The Reality Check We Called: What the World Cup Actually Paid, the Paris Warning, and What It Means for Super Bowl LXI and LA28

By Erik Ransdell and Mike Annunziata

Strands Realty Group

August 2026

In March, in this newsletter, we called the World Cup the largest demand event in North American hotel history. By May we had corrected ourselves, writing that roughly 80% of properties in U.S. host markets were pacing below earlier forecasts, that FIFA room block releases had flooded specific weeks with inventory, and that revenue management plans built on the December booking surge needed revisiting.

The tournament ended July 19. The data is in, and the May revision held. Host markets produced large RevPAR gains, but they produced them almost entirely through rate, they lost room nights while the rest of the country gained them, and the benefit to the owners who actually collect the money was far smaller than the headlines imply.

Being right about six weeks of soccer is worth little on its own. What it is worth is a method, and the method matters now because Southern California has two more mega-events coming. Super Bowl LXI arrives at SoFi Stadium in February 2027, a single day of extreme compression. The Olympics arrive in July 2028, a seventeen-day Games concentrated almost entirely in this region rather than spread across sixteen host cities. Owners here are already being shown pro formas with event premiums in them.

The Tournament Paid in Rate, and It Paid Less Than Anyone Expected

Start with the number everyone will quote. Didio Pequeno, CoStar's director of hospitality market analytics for the Northeast and Midwest, told Hotel Dive that hotels in U.S. host cities averaged RevPAR gains well above 20% for June 11 to 27, against a forecast of nearly 13%.

Now the number that matters to an owner. Pebblebrook Hotel Trust, which owns 43 hotels and resorts including seven in San Francisco and a substantial Los Angeles portfolio, told investors on July 30 that the World Cup delivered between $1.5 and $2.5 million in incremental room revenue, roughly 60 to 100 basis points of RevPAR for the quarter. The net benefit to hotel EBITDA was $500,000 to $1 million. Chairman and Chief Executive Jon Bortz called it "a relatively minor benefit overall, but a benefit nonetheless." At Marriott, U.S. and Canada RevPAR rose 5.0% in the quarter. Chief Executive Anthony Capuano told analysts that excluding the World Cup, the increase was 4%.

A tournament of this scale moved a large, well-run portfolio by about one point of RevPAR. The explanation is displacement, and Pebblebrook was direct about it. Incremental World Cup demand, the company said, was largely offset by corporate group and transient business that stayed away because of higher rates and booking restrictions, and the net room benefit came primarily from rate rather than occupancy. Urban banquet and catering revenue fell approximately 20%.

The market data confirms it at scale. According to STR, hotel demand in host markets fell 1.1% from June 11 through June 27 while demand across the rest of the country rose 2.3%. In the week of June 21 to 27, luxury and upper-upscale group demand fell 20.5% in host markets and rose 9% at comparable properties in the non-host top 25. Pequeno had framed it this way from the start, telling Hotel Dive the rate increases spoke "to the fact that the World Cup traveler is a traveler that's willing to pay more." He added: "And they've displaced American travelers who would have paid less to go to the same markets this summer."

Two markets show the cost. Seattle averaged 73.9% occupancy across the four weeks it hosted matches, 6.9 percentage points below 2025. Atlanta hosted a sold-out semifinal on July 15 and sold roughly 61,000 fewer room nights than the same week a year earlier, almost entirely on a 41.4% decline in group demand.

The displacement was a calendar shift, not destruction, and that deserves saying. Seattle occupancy rebounded to 90.5% the first full week after the tournament, up 3.3 percentage points, with luxury and upper-upscale group demand up 41.5%. Full-year forecasts were revised up, not down. CoStar and Tourism Economics now project 2026 U.S. RevPAR growth of 2.8%, against 0.6% in January.

California Split Two Ways, and Los Angeles Is the Lesson

CoStar identified San Francisco as the strongest performer among the eleven U.S. host markets over the tournament's first two weeks. In the week of June 14 to 20 the market led every top-25 market in all three key metrics, with occupancy up 17.6% to 84.8%, ADR up 53.5% to $301.35, and RevPAR up 80.5% to $255.45. For June overall, San Francisco/San Mateo led all top-25 markets in occupancy and RevPAR growth, with RevPAR up 31.2% to $212.87. It did not lead every week, and Miami took the top ADR and RevPAR gains the following week.

Understand what produced those numbers before underwriting off them. That week stacked two World Cup matches at Levi's Stadium, the Databricks Data and AI Summit with more than 30,000 expected attendees, and a badly depressed 2025 comparison. Pequeno wrote that the city "had an easy year-over-year comparison, as hotel performance in the prior year was relatively weak."

What San Francisco really demonstrates is preparation. Alex Bastian, president and chief executive of the Hotel Council of San Francisco, told KQED before the tournament that "we adopted more conservative budgeting and forecasting strategies." A week in, he told NBC Bay Area: "We have a great convention calendar for the month of June, and because we were prepared, we're doing much better compared to our colleagues across the country." The market that assumed less and diversified its June demand base outperformed.

Los Angeles went the other way, at least at first. In a May 4 report, the American Hotel and Lodging Association found nearly 65 to 70% of Los Angeles respondents reporting booking pace below expectations, often at or behind a typical summer. Roughly half cited visa barriers, high labor costs and distance from venues. The Los Angeles Times, reading the full report, wrote that FIFA had booked thousands of Downtown rooms and then canceled them. FIFA responded that all releases followed contractually agreed timelines, standard practice for an event of that scale.

Then the market turned. By July the Times reported last-minute fans lifting occupancy and rates, with The Pierside in Santa Monica sold out and The Anthem Hotel in the stadium district holding remaining rooms above $500. Airport-area properties stayed soft. Pebblebrook's Los Angeles portfolio finished with RevPAR up 8.6% and hotel EBITDA up almost 14%, which co-president and chief financial officer Raymond Martz described as "following a similar path" to San Francisco, "but with less intensity."

The pattern matters more than the tally. Los Angeles built a rate expectation on a demand signal that proved partly artificial and was rescued late by travelers booking inside the window. Jan Freitag, national director of hospitality analytics at CoStar Group, named the surprise afterward: "I was super surprised that the booking window did not change as much as I thought it should." It worked out. It is not a plan.

One honest note for readers outside a host market. The fifteen non-host markets inside the top 25 posted a combined RevPAR increase of 12.9% in the week of June 21 to 27. But no California non-host market was among those CoStar singled out, and no published analysis isolates California's non-host markets during the tournament. We are not going to claim a San Diego or Orange County spillover the data does not show.

Paris Already Ran This Experiment

The most useful data for anyone underwriting a Southern California event premium comes from Paris in 2024, and it cuts both ways.

Paris did extremely well during the Games. Samantha Mardkhah, STR's regional manager for Southern and Western Europe, reported ADR up 141% and RevPAR up 200% year over year during what CoStar termed the Olympic event period. The Paris Convention and Visitors Bureau reported inner-Paris occupancy of 84% from July 23 to August 6, up 10.1 percentage points versus 2023. Mardkhah noted the occupancy gain was smaller than London's, as expected "due to displaced 'normal' demand."

Those are the numbers that get quoted. Here is the one that does not. Paris hoteliers did not collect what they first asked. Data from Lighthouse, presented in a webinar summarized by Hospitality Net, shows advertised rates for the Olympic period peaking near 530 euros roughly 335 days out, declining from about 180 days out, and bottoming near 274 euros by the Games, a reduction of roughly 48% from peak ask. Lighthouse's Blake Reiter concluded that hoteliers priced far too high and learned that Paris has a price ceiling even during an Olympics, with mid-tier properties taking the steepest cuts. Part of the miscalculation was assuming an international surge that never fully arrived. Ville de Paris reported that 62% of the 9.5 million tickets sold went to French buyers, many needing no hotel room.

Then the year after. HVS research puts Paris at 78% occupancy for 2025, effectively equalling the 2018 peak, but average rate close to 350 euros, a 2% decline against 2024, which HVS called a recalibration following the Olympic pricing environment. RevPAR grew 3%, earned on occupancy rather than rate. Group business moved on its own schedule: ICCA data shows Paris hosting 124 internationally ranked association meetings in 2024, down from 156 the year prior and below the 237 recorded in 2019, recovering to 174 in 2025.

Now the California calendar. Super Bowl LXI will be played at SoFi Stadium on February 14, 2027, the ninth in the greater Los Angeles region. The LA28 Games run July 14 to 30, 2028. Deloitte Finance, in an analysis prepared at the request of Airbnb, projects average demand of roughly 388,000 people seeking accommodation each night across Los Angeles and Orange counties against total daily capacity near 396,000, with demand exceeding 400,000 on 13 of 19 competition days. Note the commissioning party, since the report's conclusion is that expanding short-term rental supply is worth several hundred million dollars.

That analysis may be directionally right. The Paris record says the question to interrogate is not whether demand exceeds supply. An event premium is a rate assumption, not a demand assumption. It has to be modeled net of the group and corporate business it displaces, and it has to carry a normalization year behind it. Any 2028 pro forma with an ADR spike, no group haircut and no year-after recalibration is carrying a number that Paris and this summer have both already tested.

The California Cost and Tax Picture Moved While Everyone Watched Soccer

Three developments this spring will affect more California owners than the tournament did.

Los Angeles delayed the Olympic Wage. The City Council voted 11 to 4 on May 19 and confirmed 11 to 3 on May 26, and Ordinance 188944 took effect June 29, so this is settled law. Hotel workers went to $25.00 an hour on July 1, rising to $28.50 in 2028 and $30.00 on January 1, 2030, with a health benefit payment of $4.25 an hour now and $6.00 next year. The delay followed a withdrawn November ballot measure to repeal the city's gross receipts tax, which AAHOA estimated would have cost the general fund roughly $740 million in year one. Rosanna Maietta of the American Hotel and Lodging Association said the council "took an important step," while noting Los Angeles "still remains an exceptionally challenging operating environment."

On taxes, Measure TT failed on June 2, losing 52.87 to 47.13%. The city transient occupancy tax holds at 14% rather than rising to 16. Measure TC passed with 57.67%, and it carries an operational consequence many owners have not registered: online travel companies must now collect and remit the tax on the full amount the customer pays, not just the amount reaching the hotel. Anyone with meaningful OTA distribution in Los Angeles should be checking what that does to their net.

One caution on the numbers about to circulate. Actual collections are barely starting to appear, and no host city has published July figures. Every World Cup revenue number currently in the press is a projection, most prepared in 2024, and several conflate total economic impact with money that reaches a treasury.

Where We Stand

At Strands Realty Group, we work exclusively with hotel owners, operators, and investors to advise on transactions, evaluate strategic options, and position assets for the best possible outcome.

The World Cup was not a demand event. It was a repricing event with a displacement cost attached, and the owners who came out ahead assumed less and kept their existing demand base intact. San Francisco budgeted conservatively and led the country. Los Angeles priced against a signal that proved partly artificial and got rescued late.

The same dynamic will govern Super Bowl LXI and LA28, with considerably more capital riding on the assumptions. Between now and July 2028, every Southern California owner will be handed projections built on event premiums. This summer and the 2024 Paris Games say the same three things about them: the rate you collect is smaller than the rate you first ask, the displaced business is real, and the year after matters.

On the transaction side, pricing is clearing for the right assets. We closed the Sheraton San Diego Mission Valley on June 9 at $45,250,000 across 260 keys, representing both sides of an Ashford disposition, and CoStar named it a top Q2 2026 sale deal in the San Diego market in its Power Broker Quarterly Deals awards.

If you own a hotel in California or Arizona, reply with the address and we will send you a value range within 48 hours. No listing agreement, no obligation, no pitch. Whether you are weighing an event-driven hold, a refinancing, or a sale, that decision is better made against a real number than a projection.

Thank you for your continued trust. We look forward to working with you through the rest of 2026.