Frustration is high for some looking to secure a hotel room in Regina for the 2013 Grey Cup.
Nearly all are already booked and rumours are swirling the reason for this is because tour companies have snatched them all up.
“No, it’s absolutely not true at all,” said Dash Tour’s David Ash, who many are pointing the finger at.
“There are about 3,400 hundred rooms in Regina. About of half of those are downtown,” he estimated. “The entire downtown core of hotels has been taken by the CFL and Grey Cup Committee.”
Ash said he has a few rooms at five hotels but nothing out of the ordinary.
“We don’t have every room in town. We haven’t taken a corner of the market,” he added. “It’s just that we’ve done business with a number of hotels here, it’s our home base. They give the rooms to people that have repeat business.”
The Regina Hotel Association represents 85 per cent of hotel rooms in the city and its CEO echoed what Ash said.
“We did conduct a random sample of our 18 hotel members and it shows that tour companies, all tour companies, they’ve only got a handful of rooms here and there,” said CEO Tracy Fahlman.
“I’m not sure where those rumours are coming from. They do not have a monopoly on the rooms.”
Some hotels have policies in place where they don’t allow one company to book a majority of rooms, but admitted it depends on the time of year. She said not every place is the same.
“Every hotel chain has a different policy in terms of large room block bookings,” Fahlman said.
But it could boil down to the size of Regina and the massive demand for the event.
“We are a very popular Grey Cup destination; it simply takes over our city.”
