Against a backdrop of economic uncertainty, geopolitical tensions and a sustained ‘Trump Slump’ of declining international visitation, the substantial World Cup bump U.S. hotels were promised may not materialise, according to CoStar, the industry’s leading benchmarking and analytics firm.
Key Facts
- “We are seeing much more muted optimism about the hotel results” ahead of the World Cup, Jan Freitag, national director of hospitality market analytics at CoStar, the industry benchmarking and analytics firm, posted Thursday on LinkedIn with a link to a status report from his firm.
- Lodging demand in the U.S. during the tournament is expected to boost revenue per available room (RevPAR) nationally by only 1.2% in June and 1.5% in July, Chantal Wu, a senior director of hospitality market analytics at CoStar, told Forbes.
- That’s a noticeable downgrade from less than a month ago, when CoStar and Tourism Economics forecasted a still-disappointing 1.7% year-over-year lift in RevPAR for June and July—only a quarter of the boost received when the U.S. hosted the World Cup in 1994.
- “We are much less bullish about World Cup than we were three months ago,” Harry Carr, Pivot Hotels & Resorts’ senior vice president of commercial optimization, told CoStar after FIFA sent back some of the company’s room-block holds without a single reservation having been made for the tournament.
- The demand for reserved room blocks has been “very lackluster” for HRI Lodging’s Bay Area hotels, Lior Sekler, the company’s chief commercial officer told CoStar, noting only 15% of FIFA’s reserved rooms were picked up.
Why World Cup Hotel Bookings Might Be Stronger In July
In his LinkedIn post, Freitag noted soft hotel bookings for June, but held out hope “we’re going to see this tale of two World Cups, that what happens in June is underwhelming and what happens in July is on par or better.” The group stage of the World Cup, which runs from June 11 to June 27, is lower stakes and includes a dozen national teams that will not advance. Historically, enthusiasm builds as the tournament enters the knockout stage, which begins on June 28. When their teams advance in the tournament, hordes of ticketless fans typically flock to World Cup host cities for outdoor fan festivals and the accompanying celebratory atmosphere. But while fan festivals have been a huge component of previous World Cups, some U.S. host cities are scaling back or eliminating their fan fests this time around. New York and New Jersey eliminated its fan fest in Jersey City, New Jersey, even after promoting the event would be open every day of the tournament, PBS reported. “I would be surprised if there’s a big influx of international fans at the last minute this time,” Alan Fyall, professor at the University of Central Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management, told Forbes earlier this month. “It’s not so easy to get here at the last minute, the way everything is now.”
Why Is Inbound International Visitation Down In The U.s.?
At the 2026 Americas Lodging Investment Summit in January, U.S. Travel Association CEO Geoff Freeman noted the U.S. was “the only major nation in the world to see a decline in travel” in 2025 and questioned whether the Trump administration would continue to pursue tourism-suppressing policies like the $250 visa integrity fee and a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol proposal requiring some international travelers to provide their social media histories. At the same conference, Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano wondered aloud if the U.S. wasn’t making the world welcome, telling conference-goers, “When you have visitors asking legitimate questions about what their experience will be coming through customs and immigration … those are big impediments to optimizing what should be a home run opportunity for the lodging industry.”
What We Don’t Know
Whether international soccer fans will come to the U.S. in the numbers necessary to impact the U.S. economy. A FIFA analysis last year projected the World Cup would drive $30.5 billion in economic output and create 185,000 jobs in the U.S. this year. But that figure assumed millions of international tourists would flock to the tournament. FIFA president Gianni Infantino has repeatedly stated that World Cup tickets sold out quickly, yet some U.S. fans received emails in February offering a 48-hour window to purchase tickets. “They’re selling primarily to domestic customers,” Fyall told Forbes, adding, “There is a big question about international visitors.” The State Department created a priority system for fast-tracking visa applications for soccer fans with tickets, but that leaves a potentially enormous number of would-be international visitors shut out by the notoriously burdensome U.S. visa application process. Tourism officials from three World Cup host cities told Forbes that FIFA advised them to expect a 50/50 split between domestic and international visitors. The split is important to hotels “because international travelers spend more,” Wu told Forbes. “They tend to stay longer and they try different services within the hotel. They tend to use more amenities, and then they have a larger hotel bill at the end of their stay. They also typically contribute more to the local economy, because they have to go out and eat.”
Which U.S. World Cup Host Cities Will Be Winners And Losers?
CoStar expects 10 of the 11 U.S. host markets to see growth during the tournament, Wu told Forbes. “For some of the larger international gateway markets—Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami and New York—we’re projecting double-digit RevPAR growth for both June and July,” she said. “The only market that I’m seeing a decline in both months is Kansas City,” Wu said, noting the Midwestern city is not an international gateway market. “People coming from abroad have to transfer a couple times to get to Kansas City, so we are actually projecting a slight RevPAR decline of 0.1% for June and a larger decline of 6.3% for July.”
This article was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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