“That means every single hotel room in the entire greater Richmond area should have been full with a racing fan if these numbers are to believed,” Matheson said, noting Richmond Region Tourism lists about 18,000 hotel rooms in the area.

Instead, throughout the event, rooms across the region showed up as available on booking websites. And, for all of September, the city saw hotel bookings drop. In the region as a whole, hotel occupancy was at 63 percent for the month.

Mike Watkins, president of the Richmond Region Hospitality Association, said the bike race had a minimal impact on hotel occupancy until the final weekend of the race.

Chmura’s senior economist, Xiaobing Shuai, said he ran similar numbers but determined the underlying assumptions are reasonable. He said part of this is because he assumed that the area has a larger number of hotel rooms (22,000, a number he took from a 2012 study), that all visitors stayed in double-occupancy rooms, and that some visitors stayed outside the region, for example, in Williamsburg.

Matheson responded that even taking those assumptions at face value still produces a larger-than-actual occupancy rate.