For hotel owners, the World Cup wasn’t really ever about filling rooms. It was figuring out how much guests would pay for them.
The 39-day tournament delivered a sharp increase in hotel rates across the 11 U.S. markets, even as occupancy remained flat or even declined in some cities.
That wasn’t necessarily a sign of weak demand. It was a sign that the equation had changed. Owners initially hoped to capture both occupancy and rate, but as the event drew closer, pricing became the more important lever. In an industry already facing elevated labor and operating costs, that could lead to greater profits.
The fact that the World Cup was more an ADR play than an occupancy play is an important distinction and could serve to be the go-to model for hotel owners in the future. That’s the playbook Los Angeles hotel owners will take into the 2028 Olympics.
1. Stop Chasing Occupancy. Chase Profitable ADR.
The narrative around the World Cup and hotel demand was constantly shifting over the past few years, according to Jan Freitag, national director of hospitality analytics for CoStar.
“A lot of people went from ‘(It’s) 104 Super Bowls and everybody’s coming,’ to, ‘Oh no, the occupancy (numbers) are lower, now nobody’s coming,’” he said. “We were firmly in the middle of saying, ‘No, no, that’s not true. And that’s not true either, because it’s going to be an ADR event.’”
When customers did eventually book hotels, occupancy was much lower than originally projected. But owners still found a way to capture the event’s economic benefit.
HVS recently published its analysis of “How the 2026 FIFA World Cup Changed U.S. Hotel Markets”, which measured the impact of the event in the 11 U.S. host markets by comparing occupancy, ADR and RevPAR during the weeks of World Cup matches compared to the same weeks in 2025. The study found that eight of the 11 markets had flat or negative estimated occupancy compared with the year before. Los Angeles had the strongest occupancy performance, with an estimated 1% year-over-year gain. https://www.hvs.com/article/10529-how-the-2026-fifa-world-cup-changed-us-hotel-markets
At the same time, the study said the World Cup produced an estimated $680 million in incremental rooms revenue overall. The New York market accounted for almost half of that total at $339.2 million, with Los Angeles ($77.2 million), Boston ($69.3 million) and Dallas ($60.8 million) forming the next tier. In terms of RevPAR percent change during match weeks, Kansas City was the biggest winner with a 43.1% increase, followed by Dallas (+30.1%), New York (+23.5%), Houston (+22.2%) and Boston (+22%).
“Some owners have always thought that a good hotel is a full hotel, and that’s wrong. A good hotel is a profitable hotel,” Freitag said.
2. Don’t Panic When the Rooms Aren’t Booked Six Months Out
A current reality for hotel owners is that the booking window is becoming increasingly shorter for customers, but that doesn’t mean they won’t still eventually show up.
In the run-up to the World Cup, occupancy projections in many host markets were running below not only the vastly overhyped initial projections but also the previous year.
Freitag said looking back, the lower-than-projected occupancy numbers should have been caveated a lot more. He said major media outlets looked at projected World Cup occupancy not being as strong as the year before and took it to mean that a lot of fans weren’t coming.
“It just meant people weren’t booking,” he said, noting even his surprise at that fact because the opening round matchups were clearly communicated months in advance. But fans waited, with airfare uncertainty and geopolitical events among the factors that gave travelers additional reasons to hold off.
That has an important lesson for owners preparing for future megaevents. Forward occupancy may be a poor measure of eventual demand, and shouldn’t automatically be a reason to discount. Cutting rates could mean giving away the very pricing power that makes the event valuable.
3. Higher Rates Can Displace Lower-Value Demand
The World Cup also showed that hotel owners shouldn’t think of event-driven demand as simply more people coming to town. In some markets, the bigger opportunity was charging a much higher price for existing room inventory and taking advantage of the market compression created by the event. That also meant that the World Cup was displacing some traditional demand.
Miami’s performance offered an example. Ryan Meliker, president and co-founder of Lodging Analytics Research & Consulting (LARC), noted that ADR jumped roughly 24%
during what is normally a lower-demand period, even as occupancy declined. Rather than disappearing altogether, some of that demand could shift to other dates.
“The people that go to Miami during this period go there because it’s not as expensive as the rest of the year,” he said. “It’s just more of a shift. What I would expect over 12 months is that it won’t translate into a decline in occupancy. It just moves a lot of the travel outside of those six weeks.”
June hotel RevPAR grew 8.4% on a 6.7% ADR increase, according to CoStar. While the World Cup was certainly a big reason for that increase, Isaac Collazo, senior director of analytics at STR (a division of CoStar), noted that non-World Cup markets also saw a 6.8% RevPAR jump in June. Collazo said analysts’ earlier demand-displacement projections proved true: traditional group and leisure travelers avoided the higher-priced World Cup cities and shifted their travel elsewhere.
4. International Inbound Didn’t Save the Day.
The World Cup was supposed to be the ultimate test of international demand for U.S. hotels. If any event could bring foreign travelers to the country in large numbers, this was it. Yet international inbound arrivals were essentially flat year over year during the tournament, according to CoStar.
That surprised Freitag, even after acknowledging visa challenges and administration rhetoric: “I just expected it to be a little bit stronger.”
The implication isn’t that international travelers didn’t come. They clearly did. But the influx didn’t produce the enormous demand many had expected. For some hotel owners, the expected longer stays from international guests instead gave way to big surges around match days followed by steep declines.
That lack of international influx made success stories like Kansas City even more interesting to Meliker.
“That speaks volumes to how many U.S. citizens chose to stay domestically and visit host cities for the World Cup… it wasn’t international demand going to Kansas City,” he said.
That suggests hotel owners shouldn't assume that international visitors have to provide the bulk of incremental demand for a megaevent to create substantial pricing power. Domestic travelers can generate considerable demand on their own.
5. The Olympics Will Test the World Cup Pricing Lessons
The 2028 Los Angeles Olympics will give hotel owners their next major test of whether the World Cup's rate-driven playbook can work in a different kind of megaevent. Unlike the
World Cup, which spread matches across the U.S., the Olympics will concentrate events across Southern California, potentially encouraging visitors to stay longer and attend multiple events. That could give LA-area hotels an opportunity to capture both occupancy and ADR gains, but only if owners resist the temptation to sacrifice rate to fill rooms.
Meliker expects the Olympics to generate a significant lift for the LA hotel market, and he believes the geographic concentration of the Games could also produce better occupancy than the World Cup, while still giving owners an opportunity to push rate.
“The Olympics should be a huge win for hotel performance across the LA market,” he said. “Frankly, given the wage increases in LA, hoteliers have to be more aggressive in pushing pricing.”
Zach Demuth, head of strategic growth & asset management for Santa Monica, California-based Eight Form, said running 90%-plus occupancy while sacrificing rate doesn’t make sense in today’s environment, particularly as labor costs rise and margins are already squeezed.
“Hotel owners are realizing that trading occupancy for rate, particularly for events, is a huge winning strategy,” he said.
The real test for Los Angeles won't be whether the Olympics fill its hotels. It will be whether hotel owners can turn the world's attention on the city into pricing power that translates into stronger hotel economics.