How Baylor Football Weekends Drive Waco’s Visitor Economy
Baylor football weekends are a recurring demand driver for Waco, Texas, but their full impact on visitors and lodging can be hard to isolate through a single metric. Game attendance, hotel performance, short-term rental demand, visitor origins, and overlapping local events all shape the bigger picture. Waco needed a clearer view of how home games influence lodging activity and broader destination demand throughout the season.
Rather than relying on attendance or hotel occupancy alone, the analysis examined multiple layers of performance across the 2025 Baylor football season, including day-before and game-day trends, short-term rental activity, opponent type, attendance patterns, and domestic visitor behavior. Together, these layers created a more complete view of how football weekends affect Waco’s visitor economy.
Tourism Economics used Symphony to bring together hotel, short-term rental, game attendance, and visitor datasets into one actionable view of game-day influence. The analysis incorporated STR Weekly hotel data, Key Data short-term rental performance for Airbnb and Vrbo, ESPN attendance data, and domestic visitor insights from Symphony, Azira, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Connecting these sources revealed the true story behind lodging demand, visitor behavior, and destination opportunity.
The Result
Baylor home games drove stronger lodging performance across both hotels and short-term rentals, even as average attendance declined post-COVID. Hotel occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, demand, and revenue all outperformed comparable non-game weekends, with average game-day RevPAR up 20% year over year and ADR up 22%. Combined event weekends, like family weekend, performed especially well, and games against non-Texas opponents generated stronger hotel revenue and ADR despite slightly lower stadium attendance.
