With 614 rooms, the two-year-old Omni Fort Worth is the city’s largest hotel. It hosts the Steelers during Super Bowl week

The teams are set for Super Bowl XLV—the Packers and the Steelers—and now the real work starts for Dan Piotrowski and Andrew Casperson, general managers of the two Omni Hotels in the Dallas-Fort Worth area hosting the teams for the game on Feb. 6. As far as anyone can determine, this Super Bowl is the first in which the two teams are staying in hotels from the same brand. The task of accommodating the teams, their families and friends and club officials started nearly a year ago for both hotels and the Omni organization.

“Representatives from both hotels and Omni headquarters were in Miami at last year’s Super Bowl talking to the staffs at the host hotels and observing how they handled the event,” says Casperson, GM of the 421-room Omni Mandalay at Las Colinas in suburban Irving, which is hosting the Packers. The two-year-old Omni Fort Worth is housing the Steelers contingent. “Between the two hotels, we’ve had six or seven NFL teams stay with us during the regular season so we’ve got it down to a science, although not quite at the magnitude of a Super Bowl event.”

While both properties have been working on arrangements for months with the NFL and the local organizing committee, the effort stepped up in intensity last weekend following the games to determine who would play in yesterday’s conference championship contests. According to Casperson, the hotels consulted with all four final teams to develop detailed plans for their stays. “The minute the championship games were over, each hotel threw out one set of plans and started rolling on the other,” he says.

The Omni Mandalay at Las Colinas will house the Green Bay Packers.

Naturally, security is a big issue for the teams and the hotel. The smaller Omni Mandalay will be about 95-percent full with the Packers, while the larger (614 rooms) Omni Fort Worth will also accommodate some other guests, including NFL sponsors and some staff from ESPN, which is broadcasting from Sundance Square outside the hotel. The hotels have had to coordinate with a variety of local and regional law enforcement and safety agencies to make necessary security arrangements. They include controlling access to the hotels, devising plans to get the teams back and forth to their practice facilities and Cowboys Stadium and managing traffic around the properties.

“Obviously, this is an issue for the hotels and local law enforcement, but the NFL has 45 years experience in putting on Super Bowls so they’ve been extremely helpful on these issues,” says Piotrowski. “Even so, there are a lot of moving parts and it’s a big task.”

Since the Mandalay will be mostly full with the team and its entourage, the hotel will be closed to the public, particularly during the four or five days before the game. The Fort Worth property will probably be at least partially open. “We’ll talk to team officials to get their input and if they don’t want it open, we’ll make it happen,” says Piotrowski. “If possible, we want as many people as possible to have a great Fort Worth experience, including at our property.”

Several of the hotel’s food and beverage outlets are accessible from the street as well as through the lobby, so even if the hotel restricts access through the front entrance, the public will be able to
use the facilities.

Staffing is another consideration. The hotels used the experience of the hotels at last year’s Super Bowl as a guide and tweaked labor schedules as they saw fit. “Also, the luxury of being in the Omni family is that we own and manage all of our assets so we’re able to call on some of the other hotels to lend us staff and managers for the event,” says Casperson. “We host groups like this all the time so we have the expertise, but it helps to be able to add a few pieces to the puzzle to make sure everything goes smoothly.”

Once Super Bowl Sunday arrives, both GMs will focus on an event only one of the hotels can host: the victory party. “That’s the wild card, of course,” says Piotrowski, “but both of us need to make arrangements, prepare menus, order food and everything else required for what undoubtedly will be a major blow-out attended by several thousand people.”