The World Cup Price Surge: Why Dallas Diners Might Pay More This Summer

Experts agree that the absolutely positively dumbest thing a Dallas-area restaurant can do during this summer’s World Cup is raise prices to take advantage of the millions of visitors, the captive audience to end all captive audiences.

So why are so many so worried that this is exactly what will happen? Call it a Texas-style World Cup price hike.

“That’s certainly not what we want anyone to do,” says Zane Harrington of Visit Dallas, the sales and marketing organization that promotes Dallas tourism, acknowledging that there has been talk about just that subject. “We want visitors to experience true Texas hospitality, and that certainly doesn’t involve raising prices like that.”

Brian King, Ph.D., head of the Alpin Department of Hospitality, Hotel Management and Tourism at Texas A&M University, recently spoke with the Observer about how restaurants should prepare for the influx of visitors.

“Food is a very important way to get people to want to come back and experience new things,” King told the Observer. “So even though they [restaurants] might think these are just one-off visitors, a large proportion of them will choose to come back and explore the destination again.

“So, that reputation, if you’re seen as ripping off the customers, then these days of social media, that will get around pretty fast.”

‘A Can of Worms’

Not surprisingly, it was not easy getting people to talk about this. That’s because, say those who would go on record, we should expect higher restaurant prices. This could include surge pricing from food delivery services trying to work around traffic jams, driver shortages and unusually high demand. There’s proof that struggling restaurants are coping with inflation, higher rents and declining sales. Could we see price hikes as a way to turn around their businesses within a month, regardless of the long-term damage they might cause?

Which means that even if you’re not going to the World Cup, don’t live anywhere near a match, or even care about what’s happening, that Saturday date night or Tuesday takeout Chinese could cost more. If it doesn’t show up as a $30 sesame chicken, it could take the form of a one-time fee, such as a surcharge or even a cover charge.

“You’re really opening a can of worms here,” says SMU Cox School of Business professor of marketing Venky Shankar, who prefers the term ‘price inflation’ to that of ‘price gouging.’ “It’s just not restaurants, either, but everyone in the hospitality industry who wants to profit from it. They see an opportunity to cash in. In the past, it’s reached unprecedented levels.”

In fact, says Shankar, none of this is very new, whether at Super Bowls dating to the early 2000s or the hotel industry’s ability to jack up prices at a moment’s notice. ESPN says host city hotel rates for the World Cup are up more than 300% since December, and reports from the 2026 Super Bowl saw headlines like, “Hotels and Airbnbs Are Making Bank by Gouging Super Bowl Visitors This Week.”

Even in Europe, where soccer is still a working-class tradition, there have been historically pricing issues. A Dutch report found that beer, wine and soft drink prices rose by at least one-third during the 2024 European Championships in Berlin.

The Good News

That’s the bad news. The good news is that a spokesperson for DoorDash and Grubhub told the Observer they had no plans to boost prices or add fees for the World Cup, and both emphasized that pricing was up to each restaurant. In fact, the GrubHub publicist went out of his way to stress the service’s current initiative to eliminate fees for orders of $50 or more.

However, says Shankar, that may not be practical given the added aggravations of doing business during the World Cup, in which the services will face increased demand but will be using systems that aren’t designed for the extra hundreds of thousands of tourists expected for the World Cup, be it enough drivers or massive website use. Hence, they may have to add fees to cut demand during peak hours; in other words, surge pricing.

Which means it may be time to hit that recipe website to find a couple of date night dinners, just in case.