June and July will bring moments of truth for Mikel Ruder.
He's general manager of the Crossroads Hotel in downtown Kansas City and he's been planning for World Cup fans to hit town for two years. He's mapped possible scenarios for how he'll welcome the visitors. Now that it's almost here, he's juggling excitement and nerves.
"It's so exciting to see Kansas City welcome such an event," Ruder said. "But then, from a business standpoint, you're always concerned about performance."
Ruder said the hotel is on track to nearly sell out on match days, but it'll have many rooms available in between. Most visitors will stay for two nights, and the average room cost is up $150 from last year.
His customers will represent a tiny fraction of the 650,000 tourists that Visit KC expects to pour into Kansas City in June and July.
Kansas City will host six matches and serve as home base for four national teams. Boosters say the World Cup could spur $653 million in spending in the regional economy.
The 650,000 visitors estimate comes from a projection of 2.1 million total "visitor days" over the course of the event.
"We have seen that number consistently with all the research that we've been pulling," said Kathy Nelson, President and CEO of Visit KC.
A "visitor day" represents one person who spends a day and a night in the city, including repeats. So a person who spends two days and nights would count as two visitor days. Visit KC used materials from FIFA, data from past large-scale sporting events and Kansas City-specific travel data to create the figure.
That number includes people going to matches and non-ticketed fans visiting watch parties or the FIFA Fan Festival.
The calculations estimate how many people will visit from out of town and how long they'll stay, said Victor Matheson, a College of the Holy Cross economist who studies the economics of sports.
Matheson said if a little more than half the maximum capacity of Arrowhead Stadium — called Kansas City Stadium during the tournament — is filled by new out-of-town visitors each match, roughly 210,000 people would come over the course of the tournament just for the games. If they each stay three nights, that's 630,000 visitor days — about a third of the total days Visit KC projects.
Maybe, Matheson said. But matches featuring powerhouse teams such as Argentina are likely to draw more out-of-town tourists while less popular teams tend to draw a larger faction of local residents.
"People will come from anywhere across the world to see Lionel Messi, but they're not going to come from all over in the same way to see Ecuador versus Curacao or Algeria versus Austria," Matheson said.
Economists are also wary of Visit KC's projected economic impact — $653 million.
The organization says it was calculated using an industry standard tool for destination marketing organizations. It accounts for Kansas City's six matches, average hotel room rates of $299 and 80% of attendees arriving by air. Those figures came from "local historical data from past large sporting events as well as international industry data."
"Consultants are very optimist(ic), and economists are very pessimist(ic)," said Kabeer Bora, an associate professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who teaches sports economics.
Economic impact projections, Bora said, often use economic multipliers, which assume that the money will ripple throughout the local economy.
But those methods usually don't account for visitors who will spend their money at the World Cup instead of other places in the economy, or that some people will decide against visiting to avoid crowds, like Kansas City saw during the 2023 NFL Draft. And some of the money will leak out of the local economy — say, to FIFA or another business located outside the Kansas City metro.
All in all, "it tends to exaggerate economic impact," Matheson said.
Local World Cup organizers say matches in Kansas City are on pace to sell out, and that fans from more than 125 countries have registered for the city's free fan festival. The Kansas City Aviation Department projects a record number of air passengers — more than 1.3 million each month, or roughly 200,000 more than last year — in both June and July. Others are expected to travel by train or car from other cities to take part in the festivities.
But Kansas City faces plenty of attendance headwinds. The tournament is set to be more expensive than ever for fans, with high ticket prices and fuel costs impacting travel. The U.S. government has also implemented steep visa bonds for visitors from certain countries. That includes Algeria and Tunisia, two nations that will compete in Kansas City during the group stage. People who bought match tickets before April 15 can skip the bonds.
An April survey from the American Hotel and Lodging Association showed Kansas City hotel bookings lagged significantly behind projections.
But Kansas City leaders remain optimistic and stand by their projection of 650,000 visitors. They're marketing more to potential visitors from other American cities within driving distance of Kansas City.
Even if fewer than 650,000 show, "that's still hundreds of thousands of people," Nelson said. "This will be the biggest event ever in our city."
And Andrea O'Hara, executive director of the Hotel & Lodging Association of Greater Kansas City, said bookings are on the rise. She said with weeks to go, many hotels report 50% occupancy or more surrounding match days. The average length of stay is two nights.
"We're hearing from FIFA that this is a last-minute visitor," O'Hara said. "The peak reservation and booking time is seven days out from the first game. We anticipate continuing to see bookings increase."
Demand for short-term rentals is also up slightly from last year on the days around matches, says Bram Gallagher, director of economics and forecasting at AirDNA, a short-term rental industry data collector.
For some business owners, the mixed messages play a role in planning.
"I'm literally just preparing for anything," said Alan Kneeland, who owns the Troost Avenue pizza restaurant The Combine.
He's hired four extra workers, enough to accommodate an always-full restaurant. But it's not much more than he'd do for a normal summer.
Bora said he thinks Kansas City, the smallest World Cup city in the U.S., will see a bump.
But he won't know for sure until after the event, when economists will scour data on hotel occupancy, room rates, sales tax revenue and more. They'll compare what happened to previous years, account for other reasons the economy could have spiked and only then make estimates of how many people showed up, how much money they spent and what kind of impact it had.
"We'll have to wait and see," Bora said.
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