Quote:
Originally Posted by SHOFEAR
Show me some sort of precedence of any team getting near that amount of people from out of town (hotel stay) to a CFL game. Now remember any team that gets a good visitor crowd is because edm/cal/win/sask are all within a days drive of each other. Your pulling that arbitrary figure right out of the air.
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Here are some numbers looking at the grey cup in Calgary (which is heavily slanted towards Sask.). This is taken from
this website.
It was a 4 day festival - 121,000 people attended. 46,020 came from outside of Calgary (I'm assuming that means anywhere outside, including Edmonton). That means that 38% of the total festival attendance used some form of transportation to come to the festival/game.
Now in the article it mentions a survey that showed 32,000 of the out of town visitors stayed an average of 3.9 nights for the festival. Of that, 20,000 used commercial accommodations spending 4.3 million $.
Now; I'm making assumptions based on the model that fenwick has proposed which was around 15,000 persons capacity (or was it more)?
If a typical game (on a weekend) would only have people spend one night (maybe 2) in the city; I'm sure that it would be way less than 4.3 million $ brought in. The 4.3 is based on 4 nights; so I don't think it's unreasonable to half that for an average of 2 nights (which would make it 2.15 million) and then considering the lower costs of hotels in Halifax (compared to Calgary) - assume a lower number from there. You could easily reduce the number by 25% considering the average hotel room cost in Halifax (but yet again, as you so rightly pointed out, that's an assumption).
But even if the assumption isn't far off - that's still a pretty good return just out of hotel accommodations. From the same article; they said that 5.1 mil was spent in bars/restaurants; 3.3 mil $ on food/liquor and 3.1 mil $ in retail stores. Easily (based on stadium capacity and the fact it would be a weekend game) the numbers would be way lower.
I realize that these are numbers based on a 4 day festival; but from a capturement perspective - Halifax's location makes it an easy drive for all over NS, PEI and NB. Flights to Halifax from Ontario and Quebec are frequent; so I don't think the team would have trouble getting visitors from opposing teams to visit. Just that Sask, BC and Alberta might not be so well shown.