The potential for the lockout to affect the Super Bowl had Indianapolis sufficiently worried that all hotels in the city were booked for a full week after Super Bowl Sunday. The thinking was that the lockout might force the Super Bowl to get pushed back by a week, and the hosts wanted to be ready for that possibility.
But with the lockout seemingly almost over, the host city is getting ready to release all those hotel rooms. Super Bowl host committee chairman Mark Miles told the Indianapolis Star that he plans to tell area hotels they can begin booking rooms for the weekend of February 12. The Super Bowl is scheduled for February 5.
Of course, Miles also acknowledged that it’s possible he’s getting overconfident.
“If it blows up in the next couple of days and we’re right back where we started, we’ll go back to the hotels and say ‘It was a false alarm’ and ask them to be patient,” Miles said. “How many hours or days after [a deal] it will take to amend all that, I don’t know, but I think it would be pretty quick. For them [hotels] to sit on two weekends, knowing that only one would be used, was an issue. So the sooner it’s clear they can sell the second weekend, the better.”
Miles sounds confident that the Super Bowl host committee’s work will be rewarded with a Super Bowl played in Indianapolis as scheduled.
“They [the hotels and venues] have been truly great partners in sucking it up for two weeks,” Miles said. “But we have meant what we’ve said all along. I cannot imagine a situation where they don’t resolve it and we don’t have a Super Bowl.”