HARRIS, Mich. — With 454 hotel rooms and a menu of built in amenities, Island Resort & Casino in Michigan’s upper peninsula is offering football fans a stay option for the NFL Draft.
General Manager Tony Mancilla said the decision was made to offer a package after seeing the success of last year’s draft.
“Detroit hosted it last year. It was overrun. They said there were several hundred thousand people there,” he said. “With that being said, I think Green Bay is even more desired by the NFL fan to attend.”
The resort and casino is about two hours north of Green Bay. Its draft package includes transportation to and from the event’s site at Lambeau Field.
“We think there’s going to be a lot of demand, and we said, ‘Let’s put together a package where we can drive them down,’” Mancilla said. “They can drink on the bus. We’ll have a room for them and there’s stuff to do here when they’re back. We have a nightlife, it’s built right into it, so it really made a lot of sense.”
Officials are anticipating about 250,000 people to attend the draft over three days. That’s expected to have a statewide economic impact of about $94 million.
Shawn Katzbeck, the City of Marinette’s director of marketing and tourism, said they hope to not only attract people to the community during the draft, but for visits after the event as well.
Marinette sits on the Wisconsin side of the border with Michigan.
“I’m not really expecting people to say, ‘I’m not going to the draft, I can go to Marinette.’ They’re going to the draft. But how then can we get them back?” Katzbeck said. “We can tell them about our waterfalls. We have more waterfalls in this county than any other county. We can about our fishing. Our fishing, we do Cabela’s Walleye tournaments every year. We can talk about kayaking and some of the what’s called ‘quiet sports.’”
He said the city is working with hotels in the community to provide shuttles back and forth from Green Bay.
“Our Room Tax Committee has stepped up and is offering the hotels money to help pay for that to offset it,” Katzbeck said. “We’re really looking forward to this and we’re really trying, if you will, to push all of our chips into the table.”
With a casino, sportsbook, restaurants, live music, a spa, waterpark and sports bar, Mancilla said island resort and casino offers travelers things to do after the days at the draft are over.
“We use March madness like this, the draft every year. We have parties. This is just going to be another one on a larger scale,” he said. “It’s going to expose us to people who have never been here before.”