The 2026 World Cup has come to a close: Spain lifted the trophy, beating Argentina 1–0 in front of a sellout crowd. The stadiums delivered all tournament: 6.8 million fans across 104 matches, filling 99.7% of available seats. This was more than the 2018 and 2022 World Cups drew combined.
Meanwhile, an article in The Washington Post called short-term rentals “the World Cup’s quiet winner.” And Airbnb has called the tournament its biggest hosting event ever, outperforming the Paris Olympics.
But in fact, results were mixed. Some hosts had the summer of their lives. Others watched full stadiums with empty calendars. The difference usually came down to one thing: whether their pricing moved the way the tournament did.
Before kickoff, we published the STR World Cup Playbook to help property managers prepare. Now the tournament’s over, here’s what the data says, and how those calls held up.
You’ll also see how Guesty customers did along the way. Whereas booked rates around game days climbed more than 20% in 14 of the 16 host cities; Guesty customers took ADR up in every location.
Demand followed the matches
Matchday booking demand told the clearest story. Kansas City led all US host cities, with group-stage demand around game days up 38% year over year, reaching a peak of +83% on the day Argentina played there.
In Miami, occupancy and rate gains for Brazil vs. Scotland and Colombia vs. Portugal ran far ahead of the city’s quieter group-stage games. Where there were more traveling fans, or more interest in a particular game, the bookings followed.
Boston shows what a good tournament looked like in full. Short-term rental demand rose 9% over the first two weeks, occupancy grew 5 points to 81%, and nightly rates rose around 25%. All while the region absorbed 1,000 new listings.
The pattern held at the border too. The tournament didn’t lift US tourism overall: overseas arrivals fell 1.8% in June. But the fan nations did come in numbers.
UK arrivals rose nearly 17% with England and Scotland playing across Boston, Dallas, New Jersey, and Miami, Ecuador jumped more than 50% with matches in Philadelphia, Kansas City, and New Jersey, and Colombia was up 21%. The demand that showed up came from fans with fixtures, and it landed wherever their teams played.
The late surge showed up on schedule
As predicted in our playbook, the strongest booking waves came from decisions made close to match dates, not far in advance.
Airbnb saw its biggest weekly surge in searches for tournament-time stays just four days before the opening match, and said last-minute booking defined the event.
AirDNA saw the same thing: “for some of the later stage games, people waited until they knew who was going to be playing.” A quarter of all group-stage bookings landed within two weeks of the stay, 16% inside a week. The rest committed early: a larger share of bookings than last year came more than three months out, with fans either locking in long ahead or waiting on the bracket.
As the knockouts arrived, the windows kept shrinking. In Houston, 21% of bookings for its round-of-32 match came within a week of the stay, up from 16% for the same dates a year earlier.
Premiums climbed also: by early July, available rates for knockout dates in markets like Miami and New York were up more than 40% year over year, with booked rates about 20% ahead and rising.
Philadelphia showed what that compression looked like on the ground. When the round of 16 came to town, market rates ran 50% ahead of last year at 93% occupancy, while days without a game fell back to a 21% premium. Guesty customers there held on: July ADR stayed 45% ahead across the whole month, quiet days included.
And even then fans were still hedging: flight bookings from Argentina to Atlanta jumped 108% ahead of the semifinal while bookings to New York for the final lagged, because Argentina fans wouldn’t commit until they knew their team was in it.
Once the bracket cleared on July 15, they had to make their way to New Jersey. On the night of the final, demand in Jersey City and Newark, the towns nearest MetLife Stadium, ran 45% above last year, at booked rates up 39%, while New York listings filled to 83% occupancy.
Hosts on Guesty in New York stayed ahead of that curve the whole way, with ADR up 19% in June, then 25% across July, against a market climb that went from 15%–19%.
The demand map was wider than the stadium
Matches played in “Dallas” were actually played in Arlington, halfway to Fort Worth, and the booking map shows it. Fort Worth’s matchday STR demand rose 45% year over year, well ahead of Dallas at 27%.
Why the big difference? Growth measures each market against its own normal, and the two normals aren’t close: Dallas drew 27.7 million visitors in 2024, Fort Worth 11.5 million. The quieter market had more headroom, and with the stadium sitting between them, staying on the Fort Worth side cost fans nothing in access.
The pattern held all the way to the semifinal. When France played Spain in Arlington on July 14, booked rates rose 41% in Fort Worth, against 28% in Dallas itself.
The tournament’s biggest game made the same point at scale. The “New York” final was played at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, so properties close to the game were never in Manhattan.
Across the group stage, demand around game days in Jersey City and Newark ran 16% ahead of last year while New York itself was down 5%. New York keeping its short-term rental restrictions in place through the tournament only sent more of the demand across the river.
The Bay Area ran the same play with a twist. Levi’s Stadium sits in Santa Clara, surrounded by one of the deepest listing pools of any venue: over 3,200 within ten miles. This kept typical asking rates barely above a normal summer.
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But the bookings came: the greater San Jose market hit 93% occupancy for the June 13 opener, and occupancy in Oakland and San Jose/Palo Alto stayed above 90% through the June 18–20 window.
Guests didn’t stop at city limits, and neither did the revenue. Short-term rentals sit in the residential neighborhoods where hotels have little to no footprint, which put them in the ideal position to grab this extra demand.
Canada and Mexico had their own tournament
Mexico’s host cities were the tournament’s strongest story. Group-stage demand around game days ran 94% ahead of last year in Guadalajara and 68% in Monterrey.
Here, guests didn’t only come for the soccer. Outside match windows, demand was still up 46% in Guadalajara and 20% in Monterrey, as fans extended their stays well beyond the games.
The gains were across occupancy and revenue. Around group-stage game days, Guadalajara listings filled 75% of nights, up 26% on last year, at booked rates 79% higher.
Mexico City carried it deepest into the tournament. Booked rates around game days climbed 67% in the group stage and held around 50% ahead through the knockouts, with listings 86% full by the round of 16.
Canada was steadier. Toronto held occupancy close to flat around games while booked rates rose 23% across the group stage and 22% in the round of 32. Vancouver ran the rate-led version: booked rates up 45% around group-stage games while occupancy slipped 11% as new supply spread the demand thinner.
Who missed out
Not everyone caught the wave. Supply surged everywhere with US host cities adding more than 52,000 listings during the group stage, a 12% jump, many of them first-time hosts drawn in by Airbnb’s $750 new-listing bonus. This contributed to occupancy rates falling in 12 of the 16 host markets as the new listings outpaced the demand the tournament brought in.
Kansas City felt it hardest. Listings grew 43% vs last year, 13.6% of them created only for the World Cup. Group-stage demand rose a healthy 26% but available supply nights surged 53%, and occupancy rates fell 18%.
Some new hosts cut prices repeatedly and still finished with empty calendars, while nightly rates across the market ended up much closer to normal than many hosts anticipated.
Then the knockout draw paid the city back. When Argentina came to town for the July 11 quarterfinal, Kansas City hosts filled 75% of their calendars at booked rates 54% above last year, the strongest match-day rate premium of any quarterfinal, semifinal, or final. Even a flooded market pays out when the right fixture lands.
Guesty properties in Kansas City completely avoided the slump. Across the tournament they booked 60% more revenue per listing in its most oversupplied market.
Seattle cut the other way. Matchday STR demand there ran 2% below last year, but hosts who did land bookings collected a real premium: game-day booked rates ran 30% above last year across the group stage, and even non-game days ran 19% ahead. In the best-performing neighborhoods it went much further: booked rates in Westlake nearly doubled compared to 2025.
Los Angeles was quieter still: alongside San Francisco, it saw the weakest rate growth of any host market, with game-day rates up just 15% across the group stage. The same rule applied, though: hosts who priced smartly saw results, with Guesty properties growing ADR 31%, more than double the market.
Set-and-forget failed in both directions. Price too high and the calendar sat empty until a panicked markdown; too low and the premium went uncollected.
One Dallas host told the Financial Times her property earned 78% more during the tournament than the same weeks last year, which she credited to automated dynamic pricing. The operators who won treated pricing as a living system, leveraging tools like Guesty’s PriceOptimizer to adjust rates in real time.
The next big events are already on the calendar
Summer 2028 brings two huge opportunities, and they’ll behave very differently.
The European Football Champtionship 2028, across the UK and Ireland, will look a lot like the World Cup, on a slightly smaller scale. It’s a knockout bracket that reveals host cities only days ahead, fans who book the moment their team’s route is known, and quieter markets around the stadiums soaking up the spillover.
The LA Olympics will be different. Every venue and date is known years in advance and demand concentrates in one metro for weeks.
What’s more, the listing pool is deep in LA, and as Santa Clara just showed, deep supply can keep rates flat even when occupancy fills. For the Olympics, the strategy is about pricing each night of a long event on its own merits.
One more thing about that listing pool: it isn’t going away. Most of the tournament’s new listings are advertising availability well beyond the World Cup, and after the Paris Olympics, Airbnb kept more than half of its Games-specific sign-ups six months on.
The new listings that arrived for the soccer are staying around, which makes sharp pricing and tight operations a standing requirement. And that isn’t just for the once-a-generation events. A stadium concert tour, a Super Bowl week, a citywide convention: each one compresses demand onto a few dates the same way the World Cup did, just on a shorter clock.
Whatever the event, tools like Guesty’s revenue agents will help property managers maximize returns by adjusting rates as compression builds, without you watching the market around the clock. The hosts who won this summer planned ahead and were set up to react.
So what does the best setup look like? This summer wrote the checklist:
- Map the demand before it arrives. Know which fans, teams, or tour dates are coming to your market and what they need from a stay.
- Hold your nerve on price. The strongest bookings came late. A quiet calendar in June often just meant the wave was still forming.
- Price nights, not seasons. Game days, the days before/after a match, and quiet days behaved like three different markets. Rate plans should treat them that way.
- Watch supply as closely as demand. The markets that hurt were the ones where new listings outran the tournament. Price against live market data.
The next major spike may seem a way off but it will be here sooner than you imagine. Talk to a Guesty expert about getting your pricing event-ready.
