ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The Tampa Bay Rays’ trip to the World Series is paying off well beyond Tropicana Field. Hotels, bars, shops and street vendors around St. Petersburg and Tampa say the October baseball has brought them a crowd they would not normally see this early in the fall.
Rooms that had been running roughly half full are now booked solid, and the timing lands just ahead of the usual snowbird rush. Brian Loak of Visit St. Pete-Clearwater has pointed to rooms that might have sat empty now filling with baseball travelers, many of them fans of the visiting Milwaukee Brewers.
The travel numbers back that up. Tampa International Airport usually moves about 20,000 people a day, and ahead of Game 3 that count climbed to nearly 80,000. Some visitors have extended their stays by a night or two to catch more games.
Pinellas County is expected to take the biggest piece of the bump. Visit St. Pete-Clearwater expects the series to be worth up to $1.8 million to the local economy. Earlier World Series figures put the effect of a single game at $10 million to $12 million across a host region.
On the St. Pete side of the bay, the St. Pete Pier has seen noticeably more people on weekdays as fans fill the hours between games with food, drinks and sightseeing around Pinellas. Some out-of-state fans have also said that a trip to Florida, lodging included, costs less than a ticket to a game back home.
For hotel and restaurant owners, every extra home game means another night of full rooms and busy dining rooms, and the bump arrives in what is normally a slower stretch before winter visitors show up.
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