Sonesta International Hotels Corporation is leveraging the summer soccer calendar to drive on-property foot traffic and community engagement, announcing a limited-run partnership with Rita's Italian Ice & Frozen Custard — billed as the largest Italian Ice concept in the world — for a series of mobile treat activations at select Sonesta locations.
Rita's Treat Trucks will deploy at Sonesta properties in Miami, Philadelphia, and Jersey City, each distributing 200 free custom Italian ices per event to hotel guests and surrounding community members during designated match windows. No per-unit revenue figures or activation fees were disclosed, but the format fits a familiar hotel F&B playbook: low-cost, high-visibility LTO experiences tied to a marquee sporting event cycle that drives incremental occupancy.
The hospitality sector has increasingly leaned on foodservice partnerships to differentiate the on-property experience during high-demand sporting events, a strategy that gained momentum during the NFL and NBA playoff circuits and is now extending into soccer's expanded U.S. footprint. Pop-up F&B activations — particularly those tied to mobile trucks — allow hotel operators to generate lobby and forecourt traffic without committing kitchen labor or full-service capital. For Rita's, the Sonesta footprint provides direct access to a transient, out-of-market consumer who may be encountering the brand for the first time, a franchise-development opportunity the Italian Ice chain has leaned into across its mid-Atlantic and Sun Belt markets.
Sonesta's portfolio spans more than 1,200 hotels across multiple branded tiers, giving the company meaningful density in several of this summer's soccer host markets. Rita's, meanwhile, operates primarily through a franchise model with a strong drive-thru and kiosk presence in the Northeast and Southeast — daypart flexibility that makes truck deployment logistically straightforward during afternoon and evening kickoff windows.
The activation arrives as hotel F&B operators continue to explore non-traditional revenue touchpoints, including pop-up concepts and third-party F&B partnerships that reduce fixed overhead while maintaining guest-experience value. For franchised frozen-treat concepts like Rita's, summer sports calendars represent a concentrated, high-traffic acquisition window that aligns with peak seasonal demand.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
