Hand a country that is losing visitors the largest sporting event ever held on its soil, and watch what happens. That was the 2026 World Cup. Living Lab measured it per hotel, per city, per route.
International arrivals to the United States fell 4.2% in 2025 while worldwide travel grew about 4%. Inbound visits declined to 68.3 million, against 79 million in 2019. The causes were policy rather than weather: visa suspensions, border checks, tariff sentiment.
Into that fall came the World Cup, 78 of 104 matches on American soil. If a mega-event can overcome policy friction, this was where it would show.
On its own terms, the event performed. Attendance reached 6.81 million against a projection of about 6.5 million. Ticket demand ran at roughly 30 times capacity.
The international component did not follow. Four in five host-city hotels reported bookings below projection. European advance bookings for July were 15.3% down on the prior year. US inbound arrivals kept falling through the tournament window.
A displacement that survives the strongest pull a country can apply is not a cycle. It is a new baseline.
The published pre-tournament forecast put host-city room rates up 7 to 25%. Living Lab measured each market on per-hotel fixed effects and found outcomes outside that band in both directions.
Miami booked 382,025 tournament room nights with a rate premium of 30.3%. Dallas booked 491,175 at 19.8%. New York booked the most room nights of any host, 537,655, and its rate fell 4.5%. The city absorbed the largest event on earth without moving on price.
A national average of plus 13% would have told all 16 cities the same thing. It would have been wrong for most of them.
Set the tournament beside a full year of US business events, measured on one method, and the comparison is close on most measures. The calendar produced about US$827m of economic contribution and US$194m in state and local taxes, every year. The tournament produced about US$968m and US$227m, once.
A one-off event and the ordinary calendar need measuring the same way, so a government can see what each is worth and decide what the next bid should cost. That is the argument for treating them as one event portfolio rather than a league table.
On 13 June, Scotland played Haiti at Gillette Stadium. Around 50,000 Scottish supporters travelled. Boston’s bars sold beer at roughly four times the volume of a Fourth of July weekend, and the Samuel Adams taproom alone went through about 70 kegs. Some venues ran dry.
None of it was a surprise in kind. Origin-market data, flight bookings into Boston, and hotel occupancy for the match week were all visible weeks ahead. The supply chain that did not see them was the one holding the kegs. That is absorptive capacity, and it is the concept behind the second case too: a Grand Prix town whose guests slept in the next city, on a fleet of cars with foreign plates.
Three lessons, in order of how often they are ignored.
That is what Living Lab measured in 2026, and what a national government can now have before the decision rather than after it. The full paper, The test was the World Cup, is in the white papers.
For further reading, see OECD Recommendation on Global Events and Local Development.
For further reading, see US Travel Association forecast.
Before the next bid, have three things on the table: a per-hotel measure of the current calendar, a demand scenario for the event with the counterfactual stated, and a named binding constraint. Discover them afterwards and the study goes in a drawer.
Oman has announced plans for a high-altitude destination at Jabal al Akhdar, combining sports training, wellness, and tourism at 2,400 metres. It is the kind of project a Gulf government can commit to at once, and the kind that lives or dies on a demand case nobody has yet published.
A major event is a rallying point for civic pride, and just as easily a rallying point for protest. The difference is usually whether residents can see what the event does for their street, in terms they recognise, before the road closures start.
Manchester United’s proposed stadium is a Ā£2bn, 100,000-seat ground by Foster + Partners, with a target opening of 2030-31. The club and the regeneration case cite Ā£7.3bn a year for the economy and 92,000 jobs. Those are the promoters’ projections. Here is what to test before believing them.
The owners of the Bulls and the Blackhawks are putting a reported US$7bn into 55 acres around the United Center: housing, a music hall, a hotel, retail, a park. The arena already hosts more than 200 events a year. The question a developer should ask is what the other 165 nights are worth.
At the Italian Grand Prix, the fleet of guest vehicles arrives on German plates with German drivers. The hospitality guests do not sleep in Monza, which hosts the race. They sleep in Milan, which does not. The town that pays captures a fraction of what the event generates.
On 13 June 2026 Scotland played Haiti at Gillette Stadium. Around 50,000 Scottish supporters travelled. Boston’s bars sold beer at roughly four times the volume of a Fourth of July weekend, and some ran dry. Every signal that would have warned them was visible weeks ahead.
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