Juneau needs housing for 5,000 coming to town for Ironman race

Juneau has a new housing rental crisis. The community invited 5,000 people to come for an Ironman race.

With only around 1,000 hotel rooms, the city proposed a creative solution: Encouraging Juneau residents to go on vacation and rent their homes to athletes for a week. The race is Aug. 7.

One athlete, Michael Bissell, of Alabama, said he was late to the game when looking for a place to stay, but he got something arranged fairly painlessly.

“I was looking at hotels for about two weeks,” Bissell said. “And after no luck there like, seriously, none, I started on a Facebook page.”

The Facebook page for Ironman Alaska has an accommodation thread with over 700 comments.

“And then within 30 seconds, 30 minutes, I had two people who have messaged me already,” said Bissell. “It just took a couple of days to see what was best for me and my crew that was coming out.”

His crew is his mom, his brother, and a friend. They’re paying $1,000 a night for four nights, and he’s hoping his crew will help him with that.

The comments on the Facebook thread started back in October, with people mostly looking for housing during the race, which will include swimming 2.4 miles in Auke Lake, biking 112 miles along Glacier Highway and back, and running a full marathon at 26.2 miles.

In January, there were a lot of discouraged commenters saying that they were really struggling to find a place to stay. Shortly after, more and more renters began commenting on those comments, offering places to stay.

Since then, there are more comments posting places to stay than those seeking. However, there are still some complaining about prices.

One comment reads: “Very frustrated that the only places I’ve found so far are 5 to 6 times more expensive than they are the week before or after. … Figures people would cash in, but I can’t afford to pay $5,000 a week for an Airbnb studio.”

One of the Ironman Alaska Facebook page’s administrators replied: “There’s making the most of a situation and then basically ripping people off. Sounds like that falls into the latter.”

It’s not just runners — support crew, family and volunteers need housing too. Kara Tetley, with Travel Juneau, said that Ironman considered a lot of variables before settling on Juneau as its first Alaska race location, including hotel capacity.

“They came and they visited a couple of times,” Tetley said. “Different members of the Ironman staff would come in and kind of look at things.”

Travel Juneau has a page on their Ironman site telling Juneau residents how to register their businesses, and how to qualify for a discount flight out of town with Alaska Airlines for that week if they do.

Tetley said that the demand for housing during the event seems to have quelled.

“From what we can understand, there was some concern in the beginning, just because they kind of wanted to get everything settled right away,” said Tetley. “But it’s really quieted down, and it seems like a lot of athletes are set up or not as concerned about that anymore.”

In the meantime, Bissell will be training and preparing for some of the race obstacles that are more unique to Alaska.

“Yeah, I guess I’ll be running with some bear spray,” Bissell said.