Since 2020, Airbnb has entered into two significant agreements – a long-term partnership with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), covering the 2020 to 2028 period, and a three-year deal with FIFA, for the 2025-2027 commercial cycle.
Over this period, Airbnb is sponsoring three summer Olympics, two winter Olympics, a Club World Cup, and two World Cups. These deals, in particular, move Airbnb from being “just” a travel marketplace to a scaled, strategically embedded partner for the world’s biggest events.
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Over recent years, Airbnb has become increasingly popular for major sports partnerships, challenging traditional hotel dominance by providing scalable, community-driven, and cost-effective accommodation for massive, transient audiences. There is a significant trend toward immersive, authentic local experiences over traditional travel.
Airbnb leverages this by offering not just accommodations but also curated fan experiences and unique activities tied to major sports events. Millennials and Gen Z, in particular, are seeking travel inspiration through social media, favouring brands like Airbnb that enable individualised and shareable experiences, sometimes away from typical hotel districts.
Sport is increasingly being packaged as a comprehensive travel and experience offering, rather than merely a ticketed event, while hotels are being compelled to compete through differentiation by bundling transportation, convenience, amenities, and event-driven programming, rather than relying primarily on scarcity-driven pricing during peak tournament periods.
Airbnb and Milano Cortina Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games 2026
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By GlobalDataAirbnb’s $500 million, nine-year partnership with the IOC, activated in time for Tokyo 2020, represents a major shift in how the Olympics and other mega sports events approach hospitality. Instead of relying on large-scale hotel construction or temporary event-only accommodation, the deal encourages host cities to use existing homes and short-term rentals, spreading visitor demand across a wider area.
This supports a more distributed and potentially more sustainable hosting model by reducing pressure to build new infrastructure that may be underused after the games.
A central element of the partnership is the Airbnb Athlete Travel Grant. By the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, the programme had reached its fifth edition, offering up to 1,000 grants of $2,000 for eligible athletes to use toward Airbnb accommodation.
The grant was valid for 12 months, with summer and winter sport athletes encouraged to apply, and was designed to help cover travel costs for training and competitions in the lead up to the Olympic and Paralympic Games. In addition, the Airbnb500 initiative provided $500 to athletes competing at Milano Cortina 2026, intended to support post games recovery or be put toward a training camp after competition.
This matters as many Olympic and Paralympic athletes are partially or fully self-funded. Accommodation is often one of the biggest travel expenses, so the grant provides practical financial relief, allowing athletes to prioritise preparation and performance rather than budgeting pressures. Airbnb stays can also better match athletes’ needs than traditional hotels.
Access to kitchens supports specialised nutrition plans, and amenities such as laundry, additional space, and privacy can improve recovery and mental well-being. Being able to stay closer to training or competition venues can also reduce commute times and improve day-to-day routine during high-performance periods.
The broader impact on the event hospitality model is visible in demand signals around the games. Airbnb’s Winter 2026 Travel Report indicated that Italy rose to the top of global winter travel searches, with the strongest growth in the official host regions of Lombardy, Trentino, South Tyrol, and Veneto. Notably, Lombardy recorded triple-digit year-on-year increases in searches linked to Olympic interest.
These results show how Airbnb is reshaping sports event hospitality by shifting capacity planning from purpose-built infrastructure to flexible distributed inventory, while also embedding athlete support directly into the accommodation ecosystem.
Airbnb and FIFA World Cup 2026
In 2025, it was announced that Airbnb had agreed a three-year deal with FIFA, worth an estimated $25 million annually. As part of the deal, Airbnb was the official alternative accommodations and experiences booking platform of the FIFA Club World Cup in 2025 and is a supporter of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in North America and the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Brazil. Airbnb will be providing accommodation options in cities where hotels may already be fully booked.
The FIFA World Cup 2026 is set to be a major event for the tourism sector across North America, spanning 16 cities in the USA, Canada, and Mexico. Hosting the projected millions of visitors will require the region’s full lodging capacity, including both traditional hotels and the short-term rental market, like Airbnb, which has expanded by utilising existing housing.
The 2025 FIFA Club World Cup served as a trial for the three-year partnership. The 2025 tournament allowed Airbnb to test “official fan accommodation” and soccer-themed experiences before the 2026 World Cup. Given that the tournament is expected to receive several million visitors, this trial run was vital in terms of logistics and ensuring enough housing for an unprecedented surge of visitors.
As of February 2026, Airbnb is introducing a $750 incentive to attract new hosts in the 16 North American cities where 2.1 million visitors are expected to arrive in North America over the summer; this is the company’s largest-ever incentive for new hosts. However, Airbnb must boost rental supply as it aims to secure more listings for the tournament. The incentive is a direct response to highly anticipated demand, and currently, rental supply in certain host cities may be insufficient.
The fact that Airbnb needs to quickly add more rentals suggests that hotels in these cities can’t handle all the extra visitors during big events, which often leads to hotels selling out fast and charging much higher prices.
Airbnb’s partnership with FIFA shows how platforms are becoming part of major event delivery, not just advertising. By combining accommodation with curated experiences, Airbnb can help shape the full fan journey – where visitors stay, what they do, and how they spend, while creating revenue beyond tickets and hotels.
This matters for the 2026 World Cup because it spans 16 host cities across three countries, causing uneven demand and stretching hotel capacity, transport, and visitor services. Airbnb is able to add supply through existing homes and steer demand through an official channel, helping prevent lodging shortages while affecting local prices, economies, and crowd patterns. Overall, it makes accommodation a key tool for managing the event and engaging sports fans at scale.
