Austin Registers Ring $23.6M Plus for Music Fest

"For the most part, the city was sold out. It was very difficult to get rooms," Jaclyn Barajas, with the Austin Convention and Visitor's Bureau tells GlobeSt.com. She said visitors booked approximately 4,000 hotel nights during the festival, each spending about $264 per day for an economic impact estimated to be $23.6 million.

The music draw, offering genres from hip-hop to alt country, had acts going for more than 50 stages. Some 11,000 people attended that venue while the movie and interactive festivals drew another 6,000, Barajas said.

Interest in the festivals helped boost the city's hotel occupancy, at least temporarily, following a 14.7% decline in occupancy rates between 2001 and 2000. Although the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks played a role in that decline, a bigger factor in the occupancy drop was Austin's faltering economy.

Yet despite the uptick in this year's attendee numbers, it may still be too early to gauge how the city's hotel bookings will fare for the remainder of 2003, especially as war looms in the Middle East. "It's not necessarily going to bring us to our knees in terms of travel," Doug Sutton, with the San Antonio-based Source Strategies, which compiles hotel data, tells GlobeSt.com, referring to the pending military maneuvers. "There may be a temporary interruption, but I don't see this being a long-term deal.