Hoteliers Brace For Softer-Than-Expected World Cup Demand

Hotel owners and operators have been preparing for years as if the 2026 FIFA World Cup will drive a massive hospitality boom for the 16 cities across the U.S., Mexico and Canada that are hosting matches in the world's biggest sporting event.

But with fewer than 60 days until the start of the tournament, demand is tracking below the rosiest economic projections.

A confluence of headwinds — such as record-shattering ticket prices, visa restrictions for travelers from some of the competing countries, and the conflict with Iran, which is spiking airfare costs — is combining to slow World Cup travel plans and water down hoteliers' optimism.

“The World Cup will generate business and create memorable moments for host cities,” Suraj Bhakta, CEO of hospitality-focused brokerage NewGen Advisory, told Bisnow. “But the ‘once-in-a-generation windfall’ framing was always built on assumptions of a welcoming policy environment and a recovering international travel market.”

Some host cities are reporting occupancy levels of their preallocated inventory as low as 15%, Bhakta said. The clock is ticking for hoteliers to make up the gap.

More than a dozen hospitality industry professionals spoke to Bisnow about what they have seen in the run-up to the World Cup and how they expect things to play out when matches begin June 11. 

Headwinds Blowing

An increasingly hostile climate toward international travelers in the U.S. is impacting both their willingness to attend the event and their ability to do so. 

High jet fuel prices and correspondingly pricier airfares have the potential to stifle demand recovery in the lead-up to the World Cup. Jet fuel prices were at $4.08 per gallon as of April 10, up from $2.42 per gallon on Feb. 26, before the start of the conflict with Iran, according to Argus. 

“The real curveball has been oil prices over the last couple months,” said Daniel Katz, senior vice president of portfolio asset management at hotel investor Driftwood Capital. “Does that have an impact on an event that was becoming more and more short-term to begin with?”

Driftwood Capital owns or manages about 25 hotels in World Cup host cities. Group demand has particularly fallen short of what the company expected, though transient travel has still been healthy, Katz said. 

Getting people to the games has come with multiple challenges.

President Donald Trump blocked tourist visas for residents of 39 countries, including Haiti, Iran, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, whose teams qualified for the World Cup. The president also restricted immigration visas from 15 countries competing in the tournament. 

That continued focus on immigration enforcement could dampen inbound tourism. Former FIFA President Sepp Blatter in January called for a boycott of the World Cup, citing Trump's foreign and immigration policies.

“Fans who cannot get a visa or who fear the entry process will simply watch from home or go to matches in Canada and Mexico instead,” Bhakta said.

FIFA leadership has discussed President Gianni Infantino potentially asking Trump to place a full moratorium on Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids during the World Cup, The Athletic reported.

Hotel occupancy is trending higher in the World Cup host cities in Canada and Mexico than in most U.S. host cities, according to CoStar data shared with Bisnow. As of early April, hotel occupancy on the books in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Monterrey, Nuevo León, is at or near 30%, while Miami checks in as the most booked U.S. city, with 20% of its inventory reserved.

FIFA’s convoluted ticket process and elevated prices have also angered many fans, even as the soccer organization has touted record demand. 

FIFA implemented a variable pricing model for the upcoming World Cup, and matches such as Mexico’s opening game have seen prices increase more than 50% across phases. Tickets for about 40 of the tournament’s 104 matches cost more when the most recent ticket phase opened in early April than they did in any prior ticketing phase, The Athletic reported. 

“If people were hedging on prices coming down, whether it be on tickets or on the ability to get there, you've seen both of those factors go up, rather than there being some type of normalization,” Katz said. “That could absolutely have an impact on demand.”

Great Expectations

Hype over a potential hospitality boom hit a fever pitch in the run-up to the event.  

Tourism Economics last year projected that 1.2 million international travelers would visit the U.S. for the World Cup, boosting a sluggish hospitality market. Occupancy and revenue per available room were down 1.2% and 0.3%, respectively, in 2025 compared to the year prior.

“This really is eight Super Bowls, seven, nine, whatever city you're in,” College of the Holy Cross economics professor Victor Matheson told Bisnow last June.

Hotels staffed up accordingly. The industry added 44,000 hospitality jobs in March, its strongest performance since 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Because of projected group demand from the tournament, Katz said Driftwood Capital’s hotels didn’t accept the typical business they usually would during that time frame. 

“If the World Cup demand doesn't reach what we thought it was going to, it's going to be really hard to replace that business,” Katz said.

Florida-based MIA Hospitality Management CEO and co-founder Brian Vujnovic told Bisnow that FIFA and Miami tourism organizations have been clear that the World Cup won’t be a large-group event and will instead be driven by transient travel.

He said hotel prices have held and are “very elevated” compared to a traditional June or July in South Florida, the region's tourism offseason.

Vujnovic said transient demand is in line with the typical booking window of 35% to 45% occupancy 90 days out. Momentum picks up 60 days away from the event, and then a good portion of the pickup comes 30 days out. 

“The last 10 years in the hotel space has prepared us for this event,” Vujnovic said. “Every year, the booking window just gets shorter and shorter and shorter.” 

Depending on the match, RREAF Holdings Executive Vice President of Hospitality Brad Busby said the company lifted rates slightly, from 5% to 20%. His company didn’t forecast a sizable increase in weekday demand for its business hotels because they already have a reliable segment of business travelers.

They projected a modest increase on weekends akin to NFL games, and thus far, their projections are pacing “almost exactly” as they expected, he said.

“In Dallas, we never saw it as nine Super Bowls,” Busby said. “We saw it as nine high-profile Dallas Cowboys games.”

Cloudy Forecast

FIFA made headlines late last month when it canceled hotel blocks in all 11 U.S. host cities and some in Mexico and Canada, offering no public explanation for the room reduction. Those cuts ranged from as few as 800 in Mexico City to 10,000 in Philadelphia. 

Jan Freitag, the national director of hospitality analytics for CoStar Group, said the hospitality industry expected FIFA’s room cancellations, as the organization purposefully overbooked and didn’t expect to fill 100% of the rooms it reserved. 

Loews Hotels locations in Arlington, Texas, were among those to receive room-hold cancellations from FIFA. While Loews Hotels & Co. Managing Director Stephen Cummings didn’t disclose how many room holds were canceled, he said the reservations “were secured well in advance,” so the change wasn’t a surprise.

“This is not uncommon, as they assess operational needs closer to the event,” Cummings said. 

FIFA didn't respond to a request for comment on its hotel room cancellations.  

Occupancy already on the books for the five weeks of the World Cup in most U.S. host markets is above where it was for the same period last year, CoStar data shows. 

Only New York, Boston and Atlanta are trending below their respective 2025 occupancies despite being in the same 13% or higher range of most of the nation's other host cities. 

But overall RevPAR during the World Cup months is projected to grow just 1.7% from last year, according to CoStar, muted compared to previous tournaments in other countries.

With FIFA’s canceled rooms headed back to the open market, hotels in Arlington, where Dallas-Fort Worth’s nine matches will be played, could face high compression, said Chris Gomes, senior managing director of investments for the national hospitality group at Marcus & Millichap’s Dallas office.

“[Average daily rate] may be still strong on peak nights and definitely the knockout stage matches, but overall RevPAR may not be as expected earlier on,” Gomes said. 

The 54-room boutique hotel The Inn at Meadowbrook just outside of Kansas City, one of the 11 U.S. host cities, hasn’t experienced any falloff in expected demand, Director of Sales and Marketing Rod Kopischke said.

But booking at the Station House Inn in Lake Tahoe, California, isn’t where Play Park Hospitality General Manager Brandon Crudup said he expected it to be.

Even though Lake Tahoe isn’t a host city, the Station House Inn was expecting to see an increase in demand from World Cup fans traveling between San Francisco and Los Angeles. 

“Looking at our 90-day booking window, demand has been softer than expected overall,” Crudup said. “Compared to last year, bookings are down roughly 65%, and we haven’t seen meaningful pickup tied to the World Cup.”

Looking Ahead

At this point, the hospitality industry is no longer expecting an unprecedented surge in bookings for the World Cup, Gomes said. But the tournament will still be a high-impact event for the industry, especially around the key match dates.

“To achieve the earlier aggressive expectations, the hotels would need stronger international visitation with longer lengths of stay,” Gomes said. “Whether these two factors change in favor of the hotel industry in the next few weeks remains a huge unknown.”

The industry expects bookings to accelerate as the match schedule for later rounds of the tournament is set and fans find out where their teams will play, American Hotel and Lodging Association President and CEO Rosanna Maietta said.

Due to the expanded pool of qualifying teams, many of June’s initial matches won’t appeal to the broadest fanbases. But once the tournament gets down to the final 16 teams, Freitag said hotel demand will peak.

Sova Hotel in Dallas received several cancellations in recent weeks, but co-founder Blake Shirk said he believes they were tied to World Cup tickets selling for more than $1K on secondary markets. 

In Lake Tahoe, Station House Inn has lowered rates and removed length-of-stay minimums to capture more short-term demand.

“While we haven’t seen a World Cup-driven surge yet, we’re still optimistic that bookings could pick up closer to arrival dates as plans solidify,” Crudup said. 

If they haven’t done so already, it’s time for hoteliers to rightsize their expectations and strategies for the World Cup, industry analysts said.

“The window for windfall pricing on guaranteed sellouts has likely passed,” Bhakta said. “Hotels are aligning their strategies with typical peak summer demand patterns rather than treating the tournament as a singular high-revenue event, and that's the right call.”