Kelly Sanders, area managing director for Starwood Hotels Waikiki, remembers when the Pro Bowl moved from Hawaii to Arizona in 2015.

“It was a huge loss for us when they left in 2015,” Sanders said. “When they went to Arizona, we were left with one of the slowest weeks of the year.”

Joseph Toy, president and CEO of hotel consultancy Hospitality Advisors LLC, confirmed that the Pro Bowl’s departure was significant for Oahu hotels. On Jan. 25, 2015, the night of the Arizona Pro Bowl, Toy said, occupancy rates at Oahu hotel rooms dropped 15 percentage points, with visitor-filled rooms dropping from the mid- to upper 80 percent range to the mid-60 percent range. From Jan. 25-31, 2015, Toy said, Oahu hotel occupancy rates fell 8 percentage points. Occupancy for January 2015 on Oahu fell 6.7 percentage points, to 72.9 percent from 79.6 percent, he said. Likewise, Hawaii’s domestic passenger counts fell an average of 11.4 percent along with the game’s 2010 departure to Miami, the Hawaii Tourism Authority previously reported.

“The Pro Bowl was held in the middle of our high season, but it certainly was a marquee event,” Toy said. “A lot of people came to Hawaii just for the Pro Bowl.”

The NFL will hold a press conference today to announce the Pro Bowl will be moving to Orlando, Fla., for several years, according to NFL.com.

The Pro Bowl’s relatively low return on the $5.2 million price of bringing it to Hawaii sparked years of debate about whether the money would be better spent elsewhere. According to HTA statistics, the 2016 Pro Bowl generated $26.2 million for the state’s economy, second only to the PGA Tour, which brings in $55 million. However, in fiscal year 2016 the Pro Bowl had the lowest return on investment of the top 10 HTA-supported sporting events, generating just $6.30 for every marketing dollar spent.

Still, many Hawaii tourism officials think today’s announcement should trigger concerns.

“The future of sports tourism in Hawaii is at stake,” said Mufi Hannemann, president of the Hawaii Lodging &Tourism Association and a strong proponent of Lt. Gov. Shan Tsutsui’s failed attempt this year to get the state Legislature to support the creation of a sports and entertainment authority. “It’s a very competitive game, and this latest loss on top of the recent spate of negative sports tourism news doesn’t help. We had the soccer fiasco and we lost another golf tournament recently. The last Pro Bowl had the worst traffic that anyone has ever experienced. We need a better effort to make sure that we don’t repeat the same mistakes.”

With the game expected to be absent for the foreseeable future, Hannemann said the onus is on HTA to improve the state’s image in the highly competitive sports marketing arena. He said making sports decisions has been a tremendous challenge for state tourism officials, who have to balance big-name sports spending against the need to create sporting events that will bring more first-time visitors to the state and boost travel during May, June, September and December, which are traditionally the state’s slower months.

“I think we are doing well in this arena. The numbers on a broader level bear that out,” said Leslie Dance, HTA vice president of marketing and product development. “And, we have a plan if the Pro Bowl were to depart. I can’t tell you how we’ll slice it and dice it, but we have a plan.”

HTA President and CEO George Szigeti said HTA already has committed $9 million in funds to support 19 sporting events in Hawaii with a projected economic impact of $144 million. Dance said she’s prepared to present more sports marketing opportunities and ideas to the HTA board, which is expected to approve HTA’s first sports marketing contractor by the summer.

“We want to be able to use them as a platform to attract visitors from target markets. It’s important that we think about sports that appeal not only to visitors from Canada and the U.S., but to visitors from all over the world,” she said.

Mark Rolfing, golf analyst for NBC and Golf Channel, said the loss of the Pro Bowl and of five PGA golfing tournaments reinforces the need for Hawaii to have a sports authority or commission. Because the quest for a sports authority failed in this year’s legislative session, Rolfing said it’s imperative that HTA quickly hire a sports marketing agency.

“Most competitive destinations have sporting authorities or commissions, and most have big marketing agencies working for them,” Rolfing said. “Leslie Dance has experience and she’s smart, but she doesn’t have the tools and resources and help there yet. She has to develop relationships at the highest level with entities like the NFL, the PGA and ESPN, but her job is way bigger than sports.”

Dance said HTA and the Hawai‘i Convention Center also are considering plans to retrofit the facility so that it could host amateur and school competitions for sporting events like basketball, pingpong and volleyball.

“Retrofitting the convention center is a good idea,” Hannemann said. “Youth basketball would be great at the convention center, and I happen to know many Hawaii teams are going to Las Vegas to play softball. There’s no reason we couldn’t host these events here. We have the weather and the venues.”

HTA also should consider adding more lifestyle events like marathons, bike races, surfing contests and soccer tournaments that attract visitors by offering amateur athletes the chance to play their sport against Hawaii’s coveted backdrop of blue skies, clear water and swaying palm trees, said Tom Kiely, CEO of XTERRA, which started in 1996 on Maui and has grown to 250 events in 27 countries.

“Generally, when you lose one opportunity, you might find five others that you didn’t have before,” Kiely said.

Kiely said he doesn’t think the loss of the Pro Bowl or other recent sports tourism mishaps will have much impact on Hawaii’s ability to attract more tourism-generating sporting events.

“It creates a great opportunity for the HTA to look at things that they may not have looked at before because the money was tied up,” he said. “If you took that $5.2 million and cut it into $100,000 event contributions, you could sponsor 50 more events. If those 50 events have positive economic impacts, your net benefit to the state could be greater than the Pro Bowl, which was a one-time event.”

For example, XTERRA’s Hawaii trail run and triathlon generated $8.6 million in economic benefits with just $264,000 in HTA support. The HTA estimated XTERRA’s return on investment to be more than $60 for every $1 marketing dollar spent — that’s about six times the Pro Bowl’s return on investment.

Statistics like these are why David Carey, president and CEO of Outrigger Enterprises, said he would like the HTA to apply its former Pro Bowl investment to other sporting or entertainment events.

“My personal opinion is that the game lost interest as an athletic contest compared to when it first started and became more of a celebration than a serious football game,” Carey said. “I thought it was more money than it was worth.”

While some hoteliers saw drops during the previous two times that the Pro Bowl left Hawaii, Carey said it didn’t produce any incremental demand for Outrigger. “We’ve now got a great opportunity to create a broader portfolio of events.”