Football boosting hotel occupancy from Baton Rouge to New Orleans

Take a look at hotels.com or any other online room rental aggregator, and you won’t find many vacancies in Baton Rouge for Nov. 2 and 3—which is, of course, the weekend No. 1 Alabama comes to town to take on No. 6 LSU. La Quinta Inn and Suites on Siegen Lane has a room available for $189, and there are also some rooms available in the Airline Highway area; farther from the epicenter of the action, hotels in Walker and Plaquemine still have vacancy. The LSU and Alabama rematch puts a lot of heads in beds, as they say in the hotel industry. “We knew this weekend was going to sell out,” says Gary Jupiter, general manager of Springhill Suites and president of the Baton Rouge Lodging Association. Springhill Suites sold out for the LSU-Alabama weekend back in August, Jupiter says. Ralph Ney, general manager of Embassy Suites and treasurer of the lodging association, says hotels don’t raise their rates when supply is short; they just cut away all the discounts. New Orleans is also benefiting from the football game, which is predictable. Ney says a lot of Alabama fans will be heading to the Crescent City after the game. “There’s only 10,000 rooms in [Baton Rouge],” he says. In addition, Baton Rouge is poised to benefit from the last and grandest football game of the college and professional seasons. “We’ve been getting calls for the Super Bowl, so there is a lot of demand outside New Orleans,” Ney says. New Orleans hosts the Super Bowl on Feb. 3, 2013. —Adam Pearson