$10K a night for a hotel room in Louisville? It must be Kentucky Derby time

On most nights, $449 can buy you a steak dinner and a suite in one of downtown Louisville’s finer hotels.

During the 2019 Kentucky Derby? It’ll get you a room at the Econo Lodge.

Take everything you think you know about the downtown hotel scene and multiply it by four, five and six times during the first weekend in May.

Some rooms that go for less than $200 per night at any other point of the year start at four figures and our most elite guests will pay upwards of $20,000 for a three-night stay in some of downtown's finest suites. 

Louisville's reputation as an affordable, midsized city takes a three-night hiatus every May as the country turns its heads and its wallets here for the most exciting two minutes in sports.

Once a year people from all over the world pay top dollar for a place to rest their heads during our annual spotlight moment. That can mean spending five figures a night if you're after one of the best suites in town — the presidential suite at the Omni Louisville Hotel or the penthouse apartment at the 21c Museum Hotel among them.

Whether you're on the high-end or the Econo Lodge end of the spectrum, chances are your final bill for Derby week's Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights — May 2-4 — will look more like you actually spent about two weeks here. 

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So I’ve spent the past week browsing through websites and chatting with hoteliers trying to take a pulse on what the 145th Kentucky Derby is going to mean for dollar signs downtown. 

Naturally, I couldn’t chat with everyone, but from this hotel sample, I can tell you there are still rooms available in our urban core. They're going to cost you, though, and in general, they're going to go fast. 

There were only four rooms left for that weekend at 21c Museum Hotel, at 700 W. Main St., when general manager Andrew Carter and I spoke at the beginning of this week.  Standard room packages start this year at about $2,300. Of the four rooms, one was an atrium suite for $5,000 per night and the other was a corner suite for about $6,000.

That’s a strong early showing, he told me. Some years it’s taken until April before the property sells out entirely. 

The 21c, like a lot of other hotels, has a three-night minimum stay required for the first weekend in May and a plethora of regular customers who return each year. They check out the Sunday after Derby and book their stays for the following year before they roll out of town.

Sometimes other high-profile races, like the Breeders' Cup, help put the Kentucky Derby at the top of people's minds months in advance, Carter said. There tends to be an uptick in hotel reservations after the holidays, too, but beyond that, there's no real science to knowing when hotel rooms in Louisville will start running scarce.

About a mile to the southeast and just a smidge closer to the Churchill Downs racetrack, Louisville’s iconic Brown Hotel at 335 W. Broadway still had “about a handful of rooms left” late last week, according to Marc Salmon, the hotel's resident historian and director of human resources. There are still two months to go before The Brown puts its grand display of 145 red roses — one for each Kentucky Derby — in the hotel lobby, but even so, he didn't expect those rooms would linger long. 

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Three-night packages at The Brown started at about $5,500 this year, he said, and generally go up to about $20,000 for the hotel's best room, the Muhammad Ali Suite. 

The Embassy Suites, at 501 S. 4th St., which is among downtown Louisville’s newer properties, only had about 10 percent of its stock left when Scott Shoenberger, the president and CEO of its parent company Al J. Schneider, and I chatted on Tuesday.

The hotel, which is home to more than 300 suites, opened in the old Stewart Dry Goods Company building in 2015 just before Kentucky Derby. Fitting a hotel in a historic department store meant creating more than 20 room configurations. So prices there vary, but in general, they start around $1,400 per night with that same three-night minimum.

A few blocks north of the Galt House Hotel at 140 N. Fourth St., which is also owned by Al J. Schneider, has 1,310 rooms and is the largest hotel downtown. About 30-35 percent of the Galt House’s Kentucky Derby customers are repeat visitors — including Joey Fatone of *NSYNC, who told the Courier Journal he stays in the same room at the Galt House Hotel each year when he comes to town for the illustrious Barnstable-Brown Derby Eve Gala and the Saturday race. 

A repeat booking rate that high is substantial for the size of the Galt House, Shoenberger said. It easily fills two small downtown hotels with the number of repeat customers it has. 

Over the years, the Kentucky Derby has gone from being a bucket list item to something people do year after year, he told me. People want to come back, and that shows in the return rates.   

The iconic waterfront hotel still had a decent stock of rooms available and about 200 will be offline this year for renovations, Shoenberger said.

He's confident the property will sell out, even if the last room isn’t off the market until sometime next month. When we spoke Tuesday, the hotel had one-bedroom suites available for $1,299 and spacious two-bedroom suites listed in the $2,000s.

If you’re on the hunt for something a little cheaper, it does exist. There are several properties downtown that are selling rooms for less than a grand. 

But that grand won't stretch as far as it would at any other point of the year. 

The Econo Lodge at 402 S. Second St. that I mentioned earlier had rooms listed online for as low as $449, up from the $75 rate that was available if you booked it for this past Thursday. This weekend the Fairfield Inn & Suites at 100 E. Jefferson was advertising rooms online for $140, but that rate jumps to $699 during the first week in May. 

If you're looking for something a little more modern, the Home2 Suites in NuLu at 240 S. Hancock St. is less than two years old, and it had online listings available Thursday for under $700. The Holiday Inn Express & Suites, which opened in 2016 at 800 W. Market St., was advertising rooms for $899 per night. 

If you booked a room for this weekend, those Derby time "budget" rates could buy you an executive suite for $339 at downtown’s 1-year-old Omni Louisville Hotel at 400 S. 2nd St. 

With most of them, you'd even have enough left over for a $170 "earth clay detox wrap" at the Omni's Mokara Spa and a $69 28-ounce prime porterhouse steak at Bob's Steak and Chop House, too. 

The Omni only had 19 of its 612 rooms left when general manager Scott Stuckey and I chatted late last week. That $10,000 presidential suite that I mentioned earlier isn’t one of them. That’s actually already booked for 2020, too.

Standard rooms at the Omni were starting at about $2,100 this year. One woman called a few days ago, Stuckey told me, and put 10 rooms on her credit card. 

That was more than $60,000 — and the charge cleared. That almost says more about this weekend than the actual price tags themselves.

A lot of Kentucky Derby guests have as few monetary limits as that credit card apparently did. It's why we see $1,000 mint juleps in gold cups and Pappy Van Winkle flowing like something a few shelves below. 

The world is willing to pay to see Louisville's spotlight moment — even if it costs $10,000.

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City Living reporter Maggie Menderski covers retail, restaurants and development in downtown and its nearby urban neighborhoods. Reach Maggie at 502-582-7137 or cityliving@courierjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @MaggieMenderski. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/maggiem.