The World Cup may have spurred feel-good stories from Scottish and Norwegian tourists taking over U.S. host cities, but federal data shows inbound travel from overseas as a whole is still struggling to bounce back.
Total overseas visitor arrivals in June fell 1.8% year-over-year to 2.8 million, according to federal data released Tuesday. It’s an improvement from declines of 6.5% in May and 3.4% in June 2025, but people from major source markets like Germany, Brazil, and Argentina are still holding back on U.S. travel.
Still, some World Cup markets bucked the trend. United Kingdom arrivals jumped nearly 17%, with England and Scotland both playing matches in U.S. host markets. Ecuador arrivals surged 55%, and Colombia was up 21%. Data on inbound travel from Canada and Mexico will be released at a later date.
The tournament runs through July 19. We’ll be keeping an eye out next month to see what sort of lift the final rounds deliver.
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On this episode of Suite Success, host Katie Cline sits down with one of the industry's most trusted data experts, Jan Freitag, National Director of Hospitality Analytics at CoStar, to separate hype from reality. Together, they unpack all things World Cup—from returned room blocks and evolving booking patterns to what the tournament actually meant for hotel occupancy, room rates and performance across host markets.
But this conversation goes far beyond the World Cup.
Jan explains why the best hotel owners learn to ignore headlines, how to distinguish signal from noise, and what current hotel performance tells us about the broader U.S. travel market. He also shares why successful operators make decisions based on long-term trends rather than emotion—and why that mindset may be one of the biggest competitive advantages in hospitality.
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