Lessons from a FIFA World Cup host
FIFA is finished - congratulations to Spain on a fantastic match. We've changed our titles and descriptions back; we canceled the World Cup streaming channels, there are no more game night price spikes, and we're settling into our regular summer routine. Yesterday we were interviewed by the local TV news - they wanted to know how we did, and you can watch the CBS4 interview here.
The most important lesson we learned is to stay nimble and true to your strategy, but before we get into that, let's look at some numbers:
Our occupancy was down 12% compared to the same timeframe in 2025, but our Revenue was up 4%, beating our local market by 51%. On most nights, our rates were equal to last year's rates, but our game night rates ended up being as much as 300% higher than last year's rates (double our local market rate), pushing our ADR (Average Daily Rate) up 21% YoY.
Our booking window dropped from over 30 days in 2025 to just over 8 days, which is why it was imperative to build out a strategy and stick with it. Our guests stayed twice as long as the average market stay, and about half our guests came to watch the games - the other half came for a Miami stay (however, they still paid FIFA rates if their stay included a match night).
Lessons learned
The FIFA World Cup brought a lot of guests to South Florida, with Miami's Fan Fest being the most visited in the US. Despite high ticket pricing, matches were played in front of capacity crowds, but the massive boom that everyone had predicted for the World Cup, from FIFA to the tourism development organizations and the short-term vacation rental channels, never materialized.
Lesson #1 - make data-driven decisions
Our webinar with PriceLabs in April had predicted this as Kyle laid out the reality based on market data, and we walked hosts through how to pivot and hold their pricing strategy. The most difficult thing to do was hold firm with a booking window of a week, when calendars are empty, and the temptation is to drop prices to get at least something.
Lesson #2 - Stay the course
Having the perfect strategy means nothing when you end up folding at the last minute. We saw firsthand what staying the course did to our bookings: we beat our local market's pricing by 51%, mainly because other hosts folded and went for lower prices.
Lesson #3 - Increase your distribution
In today's market, you can no longer rely on one single channel to advertise your listings. (We even ran Google ads in the countries that teams were coming from to play in Miami during the World Cup, with over 34K new users visiting our direct booking website.) Guests are looking for deals, booking last minute, and comparing pricing across the board. We've had guests tell us they booked on a different channel than they found us on, because the other channel saved them $4 a night.
Four dollars.
Airbnb used to have a 60% market share in the Miami market (that's a best guestimate). If that's accurate, that means hosts who are only listed on Airbnb aren't seen by 2 in 5 guests looking for a place to stay - and that's before their listing fights for a top spot in Airbnb's search.
So our FIFA guests came from this channel mix, with Airbnb bringing in less than one in four dollars. Interestingly enough, all of their bookings were at one of our listings; the other one had zero Airbnb bookings during the whole World Cup.
Airbnb reservations saw the sharpest drop from over 60% of our guests in 2025 to barely 20% during the World Cup. I know that we've been working toward creating a balance of guests coming from our channel mix over the past few years, but a drop of over 60% in one year really surprised us.
We've seen a marked drop in Airbnb bookings over the past two and a half years, from 100% of our guests booking us on Airbnb in early 2024, to 40% in Q2 of 2026, and now 22% in the past month. I believe there are several reasons for this drop:
#1 The Miami market was hotly contested by all OTAs
Online Travel Agencies like Booking.com. VRBO, Airbnb, and others. Anecdotally, we've seen Airbnb's market share drop from the 60% it was last year in Miami. If you didn't know, Booking.com is the largest advertiser on Google Ads, outspending Expedia (VRBO's parent company) and Airbnb by a lot.
#2 We're listed on the other channels
Now that may sound obvious, but just like Airbnb won't display your listing in their search results on dates that you're already booked, you won't show up in a VRBO search if your place is not listed on that channel. It also takes a significant amount of time and work to reach and maintain top rankings in each channel, be that guest favorite on Airbnb (VRBO calls that Loved By Guests, and on Booking.com it's the Traveler Review Award) or Superhost (again, Premiere Host on VRBO and Premiere Plus Partner on Booking), putting us in front of as many potential guests as we can.
It took us a year to get traction on VRBO, but now our places are often featured in their online ads, and today over a third of our revenue comes from that channel.
What we're walking away from FIFA with:
• Don't trust your feelings - run a data-driven booking strategy. Use a dynamic pricing tool that gives you insight into the data. We use PriceLabs.
• Get your listings onto as many channels as possible and get a Property Management Software (PMS) to do all the heavy lifting of syncing calendars and listings. We use Hostaway.
• Stick to your plan. Unfortunately, there's no software package to do that for you. Understand your market, build out your strategy, and work the plan.
What did you learn from the FIFA World Cup?
How did your listings do compared to last year and compared to your local market?