NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Rate growth is the name of the game, and it is why U.S. hoteliers are seeing a rosier picture as they look to the second half of 2026.
During the opening session of the 2026 Hotel Data Conference, attendees learned that CoStar and Tourism Economics revised their full-year 2026 and 2027 forecast upward.
The U.S. hotel industry is forecast to end the year at 4.4% revenue per available room growth, said Amanda Hite, president of STR, CoStar's hospitality analytics division. The forecast for demand has been spot on so far, she said, but average daily rate growth has been stronger than expected and should reach 3.1% by the end of the year.
STR and Tourism Economics also revised up the 2027 forecast, based on the increased strength moving into the next year, she said.
The demand generated by the FIFA World Cup matches in June and July created “incredible performance,” Hite said. ADR surpassed expectations in June and July. July, in particular, created “really positive” momentum.
Even so, "this is not just about World Cup,” she said.
There has been strength across all U.S. hotel markets this year, with demand and ADR growth beyond World Cup host cities, setting up the hotel industry for continued growth through the rest of the year into 2027, she said. From a demand perspective, there shouldn’t be any major offsets next year from World Cup-related performance.
There’s strength in corporate demand and group travel this year, and that is expected to carry over into next year, as well.
“As we look at the 2027 RevPAR growth, the nice thing that we see across each metric — ADR, occupancy and RevPAR — solid gains for each chain-scale segment,” she said. “And what’s noticeable is that we don’t see much of that K-shape anymore.”
There is supply growth in the upper-midscale and upscale hotel segments that is affecting occupancy gains, resulting in more muted RevPAR growth for those two chain-scale segments, she said. However, across the board, supply growth for the industry is below 1% in aggregate.
Gross operating profits are rising, and STR expects 2026 GOP to be up 4%, Hite said.
“Starting in March, our revenue growth has outpaced our expense growth,” she said. “We have not seen that for over a year.”
Every month, expense growth had been rising faster than revenue gains, so it seems the industry has reached its inflection point, Hite said. That should remain the case for the rest of the year.
When looking at GOP per available room, however, when indexed to inflation, it’s still off of 2019 and declining, she said. GOP is growing, but margins are going to go down this year compared to last year.
“While there’s a lot of energy and momentum, there’s also still lots of pressures,” she said.
The good news is that travel is still there, Hite said. Americans are traveling more domestically, and there should be momentum from the World Cup to increase international inbound demand.
Consumer sentiment and inflation
Citing economist Adam Smith and his “invisible hand” quote, Tourism Economics President Adam Sacks said it has been his job to understand the invisible things that shape the economy. The first is the “insidious force” on inflation pulling everyone backward.
“If you look at the data, of course, inflation is still a problem,” he said. “We are still talking about it because it is still real.”
Core personal consumption expenditures, not including energy or food prices, are still above 3% year over year, even as the housing component becomes less important, he said. Goods and services have become more expensive, and that’s without looking at gas prices, which are up 45% since the start of 2026. All of this affects earnings, which is why inflation matters.
The U.S. had a great run from 2023 until early 2026 when earnings grew faster than inflation, but over the early part of this year, inflation grew faster, Sacks said. The June data shows they matched each other, but it’s leaving a mark, particularly on how people feel.
“Consumer sentiment has fallen precipitously over the last six months,” he said. “We've seen a rebound, so consumer sentiment is down, but it's not out.”
Feelings don’t 100% translate into spending, as the way people feel and how they behave have “completely diverged” and become almost fully untethered from one another, he said.
“In fact, if you look at the latest data, what's going on with real consumption compared to what's going on with sentiment? These things have almost no relationship anymore, as people continue to spend regardless of how miserable they are,” he said.
Consumer spending of late has been outpacing the rate of growth of income, and this means Americans are drawing down on their savings, Sacks said. That means that, for the near term, consumer spending will take a breather.
“You're almost certainly going to see consumers need to replenish those savings,” he said. “It's an unsustainable drawdown, given what we're seeing in inflation relative to income and what we're seeing in terms of spending relative to earnings.”
The good news is that cooling inflation is on the horizon, Sacks aid. It won’t be this month or even this year, but it should come down in 2027. The factors driving inflation will start to roll over next year, particularly the effects of the tariffs as they won’t have a year-over-year inflationary effect. Energy costs are also projected to come down.
That means the U.S. Federal Reserve is on course to hold interest rates at their current levels through the rest of the year and a good part of 2027 as well, he said.
The "insatiable appetite" for travel will continue to drive U.S. consumers to take leisure trips, Sacks said. They continue to prioritize travel over other types of spending, especially compared to durable goods, and they would cut other things from their budgets before they cut travel.
104 Super Bowls?
When FIFA President Gianni Infantino tried to explain the economic impact the World Cup matches would have on the U.S., he said it would be like having 104 Super Bowls. Jan Freitag, national director of hospitality analytics at CoStar Group, said that claim now needs a review.
Hotel occupancy on the books for World Cup match days in match markets in the months before was showing lower compared to the same time last year, and when STR published that information, “all hell broke loose,” Freitag said. Different media publications ran with the low occupancy numbers, but that wasn’t the whole story.
“I was like room rates are going to be robust, but it’s not going to be 104 Super Bowls, which is why I wasn’t invited to the final,” he said.
But then the days of the opening matches saw hotel occupancy levels jump about 20 percentage points in the week leading up to the matches, Freitag said. Everyone thought that people buying their match tickets a year out would buy their plane ticket six months out and then book their hotel rooms three months out.
“That was completely and utterly incorrect,” he said. “The booking window for this event really was not much different from any other leisure event.”
The World Cup matches were expected to be a hotel ADR event, and that’s how they played out, Freitag said. With a few exceptions, many host markets saw occupancies below 2025 because many corporate groups wanted to avoid the matches for their meetings and conferences.
“We clearly saw an impact that people traded, and Chicago, I think was the beneficiary on the other side,” he said.
There was a deceleration in some host markets from group demand and corporate America, but that was made up for in many instances with higher ADR growth, leading to stealthy RevPAR growth, Freitag said. That’s also why next year hotels in these markets will have tougher year-over-year comparisons once they reach June and July.
To fully evaluate the 104 Super Bowls claim, CoStar hospitality analysts looked at room revenue generation for Super Bowl week, which includes the four days before Super Bowl Sunday. They examined the last three regular Super Bowls, excluding the one in Las Vegas because of gambling and other factors.
They found the Super Bowl weeks generated $108 million to $110 million in room revenue over that four-day period, Freitag said. Multiplied by 104, that amounts to $11.3 billion.
The total room revenue generated for the relevant period of time for each of the 104 matches was $3.9 billion.
“After review, the 104 FIFA matches did not generate 104 Super Bowls,” he said. “Therefore, the promise was not kept. Therefore, red card for FIFA.”