A month after the conclusion of the NFL draft in Pittsburgh, Visit Pittsburgh is out with new data that the organization says shows just how much of a historic success the draft was. However, a local analyst is casting doubt, saying the draft didn’t live up to the hype for some Pittsburghers.
KDKA-TV spoke to Visit Pittsburgh’s CEO and the executive director of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy to examine what aspects of the draft were successful, the challenges, and what could be done for future big events to avoid those challenges.
The new preliminary figures show 43% of attendees came from further than 50 miles from the city for the three-day event from April 23-25. The county-wide occupancy level for hotels averaged 75% throughout the event period. The figures drew different reactions.
Historic success
Showing why the draft was a success, Visit Pittsburgh points to the big attendance figures, relatively low emergency responses, big public transit ridership, and billions in public relations impressions.
“It certainly sets a new standard of what Pittsburgh can deliver,” Jerad Bachar, president and CEO of Visit Pittsburgh, told KDKA-TV. “It’s certainly the largest event that Pittsburgh’s ever hosted. And to our knowledge, it’s the largest sporting event that the Commonwealth has ever hosted.”
A key benefit the draft brought to Pittsburgh was exposure, Bachar said. Fifty-five million viewers tuned into the draft worldwide, according to Visit Pittsburgh. ESPN said that nationally, 13.2 million people tuned in on average to the draft’s first day, its most-watched day, across its broadcast and digital platforms.
In-person, 105 countries were represented across NFL OnePass registrants, and 43% of attendees traveled from outside a 50-mile radius.
“It tells us that this is very much not only just a regional event, but certainly a national event, and actually an international event,” Bachar told KDKA-TV. “Typically, for us and all of our research, anybody that’s coming from outside of a 50-mile radius is simply going to be an overnight guest.”
Sixty-five percent of attendees were Steelers fans, Visit Pittsburgh’s release said.
While the number of unique visitors the draft brought to Pittsburgh is not yet available, the NFL’s officially tabulated attendance, which is a combination of the official attendance on each draft day, was 805,000, making it the largest event in NFL history. In that figure, people who attended the draft on all three days were counted three times.
As KDKA-TV began reporting in the weeks ahead of the draft, the true number of fans who attended each day of the draft could be lower than the officially-released totals because of the way the NFL counts attendees at NFL drafts, which, according to multiple sources familiar with the city’s draft planning, counts an individual twice if they exit and reenter the draft footprint.
Digitally, the draft drew 14.8 billion PR impressions worldwide and became the most socially viewed draft on record, according to Visit Pittsburgh.
Bachar also highlighted how the community benefited from the draft, including investments like the new Arts Landing and renovations to Market Square and Point State Park.
“The way that this entire community came together to deliver an experience for football fans and for the NFL was absolutely extraordinary,” Bachar said.
Doubts cast
However, not everyone saw the draft as a smashing success.
“When you look at the economics of it all, it was just a party,” said Dr. Frank Gamrat, the executive director of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy.
He did not dispute that the city looked great and had been spruced up, but said those improvements had been confined to just parts of the city.
“We got a nice one-time shot in the arm,” he said.
He explained that the biggest problem the draft faced was the expectations.
“Too many people put too much emphasis and expectations on what this could do for us as a region, growing jobs and benefits,” Gamrat said.
While full economic data won’t be available for months, Visit Pittsburgh did say $17.7 million was spent directly with Pittsburgh-based businesses as part of the NFL Draft Source Program, supporting 164 businesses as local suppliers.
Visit Pittsburgh also released preliminary hotel occupancy figures, calling it “substantial activity throughout draft week.” Downtown on peak nights, 92% of rooms were occupied. Hotel occupancy across the country peaked at 85%. County-wide across the “event period,” average occupancy was 75%.
In the weeks before the start of the draft, Visit Pittsburgh Board Chair Perry Ivery told KDKA-TV that as of April 1, nearly 60% of the county’s 19,000 rooms were booked for the three-day draft.
“Historically, in NFL draft events, there’s a surge in reservations 30 days out, with 20% being the last week,” Ivery said in the weeks ahead of the draft. “We’re still optimistic within the next two weeks that there’s going to be a surge in bookings.”
KDKA-TV asked Bachar if they saw the surge and, if not, what happened.
“The hotel performance was exactly where we would have expected it to be,” Bachar said. “We got to 80% on our peak nights, so those occupancy levels and those rate levels were certainly very much on par with what we expected and forecasted, as well as what we’ve seen in all of the previous host cities, at least the last three.”
He added that rates increased dramatically for hotels and short-term rentals. He doesn’t believe the higher room prices played a significant factor in occupancy levels.
Gamrat saw the hotel figures differently, saying hotel occupancy in Allegheny County usually sits around 65%.
“To say that 75% were full during the draft, that’s only an increase of 10%. That’s not a whole lot to get excited about,” Gamrat said. “The expectations were that you couldn’t get a hotel room within a two-hour drive of here, that hotels in Cranberry were going to be booked. But that just wasn’t going to be the case. So, 75% was a disappointing number.”
KDKA-TV asked Bachar why an event like the draft, and the hundreds of thousands of people it would bring to the city, wouldn’t automatically mean all hotels would be sold out.
“Well, when you have that many people coming in, you know they’re going to see various types of accommodation that are going to be used, Bachar said.
He noted there wasn’t any other programming taking place in the Cultural District, and conventions, which often bring many people to Pittsburgh, took the weekend off.
“The draft was really the only show in town, if you will, over that weekend, and it performed extraordinarily well,” Bachar said. “The hotel still did extraordinarily well, short-term rentals still did extraordinarily well.”
Chad Wise, whose company manages 150 short-term rentals in Pittsburgh, said that, according to Airbnb partner PriceLabs, occupancy on Day 1 was 78.4%, Day 2 was 75.6%, and Day 3 was 57.5%. Those same dates the previous year saw occupancies of 54%, 78%, and 83%, respectively.
“Rates were significantly higher, occupancy was mixed,” Wise said of the figures.
The challenges
While Bachar said most people have had a positive view of the draft, he said they have heard concerns about how businesses outside of the draft footprint struggled. Some businesses told KDKA-TV they had stocked up on either draft-related merchandise or food, and have taken big losses because of the small amount of business they ended up getting.
“We’re certainly very much aware of businesses in the Strip District and other parts of the city who were disappointed in the amount of people and foot traffic that they saw in their businesses,” Bachar said, “But that’s certainly very much expected for an event like this. People who are coming here, football fans and Pittsburghers alike, all want to be in and around the footprint itself.”
People expected to get rich off the event, Gamrat said.
“People with Airbnb listings, people with restaurants, people with parking spaces thought they were going to do very, very well on this, and they were sadly mistaken,” Gamrat said.
Asked about where the source of the confusion over what to expect came from, Bachar said it can be boiled down to “excitement.”
“When you see the numbers that the NFL draft draws, that excitement gets even more amplified,” Bachar said. “So, businesses certainly want to be prepared. In some cases, they go a little bit too far in their preparation.”
Gamrat said Visit Pittsburgh, along with city and state leaders, helped build that excitement, set the expectations, cheered on the event, and sent the message that people are going to make a lot of money off of it.
“Someone said to me, ‘Why would those politicians do that?’ Well, because they were spending public money. If you’re going to spend public money, you have to justify it, and you have to justify it by touting all the wonderful benefits,” Gamrat said. “People bought into it a little more than they should have.”
It’s for the same reason Gamrat said that context about draft attendance expectations was not front and center.
“They just said we’re going to bring in [500,000-800,000] visitors,” Gamrat said. “They never said [that’s an] accumulation over three days. They [never projected] unique out-of-town visitors.”
He pointed to the preliminary figures Visit Pittsburgh released this past week, which 43% of people came from outside a 50-mile radius of Pittsburgh.
“That means that 57% came in were locals, and so you have this notion of that’s displaced economic activity,” Gamrat said. “People didn’t go to Downtown, but maybe they went to Robinson, maybe they went to Wexford, maybe they went into Mount Lebanon, maybe they spent their money elsewhere.”
For example, he said that looking at casino data, Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh took “a beating” in April, while Meadows and Live! Casino went up.
KDKA-TV asked Bachar if, when looking toward future big events, there’s something that Visit Pittsburgh or the city can do related to messaging to help set expectations at a more realistic level.
“Absolutely. I think that communication piece is critical,” Bachar said. “Leading up to this, we conducted close to 90 different civic organization presentations, or presentations to civic organizations and community groups throughout the entire area, making sure that we tried to set expectations from the beginning.”
He added that Visit Pittsburgh had ambassadors on the streets through the event, trying to guide people to the surrounding neighborhoods.
“That’s a good value lesson not just for us as a local host, but also for the NFL, as they set expectations in a lot of their future cities,” Bachar said. “I think in the future it really is just about managing expectations in line with all of the hype and excitement that comes with an event of that size.”
Gamrat said a balance has to be struck between hyping up events like this and setting realistic expectations.
“They should have said, ‘Look, Pittsburgh’s put our best foot forward, but everything’s going to be centered around this north, North Side, North Shore,'” Gamrat said.
