This year’s World Cup has two clear winners: Spain and FIFA.
The jubilant Spanish team took turns hoisting the sculptural 18-karat-gold trophy after defeating Argentina to win it all last Sunday. Spain will defend its title on home turf as a host of the 2030 World Cup.
And FIFA, the global soccer governing body, appears likely to have amassed record revenues of billions of dollars from this year’s tournament, the largest and longest in the World Cup’s 96-year history.
But from a travel perspective, who else benefited from the tournament?
The three host nations — the United States, Canada and Mexico — all hoped to capitalize on what FIFA had pitched as an unprecedented tourism moment akin to 104 Super Bowls in a single month, with a global economic impact of $80 billion. In the tournament’s final days, Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s president, reiterated this grand sentiment in a statement calling the tournament the “most incredible event in human history.”
Did that tourism and economic windfall materialize? We rolled back the footage, reviewing hotel and short-term rental data, international visitor arrivals, flight bookings and spending data to create a list of winners and losers — and one draw.
WIN
Luxury Travel Companies
Ultra-high-net-worth travelers wanted in.
Private charter companies said that they were fielding many requests related to the World Cup, and noted increased overseas arrivals related to the matches. Rob Wiesenthal, the founder and chief executive of Blade, an aviation company best known for its helicopter service, said the tournament resulted in the “largest sustained volume that we’ve experienced due to a sporting event.”
The surge in private jet activity around the World Cup was pronounced, with 17 percent more flights to host cities during all stages of the tournament compared with last year, according to the business aviation tracker WINGX.
Luxury travel concierges, including Embark Beyond, said their clients often booked last minute, despite significantly higher prices for their tickets and hotel stays. Roman Chiporukha, a founder of Roman & Erica, said some clients based in the United States spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for tournament travel. Match tickets were often not even the largest expense, he said, adding that private jet charters could cost up to $80,000 one-way.
The World Cup’s iconic moments — crowds of Norwegian fans rowing in unison — and standout teams like the tiny African nation of Cape Verde may have translated into genuine travel interest.
During the tournament, searches for Cape Verde by U.S. travelers on the online travel agency Booking.com were up 310 percent compared with the same time last year. For Norway, searches by Americans were up nearly 700 percent from last year.
Audun Pettersen, the head of tourism for Innovation Norway, a government-owned organization promoting trade, said that the World Cup spotlight had spurred an increase in interest from familiar markets including Germany and Britain, in addition to the United States.
Kansas City
Kansas City, Mo., which hosted six matches, benefited from the biggest consumer spending increase of all U.S. host cities from June 11 through July 5, a period including the group stage and round of 32, according to debit and credit card data from Bank of America. The number of diners at local restaurants rose by 20 percent during the tournament compared with the same time last year, according to data from OpenTable.
The city’s main airport, which offers limited international routes, tallied more passengers. On July 12, the day after the city hosted the quarterfinal match between Argentina and Switzerland, the airport set a record for its largest number of departing travelers, according to the city’s aviation department.
Kansas City also outperformed other host cities in the average rate for short-term rentals on match days and evenings, according to AirDNA, a market research firm that specializes in short-term rentals. On match days, the city also had the largest spike of all U.S. host regions in the average daily rate for a hotel room compared with last year, according to CoStar, a real estate analytics company.
The Beer Industry
In a time of declining alcohol consumption, this was a banner month for beer: Sales in host cities during the tournament were up nearly 14 percent compared with last year, according to the Beer Institute, a trade group.
Scottish fans were credited with (or blamed for) drinking bars in Boston dry. Taverns said they scheduled emergency beer deliveries to quench the Tartan Army’s thirst. The numbers bear out. Gillette Stadium, near Boston, which sold more than 39,000 cases of beer, bested every other stadium hosting World Cup matches in the country in beer sales, said Andrew Heritage, the Beer Institute’s chief economist. Massachusetts had the strongest growth in beer sales of all the host markets throughout the tournament, compared with last year, he added.
DRAW
Hotels
Hotels across the 16 host cities prioritized price over occupancy, said Jan Freitag, CoStar’s national director of hospitality analytics, leading to mixed results.
“It was good, not great,” Mr. Freitag said. “What was certainly not true is that this was a five-week event for every hotel, for every market. These were the night before the game and the night of the game events.”
In many cities, advertised rates declined sharply as matches approached, according to data from Lighthouse, a hospitality intelligence company, on the average price of hotels at different booking windows in each host city during the World Cup.
This indicates that rates were priced too high for demand that didn’t quite materialize, Lighthouse found. Canada’s two host cities stood out here. In Toronto and Vancouver, prices fell in the weeks before each match day.
Throughout the tournament, of all host cities, Guadalajara, Mexico, had the largest growth in average room price compared with last year, according to CoStar data.
New York had a last-minute rush of visitors for the July 19 final, bringing hotels closer to their anticipated $300 million in additional hotel revenue, according to the Hotel Association of New York City. Rates for the city’s five-star hotels soared around the final; the average advertised price jumped about 59 percent over a three-week period, to about $1,700 for a room booked a day before the final, Lighthouse data showed.
LOSE
Most Ordinary Fans
Fans hoping to travel to the United States from certain countries faced another roadblock: visa restrictions and denials. Of the 48 World Cup-qualified nations, 11 had visitor refusal rates topping 40 percent between October 2024 and last September, according to an analysis of U.S. State Department data by iVisa, a visa facilitation website. Nearly 74 percent of applicants from Senegal, whose team reached the round of 32, were rejected. By contrast, a little more than 7 percent of Argentines were turned away.
In Canada, fewer than half of the roughly 37,200 people who applied had their visas approved to enter, according to data from the Canadian immigration department.
Much of the North American Travel Industry
The three host countries seemed to welcome fewer international tourists than they had anticipated.
About 2.8 million overseas visitors traveled to the United States in June, a 1.8 percent drop from last year, which itself was a bleak year for international tourism, according to government data.
Tournament tourist arrivals — both domestic and international — for Mexico landed 40 percent below industry forecasts, according to a Deloitte study. Before the tournament, Mexican officials had estimated an economic impact of up to $3 billion, but the most recent tourism ministry calculations of $2.4 billion fall short.
In Canada, analysts at BMO said that any economic benefit appeared to be minimal, adding 0.1 percentage points to Canada’s quarterly annualized G.D.P., but government officials tried to shift expectations.
The World Cup wasn’t “just a short-term boost,” the British Columbia Ministry of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport said in a statement, “but a benefit over the longer term.”
James Wagner and Vjosa Isai contributed reporting.
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