The inevitable surge pricing is now underway as the Super Bowl tourists come pouring into SF (and Santa Clara), with some hotels up to nearly $2,500 a night, and some SF Airbnb units costing $2,000 for the weekend stay.
The tourists are already showing up in San Francisco for this weekend’s Super Bowl that is counterintuitively 50 miles away in Santa Clara, as tens of thousands of them are already here. With the influx now in progress, both NBC Bay Area and KTVU are covering the not-at-all-surprising development that hotels rooms and Airbnbs are costing substantially more money than usual this weekend, and have pretty much gone into Dreamforce-week price ranges.
“The good news is there's still rates available,” Marriott Marquis general manager and SF Travel board chair John Anderson told KTVU. “They may be a little bit pricey as compression tends to build, but you can find a room anywhere between $700 to $2,400."
Other than the $700 to $2,400 figure quoted there, neither KTVU or NBC Bay Area offers much detail in terms of prices. So we ran our own searches to find how much hotel and Airbnb rooms in SF are really costing this weekend.
The screenshot above is from an Expedia search, and mind you we searched on a Friday through Monday three-night stay. So those are not single-night prices reflected above. And we do not see a single-night price as high as the $2,400 figure Anderson cited (though I’m sure they're out there, they just didn't show up on an Expedia search).
But the standout, most-expensive result is that $3,923 three-night stay in the lower left–hand corner, which is the Luma Hotel ($1,307 for a single night). But there’s cheaper deals in the Outer Sunset at the Ocean Inn and the Seascape Inn!
Airbnb units are more affordable, or at least, they were at our first glance. Results shown above are also Friday through Monday three-night stays. There are outliers at $2,200 for the weekend, but a fair number currently available at under $1,000 for the Super Bowl weekend.
KTVU adds that Airbnb searches in Santa Clara “surged more than 150 times” on that platform, which stands to reason, because why would people search on Santa Clara during the other 51 weeks of the year. NBC Bay Area adds that during the last Super Bowl held here in 2016, San Francisco hogged 57% of the overall money spent in the region during the Super Bowl week.
So this year the surrounding South Bay and East Bay communities are trying to claw in on some of that percentage, and you can’t blame them for trying to do so. But surrounding communities, just don’t go naming your airport “San Francisco.”
Related: Rumor Swirls That Taylor Swift Will Be In San Francisco for the Super Bowl [SFist]
Image: Jen K via Yelp
