Money / Financial Planning
CAROLINE BREHMAN/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock / CAROLINE BREHMAN/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
So, you’ve beaten the odds and scored tickets to Super Bowl LVI in sunny Los Angeles — no easy feat, as we’ll get to in a bit — and you’re all geared up to watch the Cincinnati Bengals battle the LA Rams for NFL supremacy at SoFi Stadium on February 13. Congratulations! Now get ready to spend a lot more money, because it’s a sure bet you will.
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Let’s say you make a full weekend of it: flying into Los Angeles on Friday night, February 11, and flying out on Monday morning, February 14 — making sure you get home in time to give your sweetheart a nice Valentine’s Day gift. You book a hotel room for three nights and a rental car for the equivalent of two-and-a-half days. You eat typical meals while in LA
In this scenario, you can expect to spend about $1,400, according to cost analyzes conducted by Priceline.com and various food sites. This assumes you’ll be paying the average price on plane tickets, hotels, rental cars and restaurant meals.
Let’s get out the telestrator and break down the play-by-play:
Flight: $210
The average round trip ticket to fly into LAX over Super Bowl weekend is $210, according to Priceline.com. Of course, this varies depending on where you’re flying in from, but that’s the average, so we’ll go with that.
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Hotel: $804
Priceline.com estimates that the average daily hotel rate in Los Angeles for Super Bowl weekend is $268, so for three nights it comes to just a little over $800. Keep in mind that the average daily hotel rate is about 14% higher ($305) if you’re staying within five miles of Inglewood, where SoFi Stadium is located.
Car Rental: $200
The average daily car rental rate in Los Angeles over Super Bowl weekend is $82, according to Priceline.com. Because car rental rates are typically charged over 24-hour blocks, you might not have to pay the average day rate of $82 if you fly in Friday night and leave Monday morning. Let’s figure you have the car for 60 hours instead of 72 hours. In this case, your cost would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 instead of $246.
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Food: $200
This is where things get tricky. The Budget Your Trip website estimates that average food costs in Los Angeles are $35 per day, but that assumes you’re eating a cheap breakfast and being very conservative with your spending on lunch and dinner. On the other hand, the Hikersbay website estimates that a three-course meal at a mid-range restaurant averages about $78 per couple, or $39 per person.
So, assume you eat at a mid-range restaurant for dinner on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night. That’s around $120 total. Breakfast and lunch on Saturday should cost a total of about $20 total if you’re watching your pennies. Add another $10 for breakfast on Super Bowl Sunday, and $10 more for breakfast on Monday before you fly out.
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On Sunday, the game starts at 3:30 pm West Coast time, so you’ll probably grab a late lunch there. You can expect to spend $36 for two beers and two hot dogs at SoFi Stadium (you’re being thrifty here), according to the Cheapism.com website. After leaving the stadium around 7:30 pm and driving through LA traffic back to your hotel, you’ll probably want dinner out.
Here’s the final score on meals: Two breakfasts totaling $20, two lunches totaling $46, and three dinners totaling $120, for a total of $186, but you should probably round up to $200 to account for that extra dessert or bevy you might want.
The total of all four categories is $1,414, but go ahead and round down for $1,400.
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Oh Yeah, About Those Tickets…
All of the above assumes you’ve magically scored tickets to the big game, but the reality is that Super Bowl LVI ticket prices are soaring — the cheapest ticket available costs $5,300, according to TicketIQ data.
And if you want to sit comfortably in the lower levels of SoFi Stadium, that’ll cost you approximately $8,870. The debate about the outrageousness of these prices has been raging over the weekend, but that’s a whole other story.
If you do manage to get in, though, enjoy the game!
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