Hosting the Super Bowl Gives You Cheap Flights

Hosting the super bowl gives you a small window of super cheap flights, if you’re smart. Even more so if you don’t care about the game. In fact, you can fly cheapy if you live in the Super Bowl host city, live short-haul from the host city, or if your home team is in the Super Bowl.

More than 200,000 passengers transited through Phoenix Sky Harbor after Arizona hosted Super Bowl LVII, a new record. To make this happen aircraft needed to be positioned at peak times, when the crowds came in and then when the crowd went out. This left a glut of inventory if you knew where to look. For example, an American Airlines A321T flew from JFK to PHX at 20% capacity the day before the Super Bowl, everyone eligible was upgraded and still half the first class seats remained empty.

This imbalance can be taken advantage of if you plan ahead. American ran mostly empty Boeing 777-200s between Phoenix and Los Angeles in-between demand peaks. We jumped at the chance and booked a weekend trip to LAX, we paid $137 roundtrip per person. All upgrades cleared into lay-flat Flagship Business seats.

Next year, you can expect a similar sector imbalance due to the size of Harry Reid International Airport (Las Vegas), they have less capacity per day than Phoenix. I predict flying to (1) major airports in short range of LAS (PHX, LAX, SFO) and (2) the airport of the competing fanbases to be great deals for a trip from 2/9/2024 -2/11/2024. Essentially, you need to go the opposite direction of traffic.

I was able to watch the entire game in the Admirals Club as my flight was scheduled 1.5 hours after the game was expected to end. When I landed, there were a sea of Eagles fan as the aircraft was set to fly to PHL just after midnight. This is an experience I will take advantage of again next year.