Image: Confederation of African Football (CAF)

AFCON 2027 will be priced, not filled

By Onyango George (OG)

CAF told Uganda this week that its rooms problem lies upcountry. America's World Cup, whose hotel results landed the same day, suggests the bigger risk for Nairobi, Kampala and Dar es Salaam is the opposite one: hotels that price out the guests they already have.

The praise came first. At State House Entebbe on Tuesday, Bianca Wambui, the Confederation of African Football's country infrastructure manager, told President Yoweri Museveni what her inspectors had found at Uganda's competition stadiums and training grounds. "I would like to commend the efforts that have been put in so far, especially in terms of the stadiums and training grounds," she said. "The progress is commendable."

Then came the part that matters to anyone who sells a bed. The delegation, led by CAF's secretary general, Samson Adamu, had also found that accommodation outside the capital was a worry, and that the three co-hosts were moving too slowly on a single visa that would let fans, teams and officials cross freely between them, according to The EastAfrican and the Daily Monitor. Museveni did not dispute either point. "We hosted NAM here, which comprised 150 countries, and we were able to deal with them," he said, in remarks released by his deputy press secretary, Faruk Kirunda. "The Kampala area has the facilities, but now the challenge is upcountry, which we are now going to concentrate on." And then, for good measure: "I will unlock whatever needs to be unlocked."

The Africa Cup of Nations kicks off on 19 June 2027 across Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, the first time the tournament has been split among three countries. Uganda's matches are due at Mandela National Stadium outside Kampala, the new Hoima City Stadium and the Akii-Bua Olympic Stadium in Lira. Nile Post reported on Tuesday that works at Hoima stood at about 95 per cent and at Lira at about 80 per cent, with the local organising committee promising all three by December. The instinct across the region, a reasonable one, is to count rooms and then build more of them.

The evidence published on the same Tuesday from the biggest World Cup ever staged suggests that counting rooms is the wrong exercise for most of East Africa's hotels, and a costly one for some.

Houston hosted seven World Cup matches between 14 June and 4 July this year. More than 480,000 spectators passed through its stadium and the Harris County Houston Sports Authority estimated half a million out-of-town visitors. By the end of June, according to CoStar data analysed by Bunmi Oyinloye of the consultancy HVS in a report published on 22 September, occupancy across Houston's hotels stood at 61.6 per cent, essentially unchanged on the year before. Average daily rate rose 5.8 per cent on the year, to $131.67. The money was made on particular nights: rate was up roughly 52 per cent on the eve of the 17 June match and about 53 per cent on the night before the 4 July knockout game. Between those peaks, it drifted.

Houston's hoteliers had seen large events before and knew what one usually feels like. "When you have Super Bowl or Final Four, usually the day after they announce, you have no rooms to sell," said Emre Ozsut, regional director of sales at The Lancaster Hotel, in remarks reported by CoStar News in July. "In this, we were not even close to that."

Houston was not an outlier. In August, Thomas Hazinski, who leads the convention and sports facilities practice at HVS, compared performance in all eleven American host cities during match weeks with an estimate of what each market would have done without the tournament. Rate rose in every one of them, by between $8.31 a night in Atlanta and $62.27 in New York, and the eleven together earned an estimated $680mn in extra rooms revenue. But occupancy fell below the no-tournament baseline in seven of the eleven. Seattle lost 6.3 percentage points. Hazinski's explanation was blunt: dynamic pricing "generated significant rate gains but also destroyed a meaningful share of the demand the market would otherwise have hosted." Ordinary business and leisure travellers were priced out. Meeting planners, whose group rates had been contracted long before hotels switched to event pricing, simply moved their conferences to other weeks or other cities.

Didio Pequeno, who runs hospitality market analytics for CoStar in the north-east and Midwest of the United States, had forecast exactly this before the first whistle: "it's not really about demand, it's more so about markets being able to drive rate." Some owners found the rate less than they had been promised. John Fitzpatrick, chief executive of the Fitzpatrick Hotel Group in New York, told The City Reporter that revenue was up 15 per cent on the previous June. "The World Cup brought business to the city and it helped us, but I was expecting a lot more," he said. "It's not the big hype everybody was talking up."

The temptation is to treat this as an American curiosity, the story of a rich country with a vast hotel stock and fans who fly in for a match and fly out again. That would be a mistake, because two of Hazinski's findings travel to East Africa almost intact, and a third travels in a form that should worry the region's planners.

The first is that how much rate an event can extract depends on how full a market already is. New York, which would ordinarily have run at 89.4 per cent occupancy during those weeks, captured the largest rate gain in the study, $62.3 a night. Houston, with the lowest baseline at 61.2 per cent, captured one of the smallest, $17.1. A market that is nearly full in a normal week has nowhere to put extra demand except into price. A market with slack absorbs it and gains little.

The second is about location. Atlanta, whose stadium sits beside the city's main convention centre, recorded the smallest rate gain of all eleven, because tournament crowds displaced the conference business that would normally have filled those hotels. Seattle and Philadelphia, with similar geography, also underperformed. Kansas City, whose venue lies well away from its convention cluster, did far better than its ordinary occupancy predicted.

The third concerns who travels. Hazinski noted that teams from countries with smaller populations and less disposable income, naming Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire and Cabo Verde among them, generated comparatively few room nights, while France, England, Spain, Brazil and Argentina brought crowds. A World Cup in the United States and a Nations Cup in East Africa are different animals: most AFCON supporters can be expected to come from within Africa, many of them overland, and the distances are shorter. But the constraint is the same one. Supporters travel when they can afford to and when the border lets them, which is why Adamu spent part of Tuesday pressing Uganda's President on a visa that does not yet exist.

Put those findings against East Africa's calendar and AFCON 2027 turns out to be two different tournaments.

In Nairobi, Kampala and Dar es Salaam, the question is not whether there will be enough rooms. Museveni himself says Kampala has the facilities. The question is what hotels do with rate in the four weeks from 19 June, which is also the moment East Africa's safari high season opens and the city hotels start filling with guests on their way to the Mara, the Serengeti and Bwindi. Those guests, and the conference groups who use the same properties, are the ones who book early. Tournament visitors, on the American evidence, book late. Rosanna Maietta, chief executive of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, said in July that demand had picked up "consistent with a recent trend toward shorter booking windows for events of this caliber", because "many travelers finalized plans and secured tickets closer to the start of the games."

That is the trap. A Nairobi or Kampala hotel that holds rooms back for AFCON, or quotes tournament rates across the whole month, will be turning away its most reliable business in the autumn of 2026 in order to wait for customers who may not decide until the spring of 2027, and who may not come in the numbers the planners hope. Hazinski's demand destruction does not require a hotel to overprice on match night. It only requires a planner or a tour operator to see a high rate in the window and take the group, or the safari pre-night, somewhere else. East Africa has competitors for that business in a way Houston did not, and the buyers are already choosing: European operators were discussing AFCON itineraries with Ugandan sellers at IFTM Top Resa in Paris on 16 September.

Hoima is the other tournament, and it is Houston's problem turned inside out. There, the shortage is real. A CAF inspection report cited by the Daily Monitor, and repeated this week by the Kawowo columnist John Philip Mugabi, called for at least five five-star hotels of at least 50 rooms each for teams and officials. The response has been to build: seven hotels in Hoima and three in Masindi have been selected for official guests, one group is reportedly expanding its combined capacity from 102 rooms to 259, and government has set aside Shs101.1bn in cheap credit through the Uganda Development Bank for hotel upgrades in the two towns.

The HVS finding about baseline occupancy applies here too, in reverse. Rooms built for a four-week peak earn their keep in the forty-eight weeks that follow, and a market with a thin ordinary baseline is exactly the kind that captures little from an event and then carries the capacity afterwards. Mugabi, writing on Tuesday, framed the dilemma in a single question, "Where will everybody sleep?", before arguing for a modular accommodation village with a planned second life. "Build for the tournament, but design for the aftermath," he wrote. He also points to what makes Hoima unusual: an oil and gas economy that may supply the year-round demand a football tournament cannot. That is the right test for every new room going up in Bunyoro. The case has to close on the traffic of 2028, with AFCON treated as a bonus rather than the business plan.

For owners, the practical conclusions are unglamorous, which is usually a sign they are right. Look up your own occupancy for the last two Junes and Julys before deciding anything; the American evidence says that number, not the size of the crowd, determines how much rate you can take. Honour and protect the contracted safari, conference and group business in those weeks first, and price the match nights, and the nights before them, rather than the whole month. Put an event clause in 2027 group contracts now, so that a planner is not ambushed by a rate change and does not move the meeting to Kigali. Bush and beach properties should treat the tournament as a source of add-on nights for travelling supporters rather than a reason to reprice. And anyone building upcountry should underwrite the project on the year after the tournament, not the month of it.

None of the American numbers can be transplanted wholesale, and nobody yet knows how many supporters will cross East Africa's borders next June, least of all while the single visa remains a promise. But the lesson Houston's hoteliers learned the expensive way is available free of charge. A tournament does not fill a city. It tells the city's hotels what they can charge, and it punishes those that forget who was already sleeping there.