Experience-led travel is driving growth across the hotel industry and sports tourism is a huge component of that momentum — especially this year with North America hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
"Fans are not just booking for the soccer match itself or for the event itself," said Brandon Ehrhardt, vice president of marketing for travel partners and advertisers at Expedia Group, on a recent episode of the CoStar News Hotels podcast. "They're designing an entire trip around that, and that's been a significant change we've seen."
Expedia Group partnered with event intelligence platform PredictHQ to study intent to travel demand in the tournament's host markets between June and August of this year. The report found that total traveler spend across these markets will exceed $8.1 billion — a $750 million increase year over year, Ehrhardt said.
On the hotelier side of things, "the piece of that pie is about $4.8 billion," he said, adding that represents an 86% increase from last year.
"What this is going to do is create an opportunity for a lot of hoteliers who may not think of themselves as the ground zero for World Cup lodging accommodations to win additional traffic because we see people coming, staying for longer ... willing to explore outside of that city," Ehrhardt said.
The general trends in the Expedia report are longer length of stays and booking growth in "spillover markets" adjacent to host cities — with some markets seeing significant year-over-year growth.
"What we see rather consistently is if you look at the host city, outside of that, there is a ring of demand that hoteliers are capturing today," Ehrhardt said.
Beyond this year's World Cup, fan-driven experiences will continue to grow travel. Ehrhardt said throughout this summer, he's going to continue to keep an eye out for how length of stay continues to trend up, the growth of value-driven travel and continued booking increases in the nearby markets.
"Sports events travel is here to stay," he said. "I think we'll start talking a bit more about this being experience-led travel as we advance, and the window of opportunity for hoteliers will be before, during, and after the event — and it will encompass the areas that are around the host city as well, so there's definitely some things I have some eyes on."