Goodbye FIFA, hello conventions: US hotels pivot from group play to group demand as fall nears

July hotel performance in the U.S. hit a high note, but it's not one the industry will necessarily sustain.

And that's both OK and expected, according to the hosts of "Tell Me More: A Hospitality Data Podcast." The World Cup-related frenzy of midsummer likely will give way to a more normalized fall season.

July reflected the final half of the 2026 FIFA World Cup tournaments, which contributed to "another strong month," said STR senior director of analytics Isaac Collazo.

But the real highlight in July was the strength of hotel performance in cities that didn't host a single World Cup match, said Jan Freitag, CoStar national director of hospitality analytics.

While host markets such as Kansas City and New York City notched predictably great hotel performance around the World Cup, other standout cities were more unexpected.

"RevPAR for July in Chicago was plus-16, in Detroit it was plus-17, in San Diego, plus-11," Freitag said.

Why so strong? Because groups that may otherwise have held events in cities like Boston or Philadelphia chose Chicago this summer to avoid World Cup traffic.

The bottom line is that this summer's World Cup didn't prevent organizations and companies from holding events — it simply moved that demand to other places, Collazo and Freitag said.

Also in this episode

• July represented the second straight month of U.S. hotel average daily rate growth above inflation, clocking in at 8.2% growth over July 2025.

• ADR growth rate is slowly declining in August, while demand growth rate is "doing OK," Collazo said.

• Freitag and Collazo dissect annualized group demand trends, showing the trend of relatively static group demand over the years compared to rapidly rising group ADR.