(Editor’s Note: This story has been revised from an earlier version to reflect that a limited number of hotel rooms are still available this weekend. Visit Baton Rouge President Paul Arrigo says he has been contacted by officials at several hotels downtown and near LSU, who say they have limited availability, even though their websites indicate they are sold out.)
Despite the LSU Tigers’ crushing defeat to the Florida Gators on Saturday, the loss isn’t expected to dampen the enthusiasm for this weekend’s matchup against Georgia, which will be the biggest game yet of this season in Death Valley.
As of Sunday afternoon, downtown’s hotels, including the new Courtyard Marriott—which opened on Friday, Sept. 28—as well as the Hampton Inn, Hilton Baton Rouge Capitol Center, Holiday Inn Express, Hotel Indigo, The Watermark and the Belle of Baton Rouge Hotel, were mostly sold out.
Closer to campus, just a handful of rooms appear to remain, according to a search of hotel websites, and they’re fetching top dollar for a market of Baton Rouge’s size.
A standard room with two queen beds at the Baton Rouge Marriott is going for $400 per night, about the same as a standard room at the nearby Courtyard Marriott/Acadian Thruway. A standard room at the Hampton Inn near College Drive is just slightly less—$370 a night. The Crowne Plaza is completely booked.
“We expect this to be the biggest weekend of the year,” says Visit Baton Rouge President Paul Arrigo, who was interviewed last week by Sports Illustrated for an upcoming story about what the big game will mean for the local visitors market. “It’s a 2:30 game, so we’ll get two nights out of it. Plus, Georgia hasn’t been here in 15 years and there’s a lot of hype.”
Arrigo says restaurants are booking up, too, and events like a Friday night concert in honor of Walk-On’s 15th anniversary featuring the popular country band Big & Rich are also bringing more visitors to the city for the weekend.
The expected boom this weekend is a welcome break from an otherwise sluggish summer and early fall in a market that recently saw the addition of several new hotel properties—not just in Baton Rouge, where the new Courtyard Marriott recently nudged the number of downtown hotel rooms over 1,000—but in the four-parish Capital Region, which now boasts more than 12,500 hotel rooms.
Arrigo says several of those properties in Port Allen or Ascension Parish are attractive to contract workers and plant employees, who come here on business and are opting to stay in newer hotels near their workplace.
“It’s too soon to tell what kind of impact that is having on the market as a whole, but my concerns is that a lot of hotels are popping up and people have a lot of choices about where to stay,” he says.
