To measure the impact of the FIFA World Cup in eleven US cities, we compare occupancy rates, ADR, RevPAR, and rooms revenue during the weeks of World Cup matches to the same weeks in 2025, as adjusted for the expected change in these variables in the absence of the FIFA events.

We demonstrate a wide variance in the impact in host cities and discuss the underlying factors that influence these differences.

Introduction

The 2026 FIFA World Cup represents one of the largest and most geographically concentrated demand events in the history of U.S. hospitality, with matches held in eleven American cities over a roughly six-week span.

Events of this scale offer a valuable, if infrequent, opportunity to study how a hotel market absorbs a sudden, temporary surge in demand, and to understand why some markets capture outsized rates and occupancy gains while others see comparatively modest impact.
 
Methodology

For each of the eleven host cities, we compare actual occupancy, average daily room rates (“ADR”), revenue per available room (“RevPAR”), and rooms revenue during the weeks in which World Cup matches were played against a counterfactual scenario, our estimate of what these metrics would have been in 2026 had the World Cup not occurred. Constructing this baseline is essential to isolating the World Cup's effect from other forces already at work in each market.

Simply comparing 2026 match-week performance to the same weeks in 2025 would conflate the tournament's impact with whatever growth or decline the market was already experiencing. Our counterfactual approach adjusts 2025’s performance for each market's underlying trend before making that comparison, so that the resulting difference reflects the World Cup's effect.

Applying this approach across all eleven markets reveals a wide variance in impact. Some cities saw substantial gains in occupancy and ADR during match weeks, while others experienced far more limited effects, and in certain cases little effect at all.

The remainder of this report presents those results city by city and examines the underlying factors: market size and performance, the number of matches hosted, venue location, and the size of each team's traveling fan base. These factors help explain why the tournament's impact differed so markedly from one host city to the next.

The analysis period for each city runs from three days before its first match to three days after its last. Since cities hosted multiple matches in succession, these three-day windows overlap.

Market Definitions

For each of the eleven markets, we compiled data on available room night supply, room night demand, and rooms revenue relying on CoStar data. Market boundaries were drawn to capture both hotels directly affected by fan visitation and hotels indirectly affected through the compression of rate and occupancy that displaces demand outward to surrounding properties.

Our experience analyzing the lodging impacts of major events has shown that these effects are wide-ranging.^[1] Compression of occupancy and ADR is greatest at hotels closest to the event site and diminishes with distance. As nearby hotels fill and their rates rise, demand is displaced to more distant properties, producing a secondary compression effect that also tapers off with distance from the venue.

In practice, we have found that the impact summed across submarkets is roughly equivalent to the impact that would be found across the entire lodging market. Because of this, we defined our study markets broadly enough to capture the full extent of the compression effect rather than limiting the analysis to hotels in the immediate vicinity of each venue.

For seven of the markets (Kansas City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Atlanta), we relied on the respective CoStar-defined hospitality markets, which we judged to adequately capture the affected hotel supply. In the remaining four markets (New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Miami), the CoStar market definitions did not adequately reflect the full range of hotels subject to direct and indirect impacts, so we drew custom boundaries around the hotels affected by World Cup matches:

• San Francisco — Santa Clara (the location of the matches), San Jose, San Francisco, and the hotels in between along the peninsula.
• New York — all five New York City boroughs plus Newark.
• Boston — hotels along the I-95 corridor, including Providence and Foxborough, in addition to Boston itself.
• Miami — Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Key Biscayne, Hialeah, and Hollywood.

Defining the precise boundary of compression in any market involves an element of judgment. We believe the market definitions above provide an accurate representation of the hotels directly and indirectly affected by World Cup matches in each city.

Estimating the Counterfactual Scenario

To construct the counterfactual scenario for each market, we first examined occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR performance from January through May of 2025 and 2026, and calculated the year-over-year rate of change, whether growth or decline, in each metric over that period.

We then applied this year-to-date growth rate to each market's actual 2025 performance during the World Cup match weeks. This produced an adjusted 2025 baseline that represents our estimate of how each market would have performed in 2026 absent the World Cup.

We then compared this adjusted baseline to each market's actual 2026 performance during the corresponding match weeks. The difference between the two, adjusted (counterfactual) performance versus actual performance, represents our estimate of the World Cup's impact in each market.

Results

The figure below shows the estimated change in occupancy rates, ADR, and RevPAR during the roughly six-week periods of World Cup matches.

Estimated Changes in Occupancy Rate, ADR and RevPAR

Sources: CoStar data and HVS Analysis

The analysis reveals a consistent pattern across nearly every host city: occupancy softened during World Cup match weeks relative to the counterfactual baseline, while ADR rose sharply enough to produce a RevPAR gain in all eleven markets. This pattern reflects the dynamic pricing practices hotels employed in anticipation of World Cup demand, practices that in most markets generated significant rate gains but also destroyed a meaningful share of the demand the market would otherwise have hosted.

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[1] HVS, ""How Convention Centers Change Hotel Markets." Retrieved June 1, 2026,

Thomas Hazinski leads the HVS Convention, Sports & Entertainment Facilities Consulting practice (HVS CSE), which he founded in 2001. Tom advises state and local governments and private entities on the development of convention centers, sports facilities, performing arts centers, and many other types of public assembly facilities. HVS CSE provides feasibility studies, operational analysis, economic and fiscal impact analyses, and tax projections that support the issuance of public debt. Tom earned an advanced degree in Public Policy from the University of Chicago, where he has recently served as an adjunct professor, teaching a graduate level course in state and local finance. With seven years of governmental experience and over 25 years of consulting experience, he is a widely published industry leader. Tom has work on over 600 studies of public assembly facilities and mixed-use developments in nearly every state in the US. His extensive international experience includes hospitality and mixed-use projects in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Tom is also a leading expert on public/private partnerships in hotel development. Contact Tom at thazinski@hvs.com