Ya that might be true but how do you know he doesn't have to submit a plan to the AD and get it approved? And if anything happens and something needs to get done on the fly then it has to go back to the AD because it wasn't in the original plan. Not saying it does but there's a million things that are at play here and a lot of people are pretending like they know exactly how things work and paint with a really nice "prove it" brush.
I'm just saying this because ESPN had a big hand in paying for this trip so I'm wondering if they were also in on the travel planning side?
Typically with tournaments the hotels are pre-selected by the tournament itself and the schools do not have a choice in where they are staying, they are assigned it. Also, every hotel is able to set their own rate that is contracted to the tournament, not the school, so some of the teams may have been paying $40 more per room per night than another school because of where they were assigned to stay, and there is nothing the school can do about it as ESPN/NCAA is paying the rooms tab for the contracted nights thru the travel allowance, which is based on the rate being charged.
Any extra days added are at whatever rate the hotel determines since it falls outside of the contracted rate/dates. If the room rate for the tournament was $200 per night, then the extra time they wanted could have been $300 (or more) per room for the extra 6 hours of time to stay in the room.
Edited to add: The NCAA tournament the highest seeded team in a location gets first pick of tournament selected hotel for the Big Dance, and then downwards from there. Other tournaments are usually you get what you get (with the good teams being taken care of first)