United States hotels are slashing room rates during this summer’s football World Cup, as executives warn that ticket prices, inflation fears and anti-American sentiment are prompting football fans to scale back their travel plans.
Match-day room rates in host cities including Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia and San Francisco have dropped about a third from their peak earlier this year, according to data tracker Lighthouse Intelligence, in a sign of lower than anticipated demand.
“I’m seeing a lot of people start to panic and lower their rates,” said Scott Yesner, founder of Philadelphia-based short-term rental and boutique hotel management company Bespoke Stay.
Many in the industry had hoped the World Cup, which the U.S. is staging alongside Canada and Mexico, would help reverse last year’s slump in travel to the country, when revenue per available room declined for the first time since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gianni Infantino, head of world football’s governing body FIFA, told host cities in 2024 that they should expect “hundreds of thousands” of guests, including not only the “few lucky ones” with match tickets but also “many, many more who will just come to… be part of something special.”
But Vijay Dandapani, president of the Hotel Association of New York City, said he could “categorically say we haven’t seen much of a meaningful boost yet… It’s possible we will get some more demand, but at this point it certainly will not be the cornucopia that FIFA was promising.”
FIFA itself has cancelled thousands of its contracted hotel room blocks for technical staff and teams. While it was always expected to overbook initially, the cancellations have exceeded hoteliers’ expectations and left them with “a lot more rooms to sell for the period in between games,” said Jan Freitag, an analyst at hospitality data company CoStar.
Lior Sekler, chief commercial officer at hotel operator HRI Hospitality, said expectations that the World Cup would “be a large draw” — both within host cities and in surrounding regions hoping for an influx of fans extending their holidays — were “just not materializing.”
He blamed dissatisfaction with Donald Trump’s administration and its visa and immigration policies, as well as the instability triggered by the war in Iran, for cooling international demand: “Obviously, people’s desire to come to the United States right now is down.”
Aran Ryan, director of industry studies at Tourism Economics, said the research group was still expecting an “incremental boost… but there’s concern about ticket prices, there’s concern about border crossings and there’s concern about anti-U.S. sentiment — and that’s been made worse by the Iran war.”
The firm now expects international visitor numbers in the U.S. to rise 3.4 per cent this year, down from an estimate of 3.9 per cent in December.
Rosanna Maietta, president of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, said the more than two million World Cup tickets sold so far had not “translated into the level of hotel reservations typically associated with an event of this scale.”
Unusually high match ticket prices and renewed inflation fears arising from the war in the Middle East have also prompted some travellers to curtail their spending, according to Dandapani, with airfares now expected to increase because of a surge in fuel prices.
Football Supporters Europe, a fan group, has estimated that a supporter would need to spend at least US$6,900 on tickets to follow their team from the opening game to the final of the 2026 World Cup, almost five times the cost at the last tournament in Qatar.
For Europeans, at least, these higher costs and fresh inflationary pressures could be sufficient motivation to hold off until 2030, when the tournament will take place in Spain, Portugal and Morocco, according to CoStar’s Freitag.
Yesner said Bespoke Stay’s short-term rentals were outperforming its hotels, suggesting groups of fans might be looking to save money by piling into a single shared property.
Domestic demand could, at least in part, offset a slump in foreign visitors, but hoteliers’ optimistic targets rely on international visitors who typically “stay longer and spend more while they’re here,” according to Ed Grose, chief executive of the Greater Philadelphia Hotel Association.
He said hotel bookings in Philadelphia were so far “steady but not crazy — not at the level our members thought it was going to be.” He was still hoping for a late-stage surge in demand, as industry executives have noted that travellers are increasingly leaving bookings until the last minute.
Hoteliers themselves may also bear some responsibility for the unexpectedly slow bookings, according to Tourism Economics’ Ryan.
“If hotels were thinking they could demand multiple-night stays at premium pricing,” he said, “maybe expectations were just too high.”
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