of the market’s rooms remained for Derby 150, and the average rate on that remainder was about $1,200 a night. Same weekend Lighthouse scored at $347. Both numbers are true. The $347 includes every room sold months earlier at sane prices, every highway property out by the airport, every block rate. The $1,200 is what the market charges the fan who shows up late wanting something bookable. The Marriott Louisville Downtown, per the same report, sells its Derby block as three-night, prepaid, non-refundable stays, earns about 10% of its annual revenue on that one weekend, and had all 600-plus rooms gone by March.

The 2026 running showed the same shape. Days before Derby 152, VegasInsider swept 1,377 Louisville listings and found Booking.com properties advertising an average $3,362 for the three-night weekend, about $1,120 a night, per WHAS11’s April 2026 report. Hotels and Airbnbs combined averaged $2,765, roughly 264% above the week before. That’s what was still listed close to race day, not the market average, and it looks a lot like the $1,200 remainder Yates described two years earlier.

That gap between the published average and the last available room is the whole reason the refundable-rate playbook tells you to book the day your plans get real. The average is made by early bookers. The horror stories are made by everyone else.

Augusta, the market that doesn’t publish

Nobody publishes a market ADR for Augusta during the Masters. CoStar reported on April 17, 2026 that Masters week delivered the market’s highest single-day RevPAR on record, but kept the figure behind its paywall, so we won’t pretend to know it.

What is public: Rotogrinders analyzed over 1,000 Augusta-area listings ahead of the 2026 tournament, reported by Golfmagic on April 1, 2026. The average Booking.com property asked $5,643 for the five-night tournament stay, about $1,129 a night, which was 150% above the week before and 537.7% above the week after. Read that second number again. The same rooms, one week apart, at less than a sixth of the price.

The rental market there inverts the usual advice. Airbnb listings averaged $7,844 for the week, higher than the hotels, with at least 45 listings above $15,000 and one three-bedroom walking distance from the course at $55,715. Corporate groups and patrons rent whole houses near the course, so rentals are Augusta’s luxury tier. What actually gets cheaper is distance: the lowest-priced rental in the analysis was $428 for the week, eight miles out, and the cheapest Booking.com property $765 at seven miles. In a town with almost no hotel supply, you buy miles or you pay the number.

New York in September, the answer nobody gives

Fans searching hotel prices for the US Open usually brace for the worst, because it’s New York. The published data says the fear is aimed at the wrong week. Ramp, the corporate-card company, ran its own spend data in a September 17, 2025 analysis: ordinary September Manhattan nights averaged about $347, Fashion Week pushed the average to $526, and UN General Assembly week hit $653 before rates fell back to $409 once the motorcades left.

The tennis ends before the spike starts. New York is the deepest hotel market in America, and no single event short of a head-of-state convention compresses it. So the honest US Open advice is boring: book normally, stay on the 7 train line or in Manhattan, and just make sure a lingering trip doesn’t collide with UN week, when a Courtyard jumps from $428 to $575 per Ramp’s examples. Compare that with Lexington, where 43,000 Breeders’ Cup fans break a 9,000-room market. Supply decides everything.

San Antonio, the event that couldn’t save the quarter

One more market for honesty’s sake, and this one isn’t in the table because its event-weekend figure sits behind CoStar’s paywall, same as Augusta’s. What is public tells the story anyway. The September 16, 2025 San Antonio Business Journal, citing Source Strategies, reported downtown occupancy for the Final Four quarter at 61%, down 7.4% year over year, with downtown supply up 42.4% since 2019. The biggest event in college basketball landed in April, and the quarter sank anyway. A market that overbuilds can host a great weekend and still lose the season around it.

Which is the reader’s opening. In markets like that, the compression is real for two nights and gone by Tuesday, and late softness shows up the way it did for Vegas F1. Hold a refundable booking, watch the cancellation cutoffs, and let oversupplied markets come to you.

How to actually use these numbers

Budget off the peak-night figure, not the monthly one, and assume your preferred room sits above the market average. If you’re carrying points, know that dynamic award pricing rides the same curve, so the $810 night costs $810-shaped points everywhere but Hyatt. For a crew of four in a thin market, price the rental split before the second hotel room, except in Augusta, where the houses are the luxury tier and the deal is a room seven miles out. And in every one of these markets, the people who paid something near the published average are the ones who booked before the compression, which is a habit, not a trick.

We wanted more rows than we could honestly fill. Louisville’s ordinary-week ADR isn’t published anywhere we could verify, and neither is a market ADR for Augusta, State College, or Tuscaloosa. Boston’s marathon-weekend records and San Antonio’s Final Four weekend figures sit behind CoStar’s paywall too. If any of those numbers surface in a public release, this table gets a new row and a fresh updated date.