>>> Nike Jersey Prices Hit £95 as Fans Face Record High Costs Ahead of Tournament
I think if you tried to get it now, you could get a deal," Marcum said.
Atlanta Also Sees Booking Slump
A parallel booking slump is impacting metro Atlanta, where data from the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau shows only 240,000 rooms have been reserved in downtown, Midtown, and Buckhead.
This figures trails behind the 323,000 nights booked during the same period last summer.
Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau CEO William Tate explained that a delayed ticket rollout squeezed the reservation timeline.
"We ended up in a much shorter booking window, driven by a lot of different decisions. One.
FIFA didn't distribute the tickets, complete the ticket distribution until the end of April, and so we had a much shorter booking window than we have for usual major events," Tate said.
Tate stated that occupancy will likely mirror the match schedule rather than sustaining a constant maximum capacity throughout the month.
"People are coming in a couple of days before the game.
We peak on the game day, it drops back down, starts to build again and that's how the first five matches look.
Then you get to the back end where we have the knockout rounds and the semifinals, in which case we probably are going to have wall-to-wall people," Tate said.
In response to recent high-profile violent incidents on local transit lines, Tate noted that hospitality officials have finalized comprehensive safety protocols.
