FIFA World Cup: Why Toronto & Vancouver Hotels Aren’t Filling Up | Your Morning

Indexed: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]In exactly 3 weeks, the FIFA World Cup opens in major cities across North America, but a new report shows that the demand for hotel bookings is a little slower than expected. Hundreds of thousands of soccer fans we know are expected to visit cities like Toronto and Vancouver. While FIFA released thousands of hotel rooms last month, cities like Toronto and Vancouver, well, they're seeing a low. For closer look at the why, I'm joined by Sarah Angel.

[00:00:24]She's the president of the Greater Toronto Hotel Association. Good morning.

[00:00:28]Good morning, Anne-Marie. All right, let's start uh on the West Coast. What's happening in Vancouver? Uh Destination Vancouver says hotel bookings for the month of June are down 20% compared to last year. How does that compare to what you're seeing in Toronto?

[00:00:42]Well, before the drop from the FIFA blocks, we actually saw an uptick of about 28% compared to last June. Since that time, we're seeing that the drop as well here in Toronto. It's about 5 to 10% from previous year. Okay. When FIFA first released its rooms in host cities, you told the Star that you were disappointed. How did that move affect the industry from your perspective?

[00:01:06]Well, hotels are very resilient businesses. They go up, they go down.

[00:01:10]There's big events that come that change things at the very last minute, just like the World Cup come or the the World Series coming to Toronto. Now we have the World Cup. So, it's there's a lot of highs and lows and the hotels adapt as the changes come.

[00:01:25]So, since those rooms have become available, we haven't seen them fill up with visitors. Is it because of short-term rentals? Is it the cost of the rooms being inflated because of a big event that's coming? We also know that happens. What's behind the slow bookings?

[00:01:38]Well, I think people are taking their time to make their decisions about whether they're going to come and watch the games in Toronto. Another factor is the geopolitical issues that are happening across the globe as we know, oil prices, the issues with the tariffs in the United States. So, I think we're seeing this right across North America as a in all 16 host cities that there the blocks are not as full as we had anticipated. And also when you have a World Cup that has 16 cities, that in itself can be a challenge as fans may not be able to afford to move from city to city to watch their favorite teams compete. Well, also in some cases it's less expensive to travel south of the border to see a game that it is to travel across the country depending on where you live to go see one. According to this is more information from the British Columbia Hotels Association.

[00:02:26]Vancouver has seen more than a 54% spike in prices on match nights. So how does that compare with what we're seeing in Toronto?

[00:02:34]Honestly, I had went yesterday and did my own research and I went on and I looked and I'm going to tell you that the rates in Toronto are pretty much on par with any other major event or conference or convention that might be coming to the city. So there isn't a great spike that I'm seeing at all as when I looked yesterday. Okay, that's good to hear.

[00:02:54]Late last year Vancouver began encouraging homeowners to register with Airbnb. How did Toronto respond?

[00:03:02]Well, Toronto has very good compliance and rules on Airbnb. So we all cohabitate in the space between hotels and Airbnb and we know there's competition with the hotels and I think we've seen similar situations when Taylor Swift came to Toronto that Airbnb gets a pick up during these you know, more busy times and it's it's all going to work out just fine, I think. Sarah Angel, president of the Greater Toronto Hotels Association.

[00:03:29]Thanks for joining us this morning.

[00:03:31]Thank you very much.

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