Want A Cheap-Ass Hotel? Come To The US During The World Cup!
Or don't.
We’ve discussed here a number of times that the World Cup should be canceled and countries should start boycotting the event. Especially after Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth started massacring little children with their chosen war in Iran, there’s no moral argument to be made for why the US deserves the glory of hosting such an event, and Trump’s maniacal, evil anti-immigration crusade means no person traveling to the US for the tournament can feel safe from harassment, persecution, or worse from US immigration authorities. (Read this Politico for a detailed look at the difficulty of keeping Iran’s team safe, as they are top competitors.)
New reporting suggests that, boycott or no boycott, cancellation or no cancellation, people are voting with their feet and their dollars, and those feet and dollars are staying the fuck away from the United States. The Financial Times reports that hotels in the US, specifically in the cities hosting World Cup matches, are cutting their prices in hopes somebody, anybody will book them.
The word one of their expert sources used? “Panic.”
Match-day room rates in host cities including Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia and San Francisco have dropped about a third from their peak earlier this year, according to data tracker Lighthouse Intelligence, in a sign of lower than anticipated demand.
“I’m seeing a lot of people start to panic and lower their rates,” said Scott Yesner, founder of Philadelphia-based short-term rental and boutique hotel management company Bespoke Stay.
Yeah, that’s crazy, Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, all wonderful cities except Dallas, can’t get their hotels full in the summer. It’s almost like nobody wants to come to the World Cup or the United States.
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Articles abound on the subject. The Canadian travel boycott of the United States hasn’t lost a bit of steam. Estimates say the US lost $12.5 billion in tourism money last year alone. According to the World Travel & Tourism Council and Oxford Economics, the US was the only country out of 184 they looked at that lost money last year.
Because that’s how shitty at business and art-of-the-dealing Donald Trump is, that everybody in the world thinks the United States is a shithole, as long as he’s its leader.
If you travel abroad or talk to non-Americans, people are coming back with the same anecdotal stories: that literally zero people they discuss the subject with have any desire to travel to the US until or unless this [gestures wildly at all this] takes a radical turn for the better. People aren’t hopeful.
More from the Financial Times:
Many in the industry had hoped the World Cup, which the US is staging alongside Canada and Mexico, would help reverse last year’s slump in travel to the country, when revenue per available room declined for the first time since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Well that was a stupid thing to hope, somebody should tell hospitality industry executives to get their noses out of Donald Trump’s anus and check in with the real world occasionally.
Speaking of noses and Trump’s anus, Financial Times quotes FIFA head Gianni Infantino, who told all these cities in 2024 that “hundreds of thousands” of people would come visit them for the World Cup. Maybe that might have been true if Kamala Harris had been elected president. But it ain’t true now:
Vijay Dandapani, president of the Hotel Association of New York City, said he could “categorically say we haven’t seen much of a meaningful boost yet . . . It’s possible we will get some more demand, but at this point it certainly will not be the cornucopia that Fifa was promising.”
The World Cup starts June 11, with the first US match happening in LA on June 12. If people haven’t started booking hotels yet, they aren’t coming. (Lots of matches happening in Mexico and Canada, though! Those would be cool to go to.)
And it’s really not true ever since Trump started fighting Benjamin Netanyahu’s idiot war in Iran. Aside from how Trump is the only American president stupid enough to ever say yes to Netanyahu’s Iran bombing begging, it turns out starting this war was just about the stupidest thing Trump could have possibly done for American business and tourism at this specific moment in history. Not just because everybody hates Trump and has no desire to come to the US, but also because Trump’s stupid fucking war is making things like airfare much more expensive and general economic uncertainty over things like inflation are rising. Financial Times isn’t done with the expert quotes:
Lior Sekler, chief commercial officer at hotel operator HRI Hospitality, […] blamed dissatisfaction with Donald Trump’s administration and its visa and immigration policies, as well as the instability triggered by the war in Iran, for cooling international demand: “Obviously, people’s desire to come to the United States right now is down.”
Aran Ryan, director of industry studies at Tourism Economics, said the research group was still expecting an “incremental boost . . . but there’s concern about ticket prices, there’s concern about border crossings, and there’s concern about anti-US sentiment — and that’s been made worse by the Iran war”.
Welp.
The Financial Times notes that the 2030 World Cup is being held in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, in case people want to get a head start on looking for hotels.
Now that sounds fun.
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They shouldn’t cancel the World Cup, they should just move all the US games to Canada and Mexico, done.
"If we deport all the other teams, we'll win by default!"
-Steve Miller probably.