The Opportunity
Baylor football weekends represent a recurring demand driver for Waco, Texas, but the full visitor and lodging influence can be difficult to isolate through a single metric. Game attendance, hotel performance, short-term rental demand, visitor origins, and overlapping local events all contribute to the bigger picture. Waco needed a clearer view of how home games influence lodging activity and broader destination demand throughout the season.
The Strategy
Rather than looking only at attendance or hotel occupancy, the analysis compared multiple layers of performance across the 2025 Baylor football season: game weekends day-before and game-day performance, short-term rental
activity, opponent type, attendance patterns, and domestic visitor behavior. A more complete view of how football weekends affect Waco’s visitor economy took shape.
Where We Came In
Tourism Economics used Symphony to bring together hotel, short-term rental, game attendance, and visitor datasets into a more 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. By connecting these sources, we translated game-day activity into the true story about lodging demand, visitor behavior, and destination opportunity.
The Results
The analysis showed that Baylor home games:
- Drove stronger lodging performance across both hotels and short-term rentals, even as average home game attendance declined post-COVID.
- Generated stronger hotel occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, demand, and revenue on game weekends than on comparable non-game weekends.
- Average game day RevPAR grew +20% YOY, followed by day before growth at +17% YOY.
- Average game day ADR recorded a change of +22% YOY, followed by day before at +17% YOY.
- Performed especially well on combined event weekends (i.e., family weekend)
- Generated stronger hotel revenue and ADR during games against non-Texas opponents despite slightly lower stadium attendance.
Hotel Weekend Averages (Aug-Nov):
Short-Term Rental Weekend Averages (Aug-Nov):
The Takeaway
For Waco, Baylor football consistently lifted lodging performance, but the strongest opportunities emerged around specific moments: season openers, family weekend, homecoming, and overlapping local events. Home game weekends outperformed non-game weekends across key lodging metrics, and non-Texas opponents generated stronger hotel revenue even when stadium attendance was lower.
This insight—extracted by the Symphony team—serves as a planning tool. With the right measurement, destinations can identify the weekends most likely to drive visitation, align marketing and partner activity around those moments, and build stronger strategies to capture the full value of event-driven travel.
