Madrid prepared for months for a weekend of full hotels due to the return of the Formula 1 to the capital after 45 years, but the photograph immediately before the Spanish Grand Prix was quite different from what was expected. Until Wednesday, September 9, just two days before the start of the activity at Madring, reservations covered approximately 70% of hotel beds, far from the 95% that the sector had come to anticipate a month earlier.
The problem was not the lack of spectators. The circuit sold out tickets and forecasts pointed to about 345,000 attendees throughout the weekend, with more than 80,000 visitors from outside the Community of Madrid and around 45,000 arriving from other countries. However, that demand did not end up translating to the hotels in the way that many establishments had expected.
The explanation lies, to a large extent, in how the official accommodation for the event had been organized beforehand.
Thousands of rooms were blocked months in advance
Match Hospitality Europe, the official accommodation and hospitality provider for Madring, had closed agreements months in advance to reserve thousands of beds in Madrid hotels. The goal was to have enough inventory to cater to the clients of the Grand Prix and market packages that combined tickets for the race and accommodation.
For a hotel, blocking a room essentially means temporarily removing it from ordinary sale because an intermediary has the right to use it within an agreed quota. This practice is common in congresses, sports competitions, and major international events: it allows the organizer to guarantee accommodation before knowing exactly which clients will end up occupying it.
Hoteliers accepted the agreements taking into account, in addition, the international experience of Match Hospitality, which has worked in major competitions and sporting events. The scenario seemed favorable: sold-out tickets, high arrival of foreign tourists, and expectations that Madrid would practically hang the fully booked sign.
What happened: a significant part returned to the market two weeks before
The problem appeared approximately two weeks before the Grand Prix. Match Hospitality returned a significant part of the rooms it had blocked to the hotels, according to sources from various chains consulted by Cinco Días.
This does not necessarily mean that there was a “mass cancellation” of specific fans. What is credited is that the official provider released hotel inventory that had previously been reserved, so those rooms became available again for each establishment to try to sell them directly.
The difficulty was the chosen moment. Just a few days before the race, many travelers who had planned to travel to Madrid had already organized their accommodation, whether in other hotels, tourist apartments, temporary rental homes, or private residences. The establishments thus received back hundreds or thousands of rooms when there was very little margin left to find new customers.
The hotels in the center withstood the blow better thanks to their usual tourist demand, while the establishments located outside the more central areas had greater difficulties in rebooking the rooms. “Except for the hotels in the center, the rest have run out of margin to sell them,” summarized an executive in the sector.
Prices of up to 1,000 euros per night
The late release also coincided with another factor: the hotels had significantly raised prices hoping for extraordinary demand.
SiteMinder, a platform specialized in hotel commerce, analyzed more than 13,000 reservations and placed the average rate for stays between September 10 and 13 at 485 euros per night, compared to 286 euros for the same period in 2025. The increase was 69.6%.
In practice, prices varied enormously depending on the category. During the days leading up to the Grand Prix, rooms could be found for between 200 and 400 euros in lower-category establishments, while some high-end hotels ranged between 500 and 1,000 euros per night.
The rates do not imply that all guests paid those amounts or that all hotels applied identical increases, but they do help explain why it was difficult to place the released rooms at the last minute.
Tourist homes took advantage of part of the demand
While hotels dealt with those rooms that unexpectedly returned to the market, alternative accommodation platforms registered strong interest.
Booking accounted for a 41% more accommodation searches in Madrid for the weekend of September 11 to 13 compared to the same period in 2025. Spaniards represented 37% of those searches, followed by Argentine travelers, with 15%, and Italians, with 14%.
The price difference, the possibility of sharing apartments among several attendees, and the existence of offers near areas connected to IFEMA may have made these alternatives competitive against hotels that had significantly raised their rates.
However, it cannot be concluded that tourist accommodations alone explain the 30% of hotel rooms that remained free: the Booking data measures searches, not actual occupancy, and part of them also corresponds to hotels marketed through the platform itself.
Formula 1 also displaced other events from that weekend
There is another less visible element. The Grand Prix filled Madrid with fans, but at the same time caused other events to avoid coinciding with the race, reducing part of the demand that would normally have occupied rooms.
The Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Madrid postponed its celebration by a week, while numerous conferences and business meetings did the same or moved their dates forward. A hotel executive explained that many companies were simply not willing to pay two or three times the usual prices to hold their meetings during the Formula 1 weekend.
The Vuelta a España also avoided finishing this year in Madrid during the same weekend. All of this means that Formula 1 generated new tourist demand, but simultaneously displaced part of the conventional activity that would have taken place in the city.
It is one of the reasons why economists recommend distinguishing between gross economic impact and additional wealth: part of the spending generated by a large event can substitute for, and not necessarily add to, other activities.
From a forecast of 95% to reaching the race with 70%
The situation was particularly striking due to the initial expectations. Just a month earlier, some hoteliers expected to achieve occupancies close to 95%, driven by the return of Formula 1, sold-out tickets, and the expected arrival of tens of thousands of international visitors.
But by the Wednesday before the race, reservations were still around 70%. That percentage should not be interpreted as the definitive occupancy for the entire weekend: last-minute reservations were still to come in and the data came from information shared among hotel executives before the Grand Prix officially began.
It does show, however, that the expected explosion of demand did not occur uniformly across the Madrid hotel sector.
A grand prix with an estimated impact of 467 million, but not everyone wins equally
The contrast does not necessarily invalidate the overall economic forecasts for the event. A study by PwC commissioned around the project estimates an economic impact of 467 million euros, nearly 8,850 jobs and about 83 million in tax revenue and contributions associated with the Grand Prix.
Restaurants, nightlife, transportation, and commerce expect to capture a good part of that spending. The hotels themselves also benefit from rates significantly higher than those of an ordinary weekend in September, especially those that managed to fill their rooms.
But the experience of this first edition leaves a lesson for the future. Blocking thousands of beds guarantees availability for a major event, but it also transfers part of the risk to the hotel if those spots return to the market too late.
That is precisely what happened in Madrid: establishments reserved capacity for months for the official provider and part of it returned to their hands about two weeks before the race. By then, prices were at their peak and a good part of the fans already had somewhere to sleep.
The result was a paradox: Madring sold out tickets and brought hundreds of thousands of people to the circuit, but Madrid arrived at the Grand Prix with a significant portion of its rooms still empty. The first year of Formula 1 thus leaves a lesson that goes beyond the track: in major events, having guaranteed demand is as important as knowing when to release the supply.