"My guess from the experts I've heard…is $70 million," said Roger Dow, president CEO of the U.S. Travel Association. "But here's the thing that people don't count on – it's the exposure that you get from media, of having the game on, and people doing the pre-shows, and all that."
That amounts to not only free televised publicity, he said, but people who traveled to the game from other states might enjoy the city and want to come back in the future.
"I think that's the big loss, much bigger than the $70 million," he said.
And it's not big businesses that will suffer, he added, it's vendors, souvenir shops, bars and restaurants.
"The ones that really need to keep their doors open, they're the ones that got harmed the most," he said – especially after nearly a year of coronavirus pandemic restrictions that undercut their bottom lines. "This would've been such a boost in the arm for them."
Vernon Jones, a Republican gubernatorial candidate from DeKalb County, which includes a sliver of Atlanta as well as some of its suburbs, slammed the MLB for the move.
"Woke corporations won’t tell us Georgians how to run our state and certainly won’t tell us how we should secure our elections," he told Fox News Tuesday night with the game underway. "By moving the All-Star game to Colorado, to a state with even more restrictive voting laws than Georgia, MLB cost our state millions of dollars, hurting the very Black communities they claim to care so much about. They should be ashamed."