Ottawa resident Matt Peake says he experienced a bit of a shock last month when he tried to find a place to stay in Montreal for this weekend.

“When I looked online about three weeks ago, anything in the downtown area was completely booked,” he said. “It was impossible to find anything in my price range. One of the airport hotels was asking for something like $1,800 for Friday night. It was insane. I could fly to Europe for the cost of that hotel room.”

Peake and a group of friends eventually settled on an Airbnb apartment in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce that will set them back $800 for one night. He’s just grateful he doesn’t have to foot the bill alone.

“All things considered, that was the closest place that was even remotely affordable,” he said.

A search on Expedia Wednesday morning showed prices starting at $198 a night — pretax — for a three-night stay (Friday to Sunday) at a small apartment inside Université du Québec à Montréal student residences downtown.

On the Marriott website, prices for the weekend started at $362 a night at the Fairfield Inn & Suites near Trudeau airport, rising to $1,800 a night at Victoria Square’s W Montreal.

For the more extravagant-minded, a suite at the Vogue Hotel on de la Montagne St. was available for $4,497 a night for the weekend — still cheaper than the Queen E’s Plateau suite, which was priced at $4,799. Two other luxury hotels, the Ritz-Carlton and the Four Seasons, were sold out for Friday and Saturday night.

“There’s not a lot available under $300 or $400 a night, and these are the hotels with the fewest stars,” Greater Montreal Hotel Association head Jean-Sébastien Boudreault said. “For the five-star hotels, you’re getting close to $2,000 a night. People who come to the Grand Prix have money. They’re going to fill up the five-star hotels before they fill up the three-star hotels.”

Tourisme Montréal expects to release a new economic impact study on the race later this year. Due in part to hotel room inflation, preliminary data indicates the economic impact of the race is now closer to $80 million, Tourisme Montréal spokesperson Aurélie de Blois said this week.

A poll of Greater Montreal Hotel Association members conducted this month found that occupancy for Grand Prix weekend could peak at about 93 per cent, Boudreault said. That’s down from 98 per cent for the same period in 2022.

“Things are going well, we can’t complain, but it’s not as crazy as it was last year and I’m not even sure we’re going to get to 93 per cent,” Boudreault said. “Last year we were in revenge-travel mode because Montreal hadn’t had a Grand Prix since 2019. It’s still a huge event for the industry.”

About 338,000 people attended last year’s Grand Prix weekend, up from 307,000 in 2019.

Downtown stands to be the main beneficiary of the tourist influx this weekend. Over 70 per cent of Greater Montreal’s hotels are located in the central business district, and most of the satellite events also take place in the area.

“We have more hotels and more venues than we did a year ago, and the fact they’re full shows that the demand is there,” said Glenn Castanheira, head of the Montréal Centre-Ville merchants’ association.