College basketball's Final Four a slam dunk for downtown Detroit hotel bookings

Downtown Detroit's spiffy new hotels look to cash in on the Final Four.

Excerpt:

Weeks of March Madness stand between determining whether the Spartans will dance with the Tar Heels or the Blue Devils will curse the Huskies. But well before anyone knows who college basketball's Final Four are, it's clear downtown Detroit's economy will win big.

The impact of the NCAA's marquee event already is visible and significant: the Big Dance has done what the Detroit auto show could not in January -- book up all but a handful of downtown Detroit's nearly 5,000 hotel rooms.

January brought a scaled-down auto show, and the nation's biggest decline in occupancy for Detroit-area hotels. The three casinos all reported declines in revenue.
The Final Four, with its predicted $50-million impact, has been like a bright basketball looming on the horizon.

"This is the type of event that keeps us on the map," said Bill Aprill, director of sales and marketing for the Doubletree Fort Shelby hotel, which opened in December. As of Friday, all of his 203 rooms were booked for the April 4-6 event.

Read the rest of the Detroit Free Press story here.