We just got back from the NYC Tourism & Conventions Annual Meeting, and we’re still processing. Not because the information was surprising (a lot of what we heard confirmed what we’ve been seeing in our own work), but because hearing it named out loud, in a room full of hotels and restaurants and attractions and hospitality leaders all wrestling with the same questions, made it feel more real and more urgent.

The FIFA World Cup is coming to New York. A K-shaped tourism recovery is actively reshaping who’s in the city and what they’re willing to spend. And the infrastructure being built to connect visitors to live experiences is, right now, being designed around AI. These aren’t trends on the horizon. They’re trends to act on.

Here’s what we took away.

No phrase came up more in that room than “World Cup,” which makes sense given the scale of what’s heading to this region. But what made the conversation genuinely useful was the specificity. The NYC & New Jersey host committee and NYC Tourism & Conventions aren’t just talking about the opportunity. They’re building the infrastructure that will route visitors to businesses like our clients’, and there’s a concrete action item attached to it.

The city is developing an app with conversational AI functionality, think ChatGPT or Gemini, that FIFA visitors will use to navigate their time here: getting to and from the stadium, finding somewhere to eat between matches, discovering fan experiences around the city. The data powering those recommendations pulls directly from Google Business Profiles. Which means if your profile isn’t current, if it’s missing hours or a description of what you’re specifically doing for the World Cup, you’re invisible to that system before a single visitor even arrives.

And it’s not just the app. The data on how much AI is already embedded in how people plan trips before they leave home is impossible to ignore at this point. A significant and growing share of travelers are using AI tools to research and build their itineraries in advance. The World Cup app is one very visible manifestation of a shift that’s already well underway. So the preparation isn’t really about any single tool. It’s about making sure every surface where someone could discover you is sharp, current, and gives them a reason to choose you. If you’re running something special for the tournament, that needs to be findable. If you’re an air-conditioned venue where someone could watch a match, that’s a feature worth publishing.

A lot of our clients are already deep in conversations about AI optimization across their channels, and this is the moment to stop treating it as a future project. The influx is coming. The window between now and June is the time to make sure your business is in the best possible shape to be found.

One of the frameworks the meeting kept returning to was the K-shaped recovery of tourism. The shape describes two simultaneous trends moving in opposite directions: the luxury, high-propensity-to-spend traveler is growing, while the budget-conscious traveler is pulling back. It wasn’t presented as a revelation — it’s been visible for a while — but hearing it named and validated across the full hospitality ecosystem added urgency.

It’s also exactly what we’ve been seeing in our own campaign data. Premium and VIP ticket sales are trending up. Express passes. Premium seating. Exclusive add-ons. Anything that makes a trip easier, more personal, more special, or honestly more Instagram-worthy: those are the products that are moving. The traveler who is here and spending right now is not shopping for the baseline experience. They’re looking for a moment.

That’s as much a product question as it is a media one. It’s worth asking whether, across a range of price points, your organization could offer things that create those moments. Even for a more budget-conscious visitor, a small, memorable detail that makes a first trip feel elevated is what brings them back. The goal is to find those moments at every level and then make sure you’re marketing them to the right person.

On the media side, we’ve been testing high household income audience targeting as a layer in certain campaigns and seeing real returns. There’s a ceiling, and this isn’t an all-in strategy, and the budget-conscious audience isn’t one to abandon. But knowing who’s in the city and who’s spending, it’s a layer worth considering if it isn’t already in your mix.

One of the more thought-provoking things NYC Tourism & Conventions shared was their own segmentation framework for who comes to the city: Moment Makers, Navigators, Freestylers, and Neighbors. It’s a genuinely interesting lens and a good reminder that the industry is thinking about visitors in a more nuanced way than the usual buckets of families, couples, domestic versus international.

The more useful question for us is the overlap question. How do the audiences we’re already targeting for our clients map onto these four categories? Are there behaviors we haven’t yet explored because we weren’t framing visitors that way? It’s a strong thought-starter, especially when trying to figure out how to reach both locals and tourists in the same campaign without one diluting the other. At minimum, it’s something to bring back to the team and let it complicate your assumptions a little.

This one is easy to nod at and then forget the moment you go back to your desk. But being in a room with people who represent every borough, every neighborhood, the full map of what a visitor’s trip actually looks like, it recalibrates something. People don’t fly to New York for a block. They come for the whole thing. The question for all of us isn’t just why someone should come to what we’re selling. It’s how what we’re selling fits into the larger trip they’re on.

The World Cup makes this especially concrete. The matches are at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. The fan experiences are distributed throughout the five boroughs. This is not a Times Square event. Visitors are going to be more mobile than they might typically be, moving between the city and the stadium, bouncing between neighborhoods. That mobility is an opportunity if you’re thinking about where your venue or your show sits within that geography: where people are coming from before they get to you, and where they’re going next. That context matters more during a moment like this than almost any other time.

1. Audit your Google Business Profile and add World Cup-specific content now. The tools being built to surface New York businesses to FIFA visitors pull from this data. If it’s out of date, you’re out of the conversation.
2. Review your campaign audience layers. If you haven’t tested high household income targeting, this is the window. The data on who’s spending in New York right now supports it.
3. Look at your product offering through the lens of the luxury traveler and the visitor who wants to feel like one. Are there moments in your experience you could make more personal, more exclusive, more worth talking about? If yes, build them before the crowds arrive.

Jeff Miele is Account Group Director at Situation, overseeing experiential entertainment clients. Mara Koss is Business Intelligence Analyst at Situation. Want to talk through what any of this means for your World Cup strategy? Get in touch.