If you play the game without knowing the rules, you’ve already lost.
Let me see how much you know about your business, so answer me the following questions:
- What is your average occupancy and average daily rate (ADR) for June and July?
- How long is your booking window in the Summer months?
- Is the middle of the year your high or your low season?
It's kind of important to know the answers, because the actions you take to optimize your listing for the upcoming World Cup will be determined by them. Let's take occupancy and ADR for our listings as an example: last year, mid-Jun through mid-July fell in the middle of our high and low seasons, based on our historical numbers.
And if it's your low season, like it usually is in Miami, you can price a bit higher, since there aren't that many guests coming anyway. One thing I want to clarify here - pricing is the last lever we pull when we're optimizing our listings.
If you have nailed your 1st-page search impressions and you're loving your search-to-listing conversion, which, as you know, is paramount to maintaining a healthy search-to-booking conversion ratio, then it's time to jump into the World Cup specifics. (If you don't know what I'm talking about here, read through Hosting 101 - we'll walk you through it. These are the basics that everything else builds on, so don't skip them.)
Market booking ratio 101
Let's say you host in a market with 100 listings. When your market is at 90% occupancy, that means 9 out of 10 homes are booked. If the occupancy drops to 30%, it's 3 in 10. What determines which listings are booked and which aren't? Some of them will be booked simply because they are the cheapest. Others will be booked, because they are the best. You're going to have to ask yourself which side of the spectrum you want to host on.
I'm not making a judgment call here; we have a friend who hosts dozens of studio and 1-room apartments and is making a nice living. His units are clean and utilitarian, but he is always booked out. I have another friends that rents out top luxury listings. Million-dollar ocean front villas that rent for 5-figure daily rates. He's doing fine as well. They run completely different short-term rental businesses and are both very successful. In our example, they would be booked, regardless of the market's occupancy rate, whether it's 30% or 90%.
You can absolutely drive your price to the bottom in the slow season, but you can also work hard to understand what guests are looking for, provide it, and then have guests tell you they decided to book your property after reading reviews about the home and your hospitality. Building up that reputation takes time, but make it a goal that you're going for.
However, when I compare this to the general Miami market from 2025, there were only three months that had lower occupancy than that date range, so for those listings, summer was low season.
How does this play into your decision on how to position your listing in your market?
If June and July are your peak season, FIFA is competing with those traditional bookings, and if you're pricing for the matches only, your regular guests will book elsewhere.
What about your booking window?
I'll argue that understanding your booking window is one of the most important metrics you need to master. A chalet in the mountains, where guests book next year's vacation before they check out booking window is different than our place in Miami.
Our booking window is not like the chalets' at all. Not only does it change during the year, but it's also very different depending on the booking channel the guests use to book our listings. The VRBO spike is a reservation we got last week for Christmas - 7 months out.
The chalet probably needs a steep last-minute discount to get booked for next month. Our guests are just now starting to book for June. Our first bookings for June came in yesterday and today, and no, they're not for FIFA.
Our FIFA dates are still not booked, though we're in talks with one Brazilian family about a two-week booking in July. This past week, over half of the traffic to our website came from Colombia. But we're not worried. Our quality speaks for itself in the reviews and ratings that the different channels use to rank listings. Our minimum night stay requirements are targeted; our cancellation policies are well thought through and tailored to match nights and normal nights; and our pricing is where the market dictates it should be right now.
Last year, we thought we would see European and South & Central American soccer fans book places as their base of operations for FIFA. They didn't materialize, or they booked the least expensive listings. We had to adapt our strategy, though we had assumed that about a month before FIFA kicks off, a different kind of guest would book for the soccer tournament: this guest would book shorter stays and follow his team from match to match - these are the die-hard fans, who will be in the stands come hell or high water.
So the budget-driven fans have already booked; the die-hards will start booking soon, along with families and groups who will pool money to afford a nicer short-term rental than a stay in an impersonal hotel. And, knowing the luxury traveler, they will often book at the last minute, on a whim.
If we didn't understand fan behavior and just assumed our booking window was the traditional 30 days out, we would constantly book our listings at rates that were too low. Oh, did you know that the July games have booking windows as short as 3 days? So much for planning to drop your pricing a month before check-in. You'll need to be on top of who's playing whom, so you don't miss the game of the century if two top teams end up competing in your market.
We had the honor of hosting a conversation with Kyle, the host of RevLabs by Pricelabs, and we dove into the data that underpins our FIFA listing strategy. Watch the Ultimate FIFA strategy here. Kyle is a self-proclaimed data geek and sports nerd - there's no one better to do a deep dive into the FIFA data side of this tournament. Once you've got your foundation build on facts and good data and have learned how to analyze and act on it, now it's time to make your listing stand out.
