Football is the sport of choice and a true passion for many Europeans, and the UEFA European Football Championship brings together the best teams from many European countries to compete for the title of the best football team in Europe. Rome was selected to host the inauguration ceremony, which Rome’s Mayor, Virginia Raggi, called a “symbol of a new beginning.”

Mayor Raggi was right, as the event seemed to be a catalyst for the restart of domestic travel to Rome. Evidence of the renaissance of increased interest in travel to Rome is shown clearly, as the above chart demonstrates, in the number of searches for overnight hotel stays in Rome increased drastically in the days leading up to and during the inauguration and inaugural match.

On Friday June 11, the inaugural match was played at the Olympic Stadium, which only admitted a maximum of 15,958 spectators, which represents 25% of the stadium’s total capacity due to COVID-19 restrictions. After the event ended, searches for hotels in Rome have decreased but still remain at a much more elevated level when compared to the week prior to the event, which (hopefully) indicates an ongoing interest in travel to Rome – though we will have to wait and see if that demand manifests, over time.

About Destination
Destination is a market intelligence project created by Lybra – developers of the most complete, machine learning, data-centric Revenue Management System (RMS) available on the market – to share real-time, region-specific statistics, information and trends in the world of tourism.

Every day, Lybra analyzes millions of datasets – data collected from thousands of hotels’ PMS and flight search data from a leading metasearch booking engine – to help hoteliers “look ahead to better understand the present;” in other words, Lybra helps hoteliers understand the upcoming demand for their destination and gives them the revenue management tools and actionable insights necessary, to maximize bookings and revenue.

The aim of Destination is to give hoteliers and DMOs a more expansive view of tourism news and trends in different regions around the world. Destination produces weekly Travel Demand Reports, which share tourism developments for a specific country/region and analyze how the region’s travel news has impacted tourist demand. Follow Destination on LinkedIn to gain access to the upcoming Travel Demand Reports, which are published every Tuesday.