Graduation day means big business for hotels and restaurants

BOWLING GREEN Ky.- It was a big day for 2,677 students who graduated from Western Kentucky University Friday night and it’s an even bigger day for businesses.

Jessie Smith, assistant manager at Hilligan’s said Friday leading into graduation weekend is when the restaurant sees its peak businesses time.

“I see that we start picking up business pretty substantially. Come graduation weekend, it’s usually the busiest time of the year for us,” Smith said.

Families fill up Bowling Green hotels. Sales manager at the Hyatt place hotel, Nicholas Zaleski, said the hotel also seeing a huge increase in business.

“It increases pretty significantly. You’re looking at what our standard average rate would go to, and it would increase pretty significantly. Graduation is a definite sellout but we’re really looking at numbers increasing 100 percent,” Zaleski said.

With the largest graduating class in WKU history walking the line, Zaleski said it’s not just the Hyatt Place that is booked.

We talk to them every week to make sure we’re doing fairly in the market, and everybody is sold out,” Zaleski said. Everybody’s experienced a lot of good business. it’s great for the city of Bowling Green.”