The article never makes it clear what these numbers mean; presumably, they’re looking at bookings for future dates, but are they comparing those rates to future bookings at the same time as last year, or actual hotel occupancy on the date?

As someone without any knowledge of the industry, I learned basically nothing from this article, since it’s completely opaque.

For example:

For instance, occupancy in Vancouver for June 18, the day of the Canada-Qatar match, was 50.3 per cent, down by about a third from 73.8 per cent last year.

1. Is the 50.3% rate as of June 1, 2026? (As mentioned earlier in the article for a different occupancy statistic.)
2. Was 73.8% the occupancy rate on June 18, 2025, or the expected occupancy on June 18, 2025 as of June 1st? And, regardless, what are both those numbers, since the delta between the two is highly relevant to interpreting this year’s number.
3. How do occupancy rates typically change as dates approach?
4. The US-Israeli war on Iran has massively increased the cost of travel, so how do these numbers compare to relative statistics in similar non-host cities? Of course hotels are struggling when the cost of flights doubles, yet that’s never mentioned in the article.

This is a poorly researched article, imho.