Lawrence hotels were expecting World Cup demand to pick up by now, but the city’s hotel market is still showing a mixed picture.
One likely reason is that travelers are still trading tickets and coordinating visas and flights. Ruth DeWitt of eXplore Lawrence suspects some fans may not have finalized their itineraries yet, especially those who won tickets through lotteries or are still waiting on travel documents.
“I think there’s still a lot of people trading tickets who got tickets in lotteries,” DeWitt said. “I’m not sure their itineraries are fully set yet to see which matches they’re going to, so that may be playing a factor as well.”
World Cup matches begin Thursday, June 11, and the final match is set for Sunday, July 19. Six matches are slated for Kansas City between Tuesday, June 16 and Saturday, July 11.
Don’t miss a beat … Click here to sign up for our email newsletters
Click here to learn more about our newsletters first
FIFA has reported that 5 million tickets to matches were already purchased by the end of April, and a February 2025 report from KC 2026 anticipated that 22,000 hotel rooms would be booked within a 2.5-hour radius of Kansas City.
Please support local news and information from The Lawrence Times.
Subscribe here.
Those numbers have not translated into hotel bookings for some Lawrence hotels, though, even following the announcement that Team Algeria has selected Lawrence for its base camp.
Lesli Martinez, guest service manager at Holiday Inn Express & Suites Lawrence, said they still have about half to two-thirds of their 78 rooms available on most World Cup dates.
“We definitely are not getting in what we were expecting before,” Martinez said. “As of right now, our hotel still has plenty of room for the summer.”
Martinez said the reservations the hotel is seeing are mostly for typical summer travel, wedding blocks and travel sports teams rather than World Cup guests.
She said the hotel’s sales team had raised prices for the World Cup period and not brought them down yet.
At Tru by Hilton Lawrence, Acting General Manager Haylee Jarosz said the hotel has 40 guests staying during Algeria’s June 16 match — many more than a typical Tuesday.
“We actually are a little bit busier than what we were when I went through it just a month ago,” Jarosz said, in reference to the full World Cup period.
Team Algeria has three group stage matches: June 16, against Argentina, in Kansas City; June 22, against Jordan, in San Francisco; and June 27, against Austria, in Kansas City.
She said many of the bookings for the first week of matches are one- and two-night stays.
At The Eldridge hotel downtown, front desk and reservations manager Nyrica Hall said the property is still in the early stages of World Cup bookings but is preparing for a possible late surge.
“We’re still doing great and hopeful for the World Cup reservations,” Hall said. “It’s still pretty early for us, so we are still gearing up and doing everything that we can to welcome and accommodate people who are wanting those reservations.”
This mixed picture in Lawrence reflects a broader trend across World Cup host markets.
The American Hotel & Lodging Association reports nationwide bookings lagging behind expectations, with Kansas City among the weakest markets, as 85% to 90% of hotels report booking pace below a typical June or July.
The survey identified FIFA room-block cancellations, visa barriers and geopolitical uncertainty as key drivers.
Because of those concerns, eXplore Lawrence had shifted part of its marketing strategy toward Algerians living outside of Algeria.
“We have looked into the Algerian diaspora, and there are a lot of Algerians who live in France, Spain. We’ve heard from Algerians from Italy. There are a lot of Algerians in Montreal and Quebec, because of the French-speaking,” DeWitt said.
She said eXplore Lawrence is running a campaign to reach those travelers and encourage them to book rooms in Lawrence.
DeWitt also said visa processing delays could be part of the problem. She said four World Cup countries appear on the Department of State website as requiring visa bonds, including Algeria and Tunisia, which both have matches in Kansas City.
A visa bond is a deposit some foreign visitors have to pay when applying for a temporary U.S. visa. They get the money back if they follow the visa rules and leave on time.
People from the four countries were previously required to post a visa bond between $5,000 and $15,000.
On May 14, the Department of State updated its webpage to say the administration will waive the visa bond requirement for some traveling to the U.S. for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The waiver applies to nationals of competing countries who bought World Cup tickets by April 15 and signed up for FIFA’s Priority Appointment Scheduling System.
According to Jason Booker, deputy athletics director at KU, Team Algeria will be staying at the DoubleTree in Lawrence. A staff member there declined an interview, and staff members of several other Lawrence hotels also declined to discuss bookings for this article.
As Lawrence prepares for the tournament, most hotels are still waiting for the expected influx of visitors. The true scope of World Cup demand is likely to become clear only in the final weeks leading up to kickoff.
If local news matters to you, please help us keep doing this work.
Don’t miss a beat — get the latest news from the Times delivered to your inbox:
Click here to learn more about our newsletters first
Courtney Lane (she/her), staff reporter, has worked with The Lawrence Times since April 2026. She can be reached at [email protected].
Read her complete bio here. Read her work for the Times at this link, and see her photography for the Times at this link.
More coverage: World Cup 2026
Courtney Lane/Lawrence Times
