Case Study: Holiday Bowl

Holiday Bowl Case Study

As host of the Holiday Bowl each year in December (and previously the Poinsettia Bowl), the San Diego Bowl Game Association is a successful tourism generator. The Holiday Bowl has been a San Diego institution since 1978 and consistently draws 50,000 spectators annually, many of them non-locals who travel to San Diego specifically to attend the game, and millions of broadcast viewers.

Receiving $300,000 in funding from SDTMD, the Holiday Bowl yielded a return on investment (ROI) of 6.9:1 in FY18 during a time of year that is traditionally a shoulder season for tourism in San Diego. In the past four years, SDTMD has invested approximately $1.65 million in the San Diego Bowl Game Association for both the Holiday and Poinsettia Bowls and has seen a return of $12.8 million, which translates to a 7.8 to 1 average ROI.

Key highlights:

• The San Diego Bowl Games have generated an average of 22,000 hotel room nights in the month of December for the past four years
• After the 2016 bowl season, the San Diego Bowl Game Association made the decision to focus solely on making the Holiday Bowl the nation’s premier bowl game experience and ceased operations of the Poinsettia Bowl.
• Each December, millions of households experiencing winter conditions see sunny San Diego during nationally televised game coverage for both the game and the parade.
• Since 1978, the economic impact of the games on San Diego has totaled over $780 million