Market data
What big event weekends do to Atlanta hotel rates: lessons from the 2013 Final Four survey
By the AtlantaHotels.org editors. Published August 30, 2026. Source dataset collected by this site in April 2013.
When a big event comes to Atlanta, the same hotel room costs a lot more. How much more? The best record we have is one this site collected itself. On April 2, 2013, AtlantaHotels.org published a survey of twelve downtown and midtown hotels that still had availability for the NCAA Men's Final Four, comparing the rate for the tournament window of April 6 to 9 against the same room one week later, April 13 to 16.
That release is still online here, unedited: Atlanta Hotel Rates Skyrocket for NCCA Final Four, Survey Shows. Below is its table, and what the numbers say. The rates are historical. Nothing on this page is a quote for a current or future stay.
The dataset
Twelve hotels, one room type each, two dates. Regular rate is the same room one week after the tournament. The increase column is as published in 2013.
| Hotel | Room type | Regular | Final Four | Increase |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hotel Indigo Atlanta Midtown | King Room | $129 | $406 | +215% |
| Atlanta Marriott Marquis | Deluxe Room | $139 | $299 | +115% |
| Hyatt Regency Atlanta Downtown | Radius Tower | $143 | $331 | +131% |
| Holiday Inn Express Atlanta Downtown | King Room | $139 | $382 | +175% |
| Residence Inn Atlanta Downtown by Marriott | Suite | $192 | $599 | +205% |
| Renaissance Atlanta Midtown | King | $214 | $379 | +77% |
| Sheraton Atlanta Downtown | Queen | $132 | $369 | +179% |
| Glenn Hotel | Queen | $289 | $449 | +55% |
| Marriott Atlanta Suites Midtown | Suite | $229 | $379 | +65% |
| The Ritz-Carlton, Atlanta | City View | $324 | $799 | +147% |
| Georgian Terrace Hotel | Petite Room | $135 | $345 | +155% |
| Courtyard Atlanta Downtown | Junior Suite | $269 | $479 | +78% |
Reading the spread
The headline in 2013 was the average. The more useful number is the spread. Every hotel in the sample raised its rate, but the multiplier ranged from 1.55x at the Glenn Hotel to 3.15x at Hotel Indigo Atlanta Midtown. A guest choosing between two comparable downtown rooms was not choosing between a normal price and an event price. They were choosing between two event prices set on completely different assumptions.
Sorting the sample by its ordinary rate makes the pattern visible. The six hotels whose regular rate was under $145 raised prices by an average of about 162 percent. The six whose regular rate was $192 or more raised by an average of about 105 percent. Cheap rooms did not stay cheap; they moved the furthest, in percentage terms, because an event weekend erases the gap between a limited-service room and a full-service one. If the only thing that matters is a bed within walking distance of the Georgia Dome, the Holiday Inn Express and the Hyatt Regency are selling the same product.
In dollars, the ranking inverts. The largest single increase in the survey was the Ritz-Carlton at $475 more per night, followed by the Residence Inn suite at $407. The smallest were the Marriott Atlanta Suites Midtown at $150 and the Glenn Hotel at $160. Percentage premiums are what get quoted; absolute dollars are what a group of four nights actually costs.
One discrepancy worth stating. The 2013 release says the surveyed rooms cost "an average of 167% more than it normally would." The twelve rows it published do not reproduce that figure: their simple mean increase is about 133 percent, and aggregating all twelve regular rates against all twelve event rates gives about 124 percent. The most likely explanation is that the stated average covered a wider set of quotes than the twelve rows chosen for the table. We are leaving the original release untouched and flagging the gap here rather than restating a number we cannot reconstruct.
What the release said about geography
The other durable finding in the 2013 survey is about distance. The release reported that the cheapest available downtown or midtown room was running around $300 a night, that Buckhead still had rooms under $200, and that the northern suburbs of Marietta and Sandy Springs, roughly fifteen miles out, still had rooms under $100. That is a three-to-one price gradient across a fifteen-mile radius, created by a single weekend.
The gradient is the part that generalises. Event pricing in Atlanta is not a citywide surge; it is a steep, short-range function of walking distance to the venue, and it decays fast enough that one MARTA ride or a rental car resets it. Our archived Buckhead guide covers the district that absorbed the overflow in 2013.
The events since, and the one ahead
The 2013 Final Four was played at the Georgia Dome, which held the semifinals on April 6 and the championship game on April 8, 2013, with reported attendances of 75,350 and 74,326. According to Wikipedia's record of the tournament, it was the last men's Final Four held at the Georgia Dome, which was demolished in 2017. Its replacement, Mercedes-Benz Stadium, has since carried the same class of demand.
On January 20, 2025, Mercedes-Benz Stadium hosted the College Football Playoff National Championship between Ohio State and Notre Dame, with a reported attendance of 77,660, per the game's Wikipedia entry. That is a comparable single-night draw to the 2013 Final Four, into a downtown core with the same geography.
The larger structural change is next summer. According to Mercedes-Benz Stadium and Atlanta United, Atlanta will host eight FIFA World Cup 2026 matches: five group-stage matches on June 15, 18, 21, 24 and 27, a round-of-32 match on July 1, a round of 16 on July 7, and a semifinal on July 15.
That schedule is a different shape from a Final Four. The 2013 survey measured a single compressed weekend, where every visitor needed the same three nights and hotels could price against a hard ceiling of supply. Eight match dates spread across a month create repeated, shorter demand spikes with normal nights in between, and a semifinal whose participating countries are not known until days beforehand. We are not forecasting rates for it. When the dates arrive, the honest way to measure the effect is the same method used in 2013: quote the same room on the event date and on a control date a week later, and publish both.
Method, and what we are not claiming
The 2013 survey was a point-in-time snapshot of publicly quoted rates for twelve properties that still had availability days before the event, using a one-week-later control date. That design has real limits. It excludes hotels already sold out, which were probably the ones that had priced most aggressively earliest, so if anything it understates the peak. It is one room type per hotel. And it captures asking rates, not what guests finally paid.
All rate figures on this page are from that April 2013 survey and are historical. We have not published any current or projected Atlanta rate on this page, because we have not collected one.
Sources
- AtlantaHotels.org, "Atlanta Hotel Rates Skyrocket for NCCA Final Four, Survey Shows," April 2, 2013. Original release.
- Wikipedia, 2013 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament (Final Four venue, dates and attendance). Entry.
- Wikipedia, 2025 College Football Playoff National Championship (date, venue, attendance). Entry.
- Mercedes-Benz Stadium, "Atlanta to Host Eight Matches, Including Semifinal Match at FIFA World Cup 2026." Announcement.
- Atlanta United FC, "Atlanta, Georgia to host eight FIFA World Cup 2026 matches, including one Semifinal." Announcement.