Economist: Phillies impact on hotel stays overblown

(The Center Square) – Pennsylvania’s Independent Fiscal Office recently produced documents on the impact of Pirates and Phillies games the local economy, but one analyst who has studied hotel data for events across the country believes the fan spending numbers in the reports are inflated and inaccurate.

Frank Stephenson, an economist from Georgia’s Berry College, co-authored an October 2023 paper along with Abhimanyu Aurobindo and Lauren Heller on the impact of national political conventions on hotel occupancy.

In doing so, the economists examined the impact of other Philadelphia events such as Phillies, Flyers and Eagles games.

The analysis found that there were only small and insignificant increases in daily room rates and hotel revenue from the games as opposed to the IFO reports stating that the games led to thousands of room nights, hundreds of thousands in added hotel revenue and an average of two hotel nights for every out-of-state fan at a game.

“You just don’t see that in the data,” Stephenson said. “… You just don’t see a statistically significant effect on hotel occupancy from a Phillies game.”

The IFO reports claimed the average Phillies fan spent $465 per day on a family day trip and $485 on average for an overnight trip for a couple. The Pirates’ claims were even higher, at $385 for a family day trip and $505 for an overnight trip for a couple.

The data relied on numbers provided by the teams and local tourism groups Visit Pittsburgh and Visit Philadelphia. Stephenson said the IFO Phillies report data was similar to that of economic impact reports provided by marketing companies that teams use to justify stadium subsidies.

“Just like these other reports, there’s no real, at least in the hotel part, basis for using that to justify giving further subsidies to the teams, to rehab the stadiums, to expand the stadiums, to whatever they think they’ll do with them five to 10 years from now,” Stephenson said.

Of the major sports teams in Philadelphia, only the Eagles show a significant hotel room occupancy change for games with an additional 1,600 rooms rented, but that is only for the team’s eight or nine home games per year.

Stephenson is currently working with fellow economists on a paper examining the impacts of large sports events and concert events in four cities.

“Of course, the answer is that there are not that many of those concerts (like Taylor Swift) and they actually, just like lots of other stuff, they don’t really generate the big windfalls that these proponents claim.”

Stephenson said that most events attract day trippers rather than people who stay overnight, let alone two nights, in a city.