What Paris Hotels Learned in 2024: A Surge Playbook for LA in 2028

Most hotels spend years preparing for incremental growth. The Olympics are different. They compress years of peak demand into just a few weeks, exposing every operational bottleneck a property has. 

Here’s the stage: for two and a half weeks Los Angeles will host the Olympic and Paralympic Games.  

Millions of visitors will move through a region that is already busy. And for hotels, it will be one of the largest high-demand events the property will ever experience. 

The closest example? Paris in 2024.  

What Paris hotels saw in 2024  

When the 2024 Summer Games arrived, Paris hotels posted record numbers. 

According to STR and CoStar data, the average daily rate reached an all-time high of about €876 (roughly $950) on opening night, beating the previous record of €622 set a year earlier. Across the event period, room rates rose 141% year over year and RevPAR grew 200%. Occupancy climbed more than 24%, with Paris running near 84% full at the peak. Greater Paris took in roughly 11.2 million visitors over the period. 

For operators, RevPAR is usually the number that matters most, and a 200% jump is exceptional even for an event of this scale. 

The upside was real, but it was not automatic. Heading into the Games, Paris braced for overcrowding and softer-than-usual bookings as regular travelers stayed away. The hotels that planned ahead, held their rates, and ran tight operations captured the surge. Others left revenue on the table. 

LA in 2028 will be its own event, bigger and more expansive than Paris. The core question for every property is the same: when the demand wave hits, will you be ready to make the most of it? 

A surge is more than a spike in occupancy 

It is easy to picture the Games as simply more guests. In reality, they change how the entire property operates. 

Your property runs closer to full for weeks at a time. Entrances and amenity spaces that normally stay quiet are busy at all hours. You may be hosting sponsors, athletes’ families, media, and corporate groups, some arriving with their own security expectations and credentialing requirements. Your team is stretched, often backed up by seasonal or contract staff still learning the building. And the number of unfamiliar faces moving through your lobby, parking structure, and back of house climbs sharply. 

That raises the stakes on two things at once: operational visibility and guest safety.  

Hotels that handle a surge well can see what is happening across the property and act on it quickly. This is where your infrastructure either helps you or gets in the way. 

The Surge Readiness checklist 

Four questions to pressure-test your property ahead of 2028. 

1. Can your operations team understand what is happening across the property in real time? 

During a surge, blind spots turn into incidents.  

Take stock of your real coverage: every entrance, every amenity, every parking level, every back-of-house door.  

If parts of your property rely on cameras nobody can pull up quickly, or footage sitting on a recorder in a closet, that is not visibility. It is a gap you will only notice after something has already happened. 

2. How fast can you find what happened? 

When something goes wrong during your busiest week, the question is not whether you have footage. It is whether you can find the right clip in seconds instead of hours.  

The better platforms let you search footage in plain language, something like “person in a red jacket near the west entrance at 9 PM,” and surface the moment right away. That’s the difference between resolving an issue quickly and watching it become a story. 

3. Can you turn traffic into staffing decisions? 

The same cameras that keep guests safe can show you where the guests actually are.  

People counting and heat maps tell you when the lobby backs up, which amenities draw crowds, and how flow shifts through the day.  

During a surge, that is staffing intelligence: where to position people, when to open a second check-in line, and how to keep service smooth when volume peaks. 

4. Can you add coverage without a major project? 

Adding cameras to a legacy NVR or DVR setup usually means new recorders, new wiring, and a technician on site for days. Cloud-managed cameras that run on a single network connection come online in minutes, so filling a coverage gap is a quick adjustment rather than a construction job. 

What to look for in a security platform 

Notice that every question above is really about visibility, not cameras. Cameras collect information. The platform determines how quickly your team can use it. 

That is the case for a unified, cloud-managed platform. The features worth looking for: 

• One dashboard for all of your properties, reachable from any browser or phone. For groups with several LA-area hotels, that means one consistent view instead of a separate login and a separate blind spot at each site. 
• Role-based access, so each team and each property sees only what it should. Your Long Beach front office has no reason to see your Beverly Hills cameras, and it will not. 
• Operations value and security value from one investment. People counting, heat maps, and occupancy data serve your operations side. Real-time alerts, fast investigations, and scoped access serve your security and risk side. One platform, both jobs. 
• Resilience when it counts. Good cloud cameras keep recording locally if the internet drops, then sync back automatically once it returns. During a packed week, a network hiccup should not cost you footage. 
• Room to grow. No NVRs to provision, no servers to maintain, and open integrations with the access control, sensors, and tools you already use. 

The goal is not really to buy cameras. It is to give your team one place to see, search, and act across every property, the moment something happens. 

One more thing about LA 

Paris was concentrated.  

Los Angeles is not.  

Venues and visitors will spread across the basin, from the coast out to Orange County, so the demand will not sit in a single neighborhood.  

For hotel groups, the challenge is not managing one busy property. It is managing multiple busy properties simultaneously. Regional operations teams need a consistent view across every location, standardized workflows, and the ability to respond to issues without switching between disconnected systems. 

If you run more than one property, that is worth planning around: a security and operations setup that works the same way at every site gives you a consistent guest experience and a single source of truth when all of your hotels are busy at once. 

Getting ready 

Paris demonstrated that major events reward preparation more than reaction. The hotels that captured the greatest value were not necessarily those with the newest buildings or the most staff. They were the ones that could understand what was happening across their operations and respond quickly. 

Demand does not create operational problems. It exposes the ones already there. 

The properties that do well in 2028 will be the ones that planned for the demand the way they would for any major event: a clear view of the whole property, fast answers when something happens, and real data on where guests are and where to put staff, all from one place across every site they run. 

That is what Rhombus is built for. A single cloud-managed platform for cameras, access control, sensors, and AI-powered search that deploys in minutes and scales across your portfolio. 

If you are thinking through how your hotels will handle 2028, book a demo and see what unified, cloud-managed security looks like across your properties.