The San Diego Union-Tribune published an article July 21 about last weekend’s grossly inflated hotel rates due to the combination of Comic-Con, the Acura Classic and opening weekend at the Del Mar Race Track. The story raised the question, with San Diego Pride drawing 150,000 people each year and more expected for this year’s 30th anniversary celebration, what is the fiscal impact of Pride weekend on San Diego’s economy?

The answer is – not many people in the city know. For the first time ever, San Diego Pride is set this year to track Pride visitors and where they stay, eat and play, by handing out questionnaires at this year’s festival. By next year, there should be some idea of the impact of Pride tourism on the local economy. (Pride Executive Director Suanne Pauley said an attempt to track the data last year fell through.)

Neither does the San Diego Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (ConVis), which markets and promotes San Diego as a tourist destination, gather facts and figures on any civic events, said ConVis spokesman Sal Giametta. Event organizers and promoters generate all of the information ConVis provides to consumers. “Whether it’s the Super Bowl – in which case it’s the NFL – or it’s the Holiday Bowl or the Gaslamp Quarter’s annual Mardi Gras event, those numbers always come to us from the event promoters, so unless we are getting something from the folks that are putting on the parade, we don’t have a number,” he said.

Making a tentative assessment of Pride’s impact on San Diego’s economy, Giametta said, “It runs the gamut everywhere from $300 million for Super Bowl to $21 million a year for, say, the Holiday Bowl… so it’s very difficult to put a figure on. I guess it would probably be safe to say that the impact [of Pride] would be akin to a very large convention, and we have many, many very large conventions that take place in San Diego throughout the year, but I just really cannot put a dollar figure on it. It’s certainly safe to say that it would count in the millions of dollars. I would be remiss if I tried to put a number on it.”

While San Diego Pride is notably missing on the main Calendar of Visitor Events section of the ConVis website, there is a section geared towards GLBT tourists called San Diego Gay to Z in the San Diego Visitors Planning Guide section, and another section called the Rainbow Guide, where listings of Pride events and GLBT-friendly theater, dining and club options can be found.

Giametta said that ConVis sends an email alert called San Diego Summertime Fun to its members and another called the consumer email, both of which list Pride events, and their public relations department hosted a contingent of travel writers from national GLBT publications in February that highlighted San Diego as a GLBT-friendly tourist destination.

Meanwhile, San Diego hotels are greeting Pride visitors with freebies and discounts, rather than last weekend’s inflated rates. Several San Diego hotels have marketed directly to the large amount of GLBT tourism that comes during the city’s Pride for years, and others are catching on.

The W San Diego, one of the newer hotels in the area, is selling a “Pride package” for the weekend, which markets directly to gays and lesbians. A spin-off on one of their standard leisure packages, the kit includes a double-occupancy room, a gay-themed travel book, CD compilation, “intimacy kit” and two complimentary cocktails.

Ed Delehanty, sales director at Park Manor Suites, said that, though the hotel is usually sold out every weekend in the summertime, rooms for Pride weekend sell out quicker than most – this year they filled up in January. Though Pride is not the Suites’ biggest moneymaking weekend, with rates rising a mere $20 from the average summertime rate of $159 to $179 a night, the event is one of their highest-grossing weekends, with three days of parties and fundraisers drawing a steady crowd to Top of the Park, their rooftop restaurant and lounge.

The U.S. Grant, the official host hotel of San Diego LGBT Pride for the last six years, is also booked solid. Mark Debella, the hotel’s director of sales and marketing, said that hoteliers “definitely” put Pride on their radar screens. “I think if they’re smart that they should,” he said. “There is obviously great research done on the income level of the gay and lesbian customer and their discretionary income. … It’s great business for the city.”

Debella speculated that the lack of numbers about Pride’s visitor impact could have a lot to do with the event’s location. “With things like a Comic-Con, because it’s staged at the convention center, there is obviously a much broader scope of documenting room nights and its impact on the local economy,” he said. “But because the [Pride] venue isn’t a convention center, again, nobody puts together a block of rooms.”

Debella estimated that 10,000 to 15,000 room nights are sold to Pride visitors in the area between downtown, Mission Valley and Mission Bay, netting the local hotel industry over $2 million.

“Let’s all face it,” he added, “they all drink at the bar; everybody needs breakfast, so it’s great business for a several day stretch.”

Delehanty said that Pride guests break out of the Hillcrest area more than they used to, exploring more traditional San Diego tourist destinations. “They seem to experience a lot more,” he said, adding that Pride most likely has a major positive impact on the local economy. “They seem to experience the Gaslamp, they want directions to Old Town, of course they want directions to Black’s Beach and Coronado, so it’s not just parade and festival as it was a long time ago.”

Among the trends Delehanty has noticed in the 12 years he has worked Pride events at the Suites is a progressively maturing clientele. “It’s a wide range of ages, which is great,” he said. “It’s more mature; we get a big mix, but I remember years ago it being really young – 20s, 30s.”

Debella noted that Pride guests tend to be “short-term bookers”, waiting until the last minute to make reservations, and tend to hit the “outlets”, meaning the restaurants and bars of the hotel, more often. “What we’ve seen for any event of that scale or that kind of customer, about the funnest, friendliest-going people you can have at a hotel; just here to have a good time.”

Other hotels featured on the Pride website include the Holiday Inn on the Bay, Staybridge Suites Riviera, Town & Country Resort, Loews Coronado Bay Resort, the Hampton Inn, the Prava Hotel, Sheraton Suites, Mission Valley Resort, Holiday Inn Select, the Red Lion Hanalei, the Manchester Grand Hyatt downtown and the Hilton Mission Valley. The stratospheric rates of $600-$1000 reported by the Union-Tribune as average for the events of last weekend were nowhere in sight – going rates for Pride weekend averaged $80 to $340 per double-occupancy room, and rooms were still available the week before Pride.