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Concertgoers pose ahead of a Taylor Swift concert during the Eras Tour on Dec. 6, 2024, in Vancouver.Lindsey Wasson/The Canadian Press
Soccer fans worried about whether they will be able to find hotel rooms during FIFA World Cup games next year in Toronto and Vancouver should be able to put their minds at ease and Shake It Off.
The concerts put on by mega-superstar singer Taylor Swift in Canada last November and December are providing a planning template for the games next June, say people involved in both cities.
And studying what happened with the Swift concerts has them reassured that they will be able to accommodate the expected 50,000 attendees per game – seven in Vancouver, six in Toronto.
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In Vancouver, where there has been a much-publicized shortage of hotels rooms for several years, the local tourism organization has done modelling to calculate how things will go for the World Cup games.
In that exercise, taking into account how many rooms are in a massive catchment region – everything from Chilliwack, 100 kilometres to the east of Vancouver; up to Whistler, 140 kilometres to the north; some cities on Vancouver Island to the west – there’s lots of space. That’s as long as transit and the highways are performing at their max.
“After the Taylor Swift concerts, we’ve run the numbers,” said Destination Vancouver CEO Royce Chwin. “What we know is that people were coming from Whistler, Chilliwack, the island, and that TransLink and transit and the ferries adjusted their schedules for that.” And it all worked smoothly.
His organization is expecting that schedules will be adjusted the same way for an event that promises to bring in even more people than the attendance-record-breaking Swift concerts, which saw 160,000 people at the shows and more who visited just for the party atmosphere.
Mr. Chwin said the soccer games should also be easier to deal with because they’re during the day, unlike the Swift concerts that ended near midnight and entailed much later runs for ferries and transit than usual.
On top of that, his group has been talking to the provincial government about ensuring that Highway 1 to the east and Highway 99 to Whistler will be construction-free for the month.
Those reassurances provide some relief for a city that has the fewest hotel rooms per capita of any major city on the continent: about 24,000 in the region, with 13,000 in the central core. Only three new hotels with about 200 rooms are coming onstream in time for the games, say city officials, though another 28 are in the pipeline for future years.
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The concern about accommodations was accelerated recently when Airbnb, in a report commissioned from professional-services company Deloitte, said its calculations estimated that Vancouver would be short 70,000 room nights during the games, leaving 15,000 potential fans with nowhere to stay.
Airbnb representative Alex Howell said her company is urging the province and city to temporarily modify the rules for Airbnb hosts, particularly the onerous fees, to encourage more Vancouverites to list spaces.
Mr. Chwin, who disputed some of the numbers in the Deloitte report, said he doesn’t see the need to change the rules for short-term stays.
“You open up that can, you start to displace people,” said Mr. Chwin, who also argued that hotels ultimately provide more stable accommodations, as well as contributing significantly to the economy and employing large numbers of people.
“Short-term rentals have their place in the market,” he said, “but people here can flip into the market for a few weeks for this.”
But Ms. Howell noted that many are unlikely to do that when potential hosts have to go through lengthy city and provincial approval processes, plus $1,000 for a city licence, and another $450 for a provincial one.
Her company is suggesting changes be made only for the World Cup period.
“It’s not a wholesale redo. It’s quite targeted.”
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Fans wait for the doors at Toronto’s Rogers Centre before Taylor Swift performs on Nov. 14, 2024. City officials are not worried about hotel capacity for the FIFA World Cup, after Swift’s Era’s Tour.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Ms. Howell said the province has been unreceptive to Airbnb’s suggestions about easing rules, but the company is having more promising talks with the city of Vancouver.
However, the city put out a news release this week about short-term rentals for the games period and simply reminded people what the rules are, with no indication that they would be loosened.
A group that has been fighting for more regulations of short-term rentals across Canada, Fairbnb, is urging cities not to loosen rules for special events.
“If you open it up, that will incentivize people to get rid of long-term tenants,” said Thorben Wiebitz, a researcher with the group that was originally funded by hotel-workers’ unions.
“There are enough legal operators and people have almost a year to set up an account under current rules.”
Airbnb, the short-term vacation rental company, has not made the same suggestions for Toronto that it has made for Vancouver, likely because the hotel situation is significantly better there.
Toronto has more than double the number of hotel rooms as Vancouver, in both the city centre and the larger metro area. There are also 8,000 short-term rentals available in central Toronto. Airbnb said Vancouver has about 7,500 short-term rentals listed.
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Sara Anghel, CEO of the Greater Toronto Hotel Association, said the city has enough accommodations. “It seemed to work well during the Swift Eras tour.”
Toronto city officials also say they are not worried about capacity.
“At this time, the City of Toronto has not identified any concerns regarding accommodation availability ahead of the FIFA World Cup 2026 and is not currently undertaking special measures related to hotel construction or accommodation access,” said city communications adviser Elise von Scheel in an e-mailed statement to The Globe and Mail.
All of that will still undoubtedly mean that fans from around the world will be paying premium prices.
The price for three nights at the Pinnacle Harbour hotel in Vancouver on Thanksgiving weekend, according to booking.com: $775 plus taxes and fees. The price for three nights at the Pinnacle Harbour for June 13-16, 2026, the dates around the first games in Vancouver next year: $3,795 plus taxes and fees.
The Rosewood, one of the most luxurious hotels in the city, clocks in at $10,500 for those three nights in June, though a visitor could also make do at the more modest Sandman on Davie at only $2,832.
Data collected by third-party booking company Expedia is already showing that people are searching for rooms and finding that prices are soaring.
Only hotels in Mexico seem to be staying in the moderate range, the company noted, suggesting that fans might think about attending more games there.
“Savvy fans could feasibly attend multiple matches in Mexico across different cities,” according to one of Expedia’s travel experts, Melanie Fish, “for the cost of attending one game in a more expensive city, like Vancouver.”
