World Cup May Complicate Lives of Vacationers

CHICAGO — A warning for business travelers: If you need a hotel room in Boston, New York, Washington or San Francisco in the next four months, book it now.

The World Cup--soccer’s quadrennial global extravaganza--is coming.

Bob Diener, president of Dallas-based Hotel Reservations Network, said the Cup games on top of the usual spring and early summer travel activity threaten to make hotel rooms in those four cities particularly scarce and expensive.

Diener’s company is the nation’s largest booker of discount hotel rooms, last year handling 300,000 room nights in 20 major U.S. cities as well as London and Paris.

While the Cup will be played out in nine U.S. cities over the course of a month beginning June 17, with the opening match in Chicago, the four cities Diener mentioned are particularly tight, in part because they are already popular tourist venues.

“Boston is very tight,” he said. “It’s about half sold out for the month of April and it will be totally sold out much of May, June, July and August.”

The Cup crunch will be big in New York, Washington and San Francisco as well as Boston, he said.

The other Cup cities--Orlando, Detroit, Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles--will not be as much affected, Diener said. The hotel business in Los Angeles, for example, is still suffering the economic aftershocks of the deadly Northridge earthquake in January.