Mizzou to rent out residence halls for football games, hoteliers react

Broadway Hotel owner David Parmley was left wondering Friday just what the impact of the University of Missouri’s decision to rent out some of its residence hall rooms to families would have on the local hospitality industry.

He said he’s going to wait and see, but he knows that the university could be competing with hotels for bookings on some weekends.

“Parents weekend and Homecoming, those two for sure, there’s always a ton of demand and I can’t see it affecting us on those weekends,” he said. “It’s going be those other three games at the beginning and end of the year that there’re probably more than enough rooms to go around, so now you’re just eating into the number of people staying.”

Parmley said the first few games and the last few games historically have lower attendance because they fall on holiday weekends. If the football team isn’t playing at its best, the bookings also fall.

“Even in the best of years, we sometimes have problems with the first one or two games and the last one or two games,” he said.

Mizzou officials said Thursday they’re trying to a find use for seven of the residence halls they had to close due to low enrollment numbers.

“It’s not a responsible act to have those buildings sitting idle when you can look for additional ways to use them while generating some revenue,” MU spokesman Christian Basi said.

Many of these solutions, including renting out the rooms on the football weekends or for other events like conferences, are short-term. Residence hall renting will only happen in FY 2017 and 2018.

Some other fixes include putting international students in dorms rather than off-campus housing and converting Schurz Hall into office space until enrollment bounces back.

Officials said Thursday they hope that in addition to generating revenue, the extra use could be good for enrollment.

“If we can get someone here to see our facilities, a family for a football weekend that may have a high school student, they can see if this is where they want to be,” said Vice Chancellor for Operations Gary Ward.

Basi said that they don’t know how renting rooms will affect hoteliers. He said that they hope that this will encourage more people to come to Columbia and provide more business for restaurants and other businesses.

Rooms will go for $120 a night and can already be reserved here.

“I can kind of see them going more head to head with the highway hotels that are economy class,” said Parmley.