As Super Bowl XLV nears, Dallas hotel prices get big as Texas

By Chris Erskine

Feb. 3, 2011 12 AM PT

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Hotel rates in the Dallas area are running about 200% higher than normal, according to Priceline.com data. Welcome to the Super Bowl!

Surprised? Probably not. After all, tickets to the game are averaging $4,683, according to the Bloomberg news service. That’s about twice as much as tickets for last year’s game cost at a comparable time, Bloomberg said.

And so it goes with lodging. With two extremely popular teams involved – the Packers and the Steelers – the game is a must-see situation for many fans.

The median per-night hotel rate in the Dallas / Ft. Worth area is about $180, which is up 200%, or three times the rate, of the median of about $60 for the area a year ago. Those rates are based on total hotel bookings made by customers of the discount travel website for Friday through Monday, compared with the same four dates in 2010, Priceline said.

The biggest increases? Priceline said those are coming in mid-range hotels. Fans booking 2.5-star rooms will find a median rate of approximately $210, up by about 280% from last year.

And what seemed like a relatively safe venue for a hassle-free Super Bowl for travelers has been anything but that. A rare ice storm this week triggered rolling blackouts in response to unusually high power demand. It is not expected to affect the site of the game, Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, but the utility company, Oncor, said other Super Bowl facilities, such as team hotels, were not exempt.

Oncor said the planned outages would happen in 15-minute intervals. A hotel spokesman said both team hotels are equipped with backup generators that would make any outage brief.

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Chris Erskine

Chris Erskine is a nationally known humor columnist and editor who retired from the Los Angeles Times in 2020. Previously he wrote for the Sports, Travel and Saturday sections and edited with the paper’s features staff. As an editor, he has been a part of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams at The Times (for his graphics work on the Northridge quake and the North Hollywood bank robbery). He is best known to readers for his weekly humor pieces on life in suburban Los Angeles. His latest book, “Daditude,” released in 2018, is a collection of his favorite Times columns on fatherhood. He has written two other books, “Man of the House” and “Surviving Suburbia,” which reached the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. The Chicago native has also worked for papers in New Orleans and Miami.