Chicago
Q4 2025 total daily cost: $442
Average daily hotel cost: $265
Average daily car rental cost: $60
Average daily dining cost: $117
Total cost change from Q3 2025: -7.6%
Negotiating Game: Chicago’s quarter-over-quarter
costs for corporate travel per diems were down in the final quarter of 2025, but
that decline may be deceptive. A cursory look might assume U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement agents on the ground in the city from Sept. 8 through Dec.
31 put a drag on the city’s booking volumes. Conversely, however, the drop
appears to be a correction coming off sky-high occupancy and leisure
event-fueled hotel demand and pricing surges that rippled through the city in
the summer months and pushed the full-year demand picture up 2.3 percent
compared to 2024.
While ICE’s high-profile Chicago occupation hit some
neighborhoods harder than others, and particularly the city’s diverse dining
scene, Choose Chicago CEO Kristen Reynolds said the hospitality industry at
large barely registered an economic impact from the federal deportation
campaign. What is less clear, she
said in a local public media WEBZ news report, however, is how the highly
publicized ICE raids may have damaged Chicago’s image. Those perceptions “can
linger for years to come,” she said.
The Approach: Weekend surges around events fueled
Chicago’s advances. K-pop stars Blackpink coupled with the Nike Tournament of
Champions tour both hit the city the weekend of July 18-19, providing the
one-two punch for Chicago’s highest-grossing weekend for hoteliers. But the
city recognizes the role business events—at the convention center and at
hotels—play in the overall mix. Reynolds pointed out in a WEBZ News interview
that business conventions and collections of hotel-based meetings underpin
those higher profile events to boost Chicago’s hotel demand.
McCormick Place Convention Center in Q4 welcomed more than
21,000 water quality professionals to the annual WEFTEC convention in late
September, bridging hotel occupancy rates into the first week of October. This
year has begun with strong events at the convention center. Earlier this month,
the Chicago Auto Show welcomed nearly 260,000 attendees—about 10,000 more than
last year—and the city’s major convention center and larger hotels have big
bookings throughout the year, including the International Manufacturing
Technology Show, which is the largest manufacturing technology trade show in
the western hemisphere. It will take place in September. Choose Chicago has
reported strong future event bookings, surpassing its goals for the number of
events booked by nearly 50 percent. Not all those events will take place in
2026, however.
Keep In Mind: With the surge-based nature of leisure
bookings around large events, the city’s hotel community values transient
business travel commitments to provide steady midweek occupancy. Corporate
travel buyers, however, are unlikely to unearth bargains. Total travelers
through O’Hare International Airport jumped 6.3 percent through November compared
to the same period last year, according to the Chicago Department of Aviation.
The message overall is that Chicago continues to buck more generalized tourism
trends that have seen airport volume and hotel occupancy dips in other major
U.S. cities.
What’s Happening in Chicago
With robust business and leisure volume holding up, Chicago
is investing in some big projects. The biggest is a new $1.3 billion concourse
at Chicago O’Hare International Airport. Construction on Concourse D—the first
of two satellite concourses—broke ground in August and will include 19 new gates for narrowbody aircraft, with 18 of those gates to be
flexible to transform into 9 larger ports for widebody aircraft. The concourse is slated to include 20,000 square feet of airline lounge space and 30,000 square
feet of commercial space. It is set to open in 2028. There are future plans to
construct a 24-gate Concourse E and an underground tunnel to connect the
expanded facilities to the main airport. All this is part of a $8.2 billion
Terminal Area Plan, which includes closing O’Hare’s Terminal 2 and building a
new Global Terminal
A December update to that plan scrambled the sequencing of
the project, which called for building the Global Terminal as the second major
construction. The city now says it needs to build both satellite concourses
first and then address the Global Terminal, so current passenger traffic can
continue to be accommodated in Terminal 2 while construction is underway.
Either way, the airport project positions O’Hare to continue to boost passenger
numbers into and through the city. That’s good, because both American Airlines
and United Airlines consider the city a hub and have been jousting
over gate rights, with United winning the most recent skirmish just last month.
Chicago’s regional airport Midway has renovations in
progress as well. Construction plans include a $47 million rehabilitation of
Runway 13C/31C to improve traffic flow, a $75 million concession overhaul
adding more than 70 new brands, and a major parking garage expansion.
Hotel and event investments are also underway. Just this
week, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker announced a public-private partnership to
restore the historic Hotel Florence in Pullman as well as its annex and
portions of the Pullman Car Works building on Chicago’s Far South Side. The
project will include $21 million in public capital funds and $83.6 million in
private investment to refurbish the circa-1881 hotel and associated buildings
into a boutique hotel, dining locations and a cultural and performing arts hub.
Pullman is an emerging neighborhood that has seen much development coming out
of the covid-19 pandemic. Construction is slated to begin next year.
Another large-scale effort, the $7 billion 1901 Project that
will transform the parking lots and other property around the United Center at
1901 W. Madison St., is slated to begin construction this year. A 6,000-seat
music hall and 233-room hotel, retail space and two parking garages comprise
the first phase of what is expected to be a 15-year effort.
IHG Hotels & Resorts has a shorter timeline for the
debut of its first Ruby Hotels collaboration in the United States, slated for
downtown Chicago. Another restoration project, the Ruby Hotel will be the
renovation and repositioning of the historic 1920s-era Inn of Chicago building.
The renovation will begin later this year to create a 22-story hotel with 412
rooms, with an opening scheduled for 2027.
Late this year, Bally’s Casino Resort is scheduled to open
in River West. The $1.2 billion, 500-room hotel project will feature a casino,
restaurants and a riverwalk. New renovations are ready for their close-ups at
historic Gold Coast hotel The Talbott, Hyatt Centric Magnificent Mile and at L7
Chicago by Lotte, which has brought a South Korean import to a 1912 high rise
overlooking the Chicago Riverwalk.