TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

No Room At The Inn For Visiting Giants

ADVERTISEMENT

By KEITH MORELLI | The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 4, 2008

TAMPA - Talk about being inhospitable hosts.

Tampa has turned the New York Giants away from the inn. The Giants are in town for Sunday's wild card playoff game with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. On such short notice, the team couldn't book a 200-room block at a hotel in Tampa, and had to go elsewhere for lodging.

The combination of a robust tourist season and a medium-sized convention in downtown Tampa made for the lack of a 200-room block at any hotel anywhere near Raymond James Stadium, said Travis Claytor, communications manager for Tampa Bay & Company, the county's convention and visitor's bureau.

"Of course what with it being our tourist season," he said, "it's going to be hard for anybody to find a 200-room block. There are enough downtown hotels and along the West Shore corridor to accommodate 200 rooms, but not at a single location."

This weekend, the Professional Photographers of America is holding a convention downtown. While it isn't considered a large convention, there are 5,100 photographers taking up rooms throughout the downtown hotels, some spilling into the West Shore area, he said. The convention lasts through the weekend and into next week and many of those rooms could have been booked a year or two in advance.

The late-booking Giants were just out of luck, Claytor said.

Besides the convention, this is Florida and it is snowing up North.

"This is our tourist season," Claytor said. "A lot of people want to be down here. We're having a good tourist season right now."

The Bucs drew the Giants as their first playoff opponents last weekend and there just wasn't time to get all those rooms together in Tampa, Claytor said. Hillsborough County has 20,500 hotel rooms.
"We have the ability to accommodate any group that wants to come into the Tampa Bay area," Claytor said. "They just might not be all in one hotel."

Giants officials said the situation doesn't pose a problem.

"We are staying in St. Pete," said team spokesman Pat Hanlon in an e-mail to TBO. "It is not a problem. We had trouble finding a hotel to accommodate our needs [approximately 200 rooms and plenty of meeting space] because of the uncertainty of whether we would be playing on Saturday or Sunday and because of the convention in town.

Hanlon said the Giants didn't know the day or the time of the game until Sunday night, "so we didn't know if we needed the hotel space for Friday or Saturday night."

The team settled on an undisclosed hotel in St. Petersburg that met the organization's needs, he said.
"Plus," he said, "the hotel has experience hosting an NFL team. So it worked out. Again, it wasn't and isn't a problem."

Reporter Keith Morelli can be reached at (813) 259-7760 or kmorelli@tampatrib.com.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT