How we rate weekends

Every college home game we cover gets one of three ratings for how hard it will be to find a room. The rating is a rule anyone can apply, not a forecast. We do not have a live feed of hotel prices or rooms left, so we do not pretend to.

We do not rate NFL games or the one-off title games. The rule is built on college schedules, and in a big city it would mislead. Those pages show our dated readings instead.

Some pages also show what we saw: dated readings we took ourselves on Booking.com for game weekends and for a normal weekend, two nights for two adults. They are a record of one day, not a forecast, and they play no part in the rating.

The rule

We count how many of these are true for the game:

• Conference game. Conference games draw the visiting team's fans for the whole weekend.
• Visiting fans travel. The visiting team drew an average of 80,000 or more to its own home games last season: a fan base that fills hotels on the road.
• Rivalry. A named rivalry game, which sells out first.
• Special weekend. A billed weekend: a season opener in a new stadium, a White Out, Homecoming or a playoff game.
• Holiday weekend. The game falls on Labor Day weekend or in Thanksgiving week, when holiday travel adds to the game crowd.

• None: Busy Rooms fill, but you can usually find one in town if you book early.
• One: Hard Expect the town to fill. Book as soon as rooms open, or plan on the overflow towns.
• Two or more: Very hard Expect the town to sell out and prices to jump. Book at once, or go straight to the overflow ring.

Each game on a team page links to the schedule source it comes from, and a named weekend (a White Out, Homecoming) to the school's announcement. When a school names its White Out or Homecoming game, or a conference publishes its dates, the rating updates at the next check.

Visiting fans travel uses one fixed test: the visiting team's average home attendance in the 2025 season, as reported to the NCAA and compiled by Legion Report (published 9 October 2026), was 80,000 or more. Teams outside its published top 45 averaged 37,282 or fewer and do not count. Holiday weekend applies to games on Labor Day weekend (4 September 2027) and in Thanksgiving week (22–28 November 2027); a game whose date is not yet published cannot have it.

Why every college home game is at least Busy

A college home game brings tens of thousands of visitors into a small town. At Penn State, hotels from Altoona to Lock Haven fill with travelling fans in the days before kickoff (Altoona Mirror, 1 November 2024). So the lowest rating is Busy, not Easy.

Seats per resident

Each team page and the team ranking show how many stadium seats there are for every resident of the host town: the stadium's published capacity divided by the town's population from the U.S. Census Bureau. It measures pressure on local beds; it is not a count of hotel rooms, which most towns do not publish.

How we measure time to the gate

• Routed times come from OSRM on OpenStreetMap, with no traffic. They are a floor: game-day traffic patterns and closed roads add to the drive.
• Official times are what the stadium, the school or the transit operator publishes, such as shuttle hours.
• Reported figures, such as hotel rates on past big weekends, come from named local press, with the date.

How we choose hotels

We list hotels by where they are, using OpenStreetMap and the hotel's own page, and route every one to the stadium on foot and by car. The closest-hotels table is in order of walking time, then driving distance. No hotel pays to be listed, and the commission we earn never changes the order.

How often we check

Each team page shows the date we last checked it. We check when the schedule is published, before the season, two weeks before each Very hard weekend, and when kickoff times are announced.