The World Cup is finally here. That thing we’ve been talking about for forever kicks off next week.

I am not a soccer fan. I feel like this is a mandatory disclosure before speaking about something many consider church. But you know what I am a fan of, though? Wild, international spectacles that draw millions of people together in real time. This is going to be that.

And yet, Donald Trump has not made it easy.

The tournament opens June 11 in Mexico City and runs through the July 19 final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, 104 matches across 16 cities in three countries. For more than a year, the U.S. travel industry has treated it as a once-in-a-generation rescue mission for inbound tourism after a rough 2025. FIFA President Gianni Infantino likened it to 104 Super Bowls. A FIFA report projected international visitors would make up 40% of stadium attendees.

My colleague Bailey Schulz dug into the booking data, and the international crowd the industry was counting on still isn't showing up in the numbers.

Across the nine U.S. markets CoStar tracks, the average match-day hotel booking rate is up just 3% from last year. An April survey from the American Hotel and Lodging Association found close to 80% of members' bookings pacing below original forecasts. Flight bookings from Europe this June and July are down for most host-city airports, with year-over-year declines ranging from 2.8% in Boston to 15.3% for JFK, according to Cirium data.

The booking engine company Cendyn found that domestic travelers make up 72% of bookings across host cities. In New York, it's 74%, with some properties as high as 95%. This matters because, per the U.S. Travel Association, overseas visitors spend eight times more than domestic ones. The seats may fill. The wallets attached to them are lighter.

The culprits are familiar to anyone who reads this newsletter: an inbound slump driven by visa friction and the perception that the U.S. isn't especially welcoming, plus high fuel prices. But FIFA added its own special ingredient – dynamic ticket pricing. A top-tier seat for the final that started at $6,370 in October had climbed to nearly $11,000 by April. Most tickets run above $300. One group of U.S. lawmakers called the tournament "the most financially exclusionary and inaccessible to date."

And then there's the getting-there tax. Here in NYC, NJ Transit initially wanted $150 for a round-trip train to MetLife – a roughly 18-mile trip that normally runs $12.90. After public outcry and a spat between Governor Mikie Sherrill and FIFA over who should foot the bill, it dropped to $98, underwritten by corporate sponsors so New Jersey taxpayers wouldn't. As of this week, fewer than 6% of those tickets had reportedly sold. Make of that what you will.

It's not all gloom. Atlanta and Miami are bright spots – more than half of Miami hoteliers told AHLA they're pacing ahead of expectations. Short-term rentals are pacing ahead of last year across host cities, per AirDNA, as travelers trim lodging budgets to absorb those ticket prices. And last-minute bookings could rescue the back half: one REIT chief noted that 70% of business was booked within 30 days of matches at the last World Cup. CoStar's Jan Freitag predicts a "tale of two World Cups," with soft June group-stage demand giving way to a July surge as teams advance toward the final.

There's history here, too. The last U.S. World Cup, in 1994, drew gripes about ticket prices and reports of overestimated visitor spending – and still set an attendance record that stands today. A disappointing megaevent can post big numbers. The 2026 question is whether the people in the seats are the high-spending international visitors the industry banked on, or a more domestic crowd that doesn't move the economic needle.

So I'll be watching the spectacle, if not the matches, ticketless and content, somewhere far from a $98 train – actually from a beach in Mexico for week one. Which sounds perfect.