Sporting events, trade shows, concerts, and more created a 15 percent increase in hotel room demand in Minneapolis last year according to data released Tuesday by Meet Minneapolis, the private non-profit tasked with promoting and selling the Minneapolis area as a destination for conventions and meetings.
The increased demand brought the strongest year for Minneapolis hotels since 2019, with over 2 million hotel room night stays in 2023.
"That means that a collection of events that took place here, as well as generally consumers feeling more confident coming to Minneapolis, our sports events all those things contributed to an overall demand increase in our hotel community, which obviously helps the helps the way that our downtown area is the reanimating itself," said Meet Minneapolis president and CEO Melvin Tennant.
More than 1.9 million hotel rooms were sold in Minneapolis last year, with August seeing the biggest demand. Occupancy was 51.1 percent, up nine percent from the year prior.
"Our sales team is out frequently meeting event planners and I've been on a couple of those trips myself this year," Tennant said. "There's very positive momentum with the group and event planners wanting to come here. We've always been a good, strong convention destination and I think you can see that from our convention calendar and event calendar for this year. So there's a lot of positive sentiment about wanting to bring events to Minneapolis for a variety of reasons."
Nearly 713,000 people attended the 205 events held at the Minneapolis Convention Center last year. 2024 is shaping up to be a big year as well including seven concerts at U.S. Bank Stadium, three at Target Field, and several large-scale sporting events, consumer shows, and conventions.
Tennant said Minneapolis relies on greater Minnesota and those living in other states when it comes to leisure travel.
"We have focused our attention on reintroducing Minneapolis as a leisure travel destination and that's been very successful if you look at some of the results from particularly pre-sales with the Twins and you look at some of the theater presentations that are taking place over the course of this year in our city," added Tennant. "Of course going to the convention side we've had great attendance of convention that are coming here. For example we had the Minnesota school boards convention that came here recently and they outpaced their original projections for attendance and we've seen that time and time again."
The nearly 2 million hotel room nights stays last year brought in an estimated $10.5 million in lodging taxes.