Visit Anaheim is forecasting a record year for conventions coming to the city in 2026.
Anaheim’s destination marketing organization (DMO), responsible for booking events and promoting local businesses, has so far surpassed its target of 525,000 room nights and expects more than 568,000 for next year’s slated events.
“Group is king,” Visit Anaheim CEO Mike Waterman said during an August event. “It will be a guaranteed record year for conventions in Anaheim.”
Next year’s forecast is a 19% increase from this year’s 478,000 rooms booked so far. For 2026, the DMO has booked 60 conventions.
Waterman noted that group travel is boosting monthly reservations in 2026 due to convention activity. For example, 14,000 rooms as of August have been requested for two back-to-back days in the first week of March 2026.
On the other hand, Visit Anaheim said it spotted a gap in activity in the first weekend of April 2026—the same month it aims to launch a city event that mixes comedy and culinary. The DMO is in talks with Doug DeLuca, a producer of the “Jimmy Kimmel Show” to create the event, according to Waterman. He added that the team is looking to plan and host other festival style events in Anaheim, possibly for country music.
The DMO anticipates reaching 30 million visitors in Anaheim by 2028, a milestone for the city and four years earlier than expected, according to Waterman.
The target implies a 15% jump from last year’s record high of 26.3 million visitors. Orange County had 50.8 million visitors last year, according to data from Tourism Economics.
Efforts to Improve Bookings
Visit Anaheim still has work to do to prepare for the anticipated 30 million visitors.
To counter expected softening in hotel bookings this summer, Visit Anaheim created a campaign dubbed “100 Days Till Summer.”
The campaign started in April and offered up to $100 in savings for a minimum three-night stay and resulted in 3,348 room nights booked, according to the marketing organization.
“If we’re going to reach 30 million by 2030, we need to have additional source markets,” Visit Anaheim’s VP of Tourism and International Sales Adriel Terbeche said at the event.
She discussed ongoing trends with representatives from Anaheim’s top three international markets—Mexico, Canada and the United Kingdom. Tourism executives from other markets such as Australia and New Zealand also spoke of concerns about exchange rates and currency, which keeps international travel soft when the dollar is strong.
Many of the executives noted that the city’s Disney angle keeps international visitation active, on top of the entertainment company offering resident deals for three- to five-day passes in different countries.
It goes without saying that the Disneyland Resort is the biggest draw for Anaheim and that means organizations such as Visit Anaheim are trying to persuade those leisure travelers to visit other hotspots in the city.
“We know people are traveling to Anaheim,” Terbeche said.
Future tailwinds are events such as the World Cup, Anaheim’s OCVibe development and the Olympics in 2028.
With Honda Center chosen as the venue for Olympic indoor volleyball, Visit Anaheim is looking to book a few more related competitions over the next few years, leading up to the games.
The strategy is to make Anaheim “the volleyball capital of the world,” Waterman said.
