In one week this summer, the average hotel room in San Diego went for 249.71 dollars. That is 12.6 percent above the same week last year, and revenue per available room in the city rose 22.8 percent to 201.10 dollars.

Nothing changed about the hotels. Same rooms, same beds, same breakfast that costs 28 dollars. What changed is that roughly 130,000 people needed to sleep within a few miles of one convention centre for four consecutive nights.

The industry calls this compression, and it is the single largest thing standing between you and a reasonable hotel rate. It is also, unlike most hotel pricing, entirely predictable.

What compression actually is

A compression night is a night when a hotel market runs so close to full that properties stop competing on price. Once a city crosses roughly 90 to 95 percent occupancy, a hotel that raises its rate does not lose the booking, because there is nowhere else for that booking to go.

That is the whole mechanism. Compression is not high demand. It is high demand meeting fixed supply on a specific date. Hotel rooms cannot be built for a weekend and cannot be stored, so when demand exceeds the room count, price is the only thing left that can move.

Rate premiums on compression nights have risen in all six US hotel classes every year since 2010, and they are currently the highest they have ever been. Major events push room rates 50 to 300 percent above the market baseline depending on the size of the event and how tight the local room count is.

Why the premium is bigger than the extra demand

An event that fills the last 8 percent of a city's rooms does not raise rates by 8 percent. It raises them by 60. Three things compound.

Rate fences come down. On a normal night, a hotel sells the same room at four or five different prices to different segments, with the cheapest requiring advance purchase or a corporate code. On a compression night the discounted buckets are simply closed. The rate you see is the last one standing, not a special event rate.

Length of stay requirements appear. Two and three night minimums are the standard tool. If the event needs one night and the hotel needs three, you are paying for two nights of hotel inventory management.

Group blocks eat the cheap inventory first. Group business is the thing most strongly associated with compression, and group rooms are contracted months or years ahead. By the time the public rate appears, the affordable half of the hotel is already committed. We looked at how this plays out in our piece on group block cutoffs and sold out hotels.

The result is that the same room in the same hotel can be 140 dollars on a Tuesday in March and 480 dollars on a Saturday in July, with no difference in what you receive.

The 2026 numbers

US hotels are having a strong year. For the week ending 15 August, occupancy was 68 percent, average daily rate was 163.56 dollars, and revenue per available room was 111.29 dollars. That was the eighteenth straight week of year over year gains. Full year RevPAR is now forecast to grow 4.4 percent, built on 1.7 percent demand growth and 3.1 percent rate growth.

Read those two numbers next to each other. Demand up 1.7 percent. Rate up 3.1 percent. Nearly twice as much of the gain is coming from price as from people. That is what a compression heavy year looks like.

April made the point plainly. Concerts and sporting events pushed weekend average daily rate to 184 dollars, the second highest weekend rate of the year, in a month with no holiday attached to it.

And it is loading up further. Los Angeles hosts eight FIFA World Cup matches, the NBA All Star Game, Super Bowl LXI and the Summer Olympics between 2026 and 2028. Every one of those generates compression nights across a metro area of 100,000 rooms.

Which events actually compress a market

Not all of them do, and the difference is worth knowing before you cancel a trip over a festival.

The events that move rates hardest share four features. They require an overnight stay, meaning the audience is not local. They are concentrated at one venue on fixed dates. They fill more rooms than the market has spare. And they run multiple nights.

Conferences are the worst offenders by that test. A 40,000 person industry conference in a mid sized city fills every downtown room for three nights with attendees who have expense accounts and no price sensitivity. Comic Con does exactly this to San Diego every July, which is why the city posted the numbers above.

Stadium concerts are second. Big tours now sell out multiple nights in the same city, and a two night stand turns a single spike into a full weekend of compression across the metro area, not just downtown.

Marathons and endurance events are underrated. Fifty thousand runners plus family, all arriving Friday and leaving Sunday, all needing to be near a start line.

Single day sporting events with a mostly local crowd barely register. A regular season game moves rates by a few percent. A championship final moves them by triple digits.

How to check before you book

This takes about two minutes and saves more money than any other pre booking step.

Search the city name plus your month plus the word convention. Every convention centre publishes its calendar. If a 30,000 person event overlaps your dates, you have found your answer.

Check the arena and stadium schedules. Both are public. You are looking for anything with a name attached to it that you recognise.

Look for a rate cliff. Price your hotel across seven consecutive nights. Normal pricing rises gently into the weekend. Compression shows up as a wall, where three nights cost double the four around them. That wall is an event, and you did not need to know which one.

Check the minimum stay. If a two or three night minimum appears on dates where it did not exist a week either side, the property is managing compression.

What to actually do about it

Four moves, in rough order of how much they save.

Move by one day. The single most effective adjustment. Compression is sharply date bound, and rates on the night before an event load in are often half the rate on the night after. Arriving Wednesday instead of Thursday can cut a four night stay by 30 percent.

Move two miles. Compression radiates outward from the venue and weakens fast. In most US markets the premium drops by half once you are outside the immediate downtown core, and transit or a short ride costs far less than the difference. This works less well in dense European cities where the whole centre compresses at once.

Book long before or short after. The cheap inventory for a known event goes eight to twelve months out. After that, prices only rise until the last 48 hours, when unsold rooms occasionally reprice downward. That late window is a gamble and it fails often. Our guide to how hotel dynamic pricing works explains why.

Take a flexible rate and rebook. Compression pricing is set by an algorithm making a demand forecast. Forecasts are wrong regularly. Holding a flexible booking and re pricing weekly costs nothing and catches the corrections.

On the last point, this is where cashback does real work. A compression rate is high by definition, and 10 percent of a high number is a large number. A 480 dollar Saturday night through Best returns 48 dollars, which is most of the difference between the compressed rate and the one two miles out. It does not undo compression. It does take the edge off the nights you cannot avoid.

Questions we get asked

What is a compression night in hotels? A night when a market runs near full occupancy, typically above 90 percent, and hotels stop discounting because demand exceeds the total room supply. Rates on compression nights commonly run 50 to 300 percent above the market baseline.

Why did my hotel rate double for one weekend? Almost always an event. Check the local convention centre, arena and stadium calendars for your dates. A rate that doubles for two or three nights and returns to normal either side is the clearest signal of event driven compression.

How far in advance should I book around a major event? Eight to twelve months for anything with a fixed date and a large out of town audience. The affordable inventory is allocated to group blocks and early bookers well before the general public starts looking.

Does staying outside the city centre help? In most US markets, yes, and substantially. The compression premium typically halves once you are beyond the immediate downtown core. In compact European city centres the effect is weaker because the whole centre compresses together.

Are hotel prices going up in 2026? Yes, moderately. US average daily rate is forecast to rise 3.1 percent for the full year with RevPAR up 4.4 percent. More of that growth is coming from rate than from demand, which means the increases are concentrated on high demand dates rather than spread evenly.

Images: Hero by Jack Gittoes via Pexels. City hotels at sunset by Harun UZ via Pexels. Conference hall by Lf Asia via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.