By QUITA CULPEPPER, courtesy of KVUE News
AUSTIN -- Sixty thousand people are expected to come to the capital city for this year's South by Southwest festival. The new Hyatt Place Hotel downtown is ready to welcome the crowd when it officially opens its doors Tuesday.
"We'll be checking people in at 10 a.m. tomorrow," said General Manager Brad Haas. "It's going to be a busy and fun day for us."
There are 296 rooms opening at Hyatt Place and Haas says 90 percent of them are already booked for SXSW.
"There's always a few last minute changes where people may have some cancellations here and there so we may still have a few rooms," Haas said.
The Austin area has on average 30,000 hotel rooms available, SXSW organizer Mike Shea says those were booked up fast.
"Yeah we need a lot more hotel rooms," Shea said. "Our hotels start selling out really some as early as September. And sometime in January we actually posted that most of the hotels were sold out."
And prices for those remaining rooms have skyrocketed. Travelocity shows the Holiday Inn Express in Buda is charging $633 dollars during SXSW.
"We do live in a world of supply and demand," Shea said. "With any situation like this where you have a popular event in a popular city it's going to cost you a little bit more but I still think that in a lot of ways the hotels that we have in Austin are good value for what you get during an event."
Shea says if you are determined to go to SXSW, you'll find a place to stay.
