Planning is in place for the potential impact to the Bay Area next year

The City of Tampa and the surrounding areas are gearing up for 2021. The Gasparilla Parade of Pirates makes its way down Bayshore Boulevard January 30, 2021, and eight days later, on February 7, the Super Bowl kickoffs at Raymond James Stadium. For two consecutive weekends, Tampa will be home to what will likely be the largest event crowd in the nation.

“In other places, I’d worry about fatigue,” Visit Tampa Bay president and chief executive officer Santiago Corrada said. “But not here. We’ve done this before.”

Back-to-back Super Bowl/Gasparilla weekends last occurred in 2009. And in 2001, they were held on the very same day.

In 2018, Gasparilla and the NHL All-Star Skills Competition also took place on the same day and the All-Star hockey game on the next.

The teams in charge know this will be no easy task.

“The key is to be prepared,” he said. “We’re already thinking about what we need to do.”

For law enforcement, said Tampa Mayor (and former police chief) Jane Castor, the biggest issue will be “personnel demands.”

No one can take off the week of the Super Bowl, she said, and all are on duty on Gasparilla day.

“We have just under 1,000 law enforcement officers who know the demands of special events like these,” Castor said. “But it’s these events that truly show how remarkable our police department is.”

It helps that the two major events will occur in different sections of the city, Visit Tampa Bay’s Corrada said. (Gasparilla takes over South Tampa and downtown. The Super Bowl will be played at the stadium in West Tampa, though related events will likely take place around town.)

That means both areas can be physically prepared simultaneously.

“Challenges that some other cities might have because everything is in the same concentrated space is not a challenge here,” Corrada said.

In 2001, the Gasparilla parade was again scheduled for the day before the Super Bowl in Tampa. Around 750,000 showed up for the parade, which usually welcomes half that number.

Traffic was so bad that many staying downtown couldn’t get to Super Bowl events also held that day.

But in 2009, the events successfully took place on back-to-back weekends — as they will again this year.

“That means two solid, solid weekends” of hotel bookings, Corrada said.

Hillsborough County’s hotel occupancy on Gasparilla day is typically more than 80%, according to Visit Tampa Bay reports. But it reached 90.6 percent in 2018 when Gasparilla shared the stage with the National Hockey League.

Corrada said Super Bowl weekend’s occupancy rate next year could soar above 90%.