Super Bowl trip's cost of $5,000 per person defers other dream vacations

DALLAS -- Paris can wait. This is Super Bowl XLV.

"Instead of going to France, we're coming to the Super Bowl," said Kevin Delacour, 49, of Mt. Lebanon when he and wife Kristen, 32, arrived Thursday at Dallas Love Field Airport.

"She wasn't wild about it, but hey, you don't want to miss a Super Bowl because you never know when (the Steelers) are going to get there," he said.

Delacour and his wife planned to vacation in France and trace his family's ancestry. Instead, they're spending about $400 a night to stay in Dallas, more than $1,200 on game tickets and probably hundreds of dollars on Texas barbecue brisket and drinks at a "Steelers watering hole."

Those are among the economic trade-offs Steelers and Packers fans are making to visit North Texas for what many families said would be the vacation of 2011, because the expense of attending a Super Bowl leaves little room in the budget for big spending later in the year.

That adds up to big green for Big D.

More than 300,000 people are expected to be here during the Super Bowl weekend, with about 105,000 attending the game in the 2-year-old, $1.2 billion Cowboys Stadium in Arlington.

Visitors will spend an estimated $202 million on hotels, food, rental cars, parties and other items, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers that included spending beyond Arlington, Dallas and Fort Worth, where the Steelers are staying.

That beats the firm's previous high Super Bowl spending estimate of $195 million at Super Bowl XLI in 2007 in Miami. Estimates for 2009-10 were significantly lower because of the economic recession.

The uptick in spending is based on "improved economic outlook, the game's location, and the strength of each team's fan base," according to the study.

The Law family of McCandless is contributing significantly to the Texas economy.

Kathleen Law, 43, used ticket reseller StubHub.com to spend $2,200 per ticket for four top-level end-zone seats. The expense probably will mean postponing a trip to the beach this year or deferring a cruise vacation.

"The prices kept going up and up," Law said. "But my daughter is a huge, huge Steeler fan."

"They're jealous. I have a lot of friends who are Steelers fans, too," Tori Law, 18, a college freshman in Orlando with Steelers logos on her fingernails, said about her classmates.

The Laws, who brought two friends along, said they never have taken a trip "this big before."

Steelers fans are not the only ones spending and sacrificing to attend the game.

Mark Borowski, 47, of Milwaukee traveled to Dallas on Wednesday and Thursday by plane -- and by car when his connecting flight to Kansas City was canceled because of icy conditions -- with daughters Ashley, 11, and Olivia, 6.

After traveling 15 hours, Borowski's prepared to spend up to $6,000 to buy two tickets before the Super Bowl: one of them for wife Stephanie, who traveled separately.

The unexpected car rental to drive overnight to Kansas City cost $250. To cut costs, he used rewards points to stay at a Hampton Inn, and the children will stay with a relative in Oklahoma City, a 3-hour drive north, on game day.

"This was a bucket-list thing for my wife and I," Borowski said. "We said, 'The next time they go, we're going.'"

Is this the family's trip of the year?

"I think it's going to have to be," he said. "As the year goes on, we might not do other things because of (this)."

Additional Information:

Super Bowl costs

• Round-trip flight to Dallas (Saturday to Monday): $1,145 to $1,834 (direct, Orbitz)

• StubHub.com has about 1,000 game tickets available, starting at $2,200; on average, fans paid $3,600 a ticket

• Least expensive ticket purchased: $1,700 for upper corner seats

• Most expensive: $15,022 for club seats at the 50-yard line; 'the buyer, from California, bought two at this price right after the Steelers decidedly eliminated the Jets,' says StubHub spokesman Glenn Lehrman