The 100,000 visitors expected to travel to the Phoenix are for Sunday’s Super Bowl will need a place to stay, likely for more than one night. Lots of hotels close to the stadium are sold out, and others just cost a lot of money. The Clarendon Hotel and Spa, normally around $240, is now renting rooms for $1,499.
For those who live in Phoenix but are traveling this weekend or who have a second home there, it could be tempting to get in on some of that surge pricing. If you check on Airbnb, there are suddenly lots of people who joined the site in January 2015, have no reviews, and are renting their homes, apartments, or condos for hundreds of dollars.
For many of these people, it’s a one-and-done deal. They don’t have their properties listed beyond a couple days following the game. Others seem to regularly offer their homes on the site and have lots of reviews. This weekend, however, their prices are going way up.
A four-bedroom home that would cost $195 a night to rent next weekend is going for $995 a night starting today. Another four-bedroom pad that usually goes for $550 a night is now seven times the price at $3,500. As of now, both are still available, but lots of other properties frequently listed on Airbnb have either already been snapped up or weren’t listed at all.
It’s not just the over-inflated homes that are still left on Airbnb, though. Still in search of a renter is a three-bedroom house that apparently always rents for $500, according to the booking calendar. It’s only a 15-minute drive from the stadium, so even the location hasn’t made it a hot commodity.
‘‘There could be people that don’t have tickets yet. It’s hard to say what’s holding up somebody,” one hopeful would-be renter told the Boston Globe about his still-empty place.
Maybe the last-minute lookers are hoping the renters will get desperate and start dropping the prices.
