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ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Hotel revenue in Alexandria went from down 9.9% year over year through January to up 3% through June, Visit Alexandria told City Council on Tuesday, a reversal the organization attributed to a summer of major events and a marketing campaign launched in February.
The measure is revenue per available room, which Vice President of Marketing and Research Vito Fiore described as the industry's standard gauge of lodging performance. Since March, Alexandria has ranked first or second among the state's 25 hotel submarkets in RevPAR growth every month.
Two other numbers moved. Average length of stay rose from 2.0 to 2.3 days, and the share of visitors staying overnight, meaning those traveling more than 50 miles, rose from 77.1% to 82.2%.
"That means more room nights for our hotels, but it also means more people eating at our restaurants, shopping at our shops, taking our tours," Fiore said, adding that longer stays give visitors time to reach neighborhoods beyond Old Town.
A year of declines first
The recovery followed a difficult 2025. Fiore said the region absorbed double-digit RevPAR declines through most of last year, driven by uncertainty around the federal budget and new federal policy. Group business, which he said generally means meetings and events, took the worst of it, with leisure travel down more modestly.
A chart Fiore presented tracking the two separately shows how sharp that was. Group revenue fell roughly 27% year over year in March 2025 and stayed negative for most of the year. It swung to a gain of about 46% in March 2026, the largest month on the chart. Leisure travel followed a similar path with smaller swings, then overtook group in July, up about 42%.
January comparisons were also distorted. A spike in January 2025 came largely from the presidential inauguration and the hotel demand it pushed into the region, which made the following January look worse by comparison.
The turn came in February, and by summer the year-over-year gains were running 15% to 30% and higher. Occupancy topped 90% during the Sails on the Potomac weekend and again over the Fourth of July.
What the city was selling
Visit Alexandria launched its Unlock Your Story campaign in February. CEO Todd O'Leary said the campaign generated 46 million impressions and 3.7 million video views, with an engagement rate nine percentage points higher than the year before, and that page views on the campaign's landing page grew 150%. The organization has more than 450 member businesses.
The two anchor events were the World Cup and the nation's 250th anniversary.
Croatia chose Alexandria in January from more than 60 possible base camps, after a federation delegation visited eight sites in the northeastern U.S. and Canada and coach Zlatko Dalić and his staff picked the city unanimously. The team trained at Episcopal High School and stayed at the hotel then known as AKA, now the Satire, and opened its camp in June before hundreds of local children, with the Alexandria City High School band performing and Mayor Alyia Gaskins presenting a gift to technical director Stipe Pletikosa. Watch parties followed at bars and restaurants around the city as the team played its group matches in Dallas, Toronto and Philadelphia. John Malkovich took part in a Croatian cultural showcase at the team's hotel.
The city also ran a Croatian stamp exhibit, a Flavors and Sounds of Croatia event and a community training session, and hosted Ghana. O'Leary said the arrangement produced a tourism summit between the two countries.
For America 250, the largest event was Sails on the Potomac in mid-June, which brought three tall ships to the city alongside the Providence. City Manager James Parajon credited O'Leary's team with the Croatia partnership, saying it would not have happened without it.
The numbers O'Leary promised in June
As Croatia prepared to leave in late June, O'Leary told The Brief that hotel data would arrive within a few weeks and a fuller economic read, including transportation and food-and-beverage spending, by year's end. Tuesday's presentation was the first public installment.
He was candid then that much of the value would resist measurement. Hosting a closed-camp national team is an unusual assignment for a tourism bureau, which normally deals in ticketed, countable events. The bureau's international marketing budget, he said, is a fraction of what a city like Washington can spend, and a month in the global World Cup conversation was "exposure that money can't buy."
Episcopal, which beat out professional and collegiate training grounds for the base camp, did not build anything for the team. Director of auxiliary programs Dan O'Neil told The Brief in June that the school's fields are maintained the same way regardless, and that hosting Al Ain FC during the 2025 Club World Cup served as a dry run.
The year without tentpoles
The figures cover a fiscal year with two events the current one does not have. Visit Alexandria's fiscal 2027 began July 1 without the World Cup or the America 250 celebrations, and O'Leary said in June that the central marketing question for the year ahead is how to sustain the momentum in their absence.
He said Tuesday that more detail will come at the bureau's annual meeting, which this year marks its 30th anniversary as a standalone destination organization.
Why council was hearing it
The presentation was the first of four city manager reports Tuesday and part of a State of the Economy series council added last year to the first legislative meeting of each month.
Mayor Alyia Gaskins tied the figures back to the budget, recalling that declines in hotel stays and visitor spending were a concern during last year's deliberations.
"To be able to see a correlation between the events we're investing in, how we're bringing in more people, getting those longer stays, and then hopefully continuing to generate more and more revenue for the needs of our city is really important," she said.
Council members asked no questions.
The report was one of two economic snapshots the city put out Tuesday. The Alexandria Economic Development Partnership released its mid-year market report the same morning, showing office vacancy down to 18.8% from 21.6% a year earlier, with negative net absorption of 160,400 square feet.
Ryan Belmore is an Alexandria resident and the founder and publisher of The Alexandria Brief. Send tips, feedback, and story ideas to ryan@alexandriabrief.com.
