Why The World Cup Won't Save U.S. Hotel Owners

Hotel operators in host cities for the FIFA World Cup this summer are expecting a big month when the soccer tournament comes to town.

But after a disappointing 2025 and with underwhelming projections for the year ahead, that monthlong burst of activity is unlikely to be enough to pull the hotel industry out of its slide.

Optimism around the World Cup has also been tempered by the international community’s aversion to travel to the U.S., capped off by talk of a possible boycott of the sprawling tournament.

“We’re not necessarily assuming best-case scenario where every single person who wants to come is going to come, because there’s these concerns about what’s going to happen at the border and getting the visas that you need and having seamless travel,” said Rod Clough, Americas president at HVS, a global hospitality consulting firm.

Hotel operators and analysts expected a rebound in 2025 that never materialized. Instead, the industry saw declines of 1.2% in occupancy and a 0.3% drop in revenue per available room compared to 2024, according to CoStar and Tourism Economics.

Projections for this year show more of the same, with metrics from HVS, STR and Lodging Analytics and Research forecasting occupancy in the low-60% range and RevPAR around $100, roughly in line with 2025. 

The average daily rate is expected to grow by a maximum of 2.1% compared to last year, a number that isn’t inspiring much enthusiasm around the industry, especially with inflation clocking in at 2.7% in December.

“When you think about a 2.1% ADR increase, if you were told you were getting a 2.1% cost-of-living increase next year, how would you feel about that?” Lodging Analytics Research & Consulting President and co-founder Ryan Meliker said.

Many hotel operators banked on a surge of international travelers in 2025, but instead, the number of people coming to the U.S. dropped for eight months in a row to 3.2 million people in December, according to the International Trade Administration.

Canadians have especially reported dissatisfaction with the U.S. and have avoided visiting in general. Clough doesn't expect that to change for the World Cup.

“If there’s a swath of people that aren’t coming from Canada, well, that same swath of people are certainly not going to come to a World Cup event,” Clough said.

The World Cup is set to come to 11 U.S. markets in June and is expected to bring with it 1.2 million international travelers who will boost the hospitality industry in the markets where games are played. 

But the tournament’s impact could be diluted by the international community’s view of the U.S., including an immigration crackdown that has drawn calls for a boycott of the World Cup from foreign leaders. 

The Trump administration’s restrictions on visas from 75 countries are also posing challenges for international travel. Although these restrictions don’t apply to tourist visas, they create uncertainty for some travelers who might not be as confident that changes in the regulations won’t come closer to game time, Meliker said.

“The Trump administration would do the country a world of service by coming out with a statement saying that they are welcoming to foreign travelers and they will not be adjusting tourist visa restrictions over the next six months,” Meliker said. 

The impact of the 39-day World Cup is also limited by time and geography.

“That is, of course, a one-time-in-nature advantage to those markets, so that's not something that's going to boost growth this year and then continue on into perpetuity,” Green Street senior equity associate Michael Herring said.

In general, Green Street and the REITs it tracks aren’t betting that international travel will come back strong in 2026. 

“Expecting that to occur at this point is difficult, given trends of last year [and] the continued kind of animosity ... that other countries might have towards the U.S. at the moment,” Herring said.

Unlike early last year, investors aren’t baking a return of international travel into their guidance, Herring said. 

Although the international travel picture remains dreary, dragging down the industry’s performance as a whole, there are a few bright spots.

The era of “revenge travel,” in which people took trips in droves after pandemic lockdowns ended, is over, slowing some segments of leisure travel. Group travel is expected to be the strongest segment of tourism by the end of the year, Meliker said.

By LARC’s December count, group travel bookings for 2026 were pacing 6% above the previous year. 

Business travel is also expected to tick up this year, according to a new survey from Morgan Stanley. The company polled 160 corporate travel managers and found that in the U.S., business travel budgets are expected to rise 4.9%. Europeans project a 5.8% increase.

Meliker said the shift to hybrid work has meant that workers are spending less time together day to day, but they still want to come together for events like conventions. 

Still, these slight improvements are up against a persistent maturity problem for loans on hotel properties.

The hotel CMBS market looks a bit healthier than it did a few months ago, at least on the surface. New data from Trepp indicates the delinquency rate for CMBS loans attached to hotels ticked down to below 5.6% in January after peaking around 7% in April. 

But even with that improvement, the hotel sector isn’t out of the woods. Lodging loans are still part of the maturity-related stress in the CMBS market. Hotels that refinanced during the low‑rate era are still facing the same math problem as everyone else: higher debt costs and uneven revenue growth.

“We're not seeing a lot of operators coming into this year saying, ‘Well, we're going to have 5% revenue growth this year,’” Clough said. “They're more like in that 1% to 2% revenue growth mindset.”