What made it obvious? Your statement would require that the hotels had a previous annual occupancy rate of under 40%. Hotels with an occupancy rate at that level would have been losing money all those years prior to the Olympics. Unless all of them had someone willing to feed large amounts of cash into them, they all would have gone out of business. That isn't what occurred though. The 148% was your statement.
You are welcome to listen to anyone you like but if you are going to cast aside figures provided by the Salt Lake Visitors and Convention Bureau and the Salt Lake Tribune you should have some solid reasons for doing so. They both provided figures for non-Olympic years.
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