Hotel occupancy fell year-on-year across most of the tournament's host cities during the first half of the competition, according to industry data published on 10 July and reported by the International Business Times. Kansas City ran 24% below the same period last year, Vancouver 20.9%, Seattle 15%, Toronto 12.4% and Atlanta 12% 1, with Guadalajara, Mexico City and Monterrey also down. Of the eleven American host cities, only San Francisco and Dallas posted net gains. New York went the other way entirely, clearing 90%.
The revenue column tells a flatly contradictory story, and the gap between the two is the whole mechanism. Revenue per available room rose around 26% on match days. That came from higher nightly rates, not from more rooms sold, and hotels then overcorrected hard: average daily rates swung from peaks of $3,882 down to lows near $370 2. Rooms that sold, sold dear. A great many did not sell at all, because the visitors who normally fill a city in July avoided one that had spent two years announcing it would be full.
Two limits on reading too much into this. It is mid-tournament data covering roughly the first seventeen days, published nine days before the final, and it is not a reconciliation; full-run figures do not exist yet and could move either way, particularly for cities that hosted late knockout matches.
Vancouver and Toronto both file formal cost-benefit accounts in spring 2027. Vancouver's hosting bill has been put at between CAD (Canadian dollars) 532m and CAD 624m, and Toronto's at roughly CAD 380m . Those documents will be written by officials who sold the tournament to their councils partly on visitor spending, and they will have to account for a July when the hotels were quieter than the July before.
