businesses

Along 2,400 miles of Route 66, small towns and road-trippers will be marking the highway’s 100th anniversary Wednesday. But for many business owners along the Mother Road, the birthday gifts have been coming in for months, thanks to a surge in spending by centennial travelers.

Hundreds of small businesses invested in upgrades and celebrations for 2026 — particularly during summer’s busy road trip season — including concerts, car shows, signs, murals, publications and a 19-day national caravan that began in Santa Monica in June.

“I’d say we’ve had probably double the travelers and double the spending,” said Gar Engman, owner of TeePee Curios, a novelty shop in Tucumcari, N.M., comparing this year with 2025.

Not every entrepreneur had numbers that rosy, and there’s no official measure of this year’s business along the route. But after driving the route myself for a Times travel guide that published in May, I reached out this week to several entrepreneurs I met on the way, and most said business was up sharply this year. In addition, many said they were seeing more Americans on the road this year — a notable trend, since international travelers have been the lifeblood of Route 66 for many years.

All along the road, there had been doubts about centennial traffic, given gas prices (up 30% from last year) and the many Route 66 devotees who come from countries that have been maligned or targeted for higher tariffs by President Trump, including the United Kingdom, France and Germany. Several entrepreneurs along the road said some international travelers did stay away, including Canadians who have been avoiding U.S. travel since 2025, when President Trump made comments about annexing Canada. But in many cases homegrown travelers filled the gap.

An amateur photographer captures the Roy’s sign in Amboy.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

At Roy’s in Amboy, manager Kenneth Large said 2026 has been “fantastic” so far, with receipts at his gas station and shop up 18% to 20% over last year. International visitors are still the majority of his customers, Large said, but “I think there were more domestic travelers this year.”

At the Aztec Motel & Creative Space in Seligman, Ariz., “it’s been a roller-coaster,” said co-owner Anne Marie Gonzalez. “Our numbers here were almost nonexistent until August. We were getting really worried. And then it finally kicked in.” Though her 2026 numbers remain behind 2025 and 2024, Gonzalez said, she has seen “more Americans than ever. … People seemed to decide to do it at the last minute.”

Sebastiaan de Boorder and Anna Marie Gonzalez own and operate the Aztec Motel and Creative Space in Seligman, Ariz.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

When I called the U Drop Inn Cafe in Shamrock, Texas, co-owner Lianne Halpern started by saying “Give me one second! Let me just take this dessert to this table.”

“It’s been huge,” she said a moment later. “Right now, we’re probably up about 30% year over year. … It’s always been disproportionately international versus domestic and I would stay that’s still true.”

The U Drop Inn Cafe, part of a 1936 Streamline Moderne filling station in Shamrock, Texas, is run by Lianne and Aldo Halpern.

(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)

At the Rockwood Motor Court in Springfield, Mo., “it’s just been stellar,” said owner Phyllis Ferguson. Ferguson, whose motel has just 10 rooms, said that in June she filled 286 of 300 room-nights. By the end of that month, she said, she was already on the brink of passing her room-night total for all of 2025.

She was further encouraged by the number of younger travelers this year — so many, Ferguson said, that “I think Route 66 has become the honeymoon destination of young European couples.”

In Clinton, Okla., the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum reported that through the first half of 2026, business quadrupled over the first half of 2025.

In Tulsa, Buck Atom’s Atomic Curios and Meadow Gold Mack’s Route 66 Outpost have drawn a mix of young and old customers with their blend of irreverent and vintage wares items, perhaps offering a peek at the route’s future.

Rhys Martin, manager of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Route 66 program, said the positive reports have been fairly consistent along the highway’s “linear community,” which stretches from town to town across eight states.

Nov. 11, 1926, is considered the route’s official birth date because that’s when a group of state and national transportation officials formally agreed, after months of debate, that a highway would connect cities and towns from Chicago to Los Angeles, and that it would bear the number 66. It was another 12 years before the entire route was paved.

Martin was in Los Angeles over the weekend for a screening of director John Paget’s documentary “Route 66: The Main Street of America.” But he will soon be traveling to Washington, D.C., where Route 66 boosters are pushing a pair of identical bills that call for creation of a Route 66 National Historic Trail. In the House of Representatives, HR5470 still needs to clear a committee before a House vote. In the Senate, Martin said, S2887 awaits a full Senate vote.

The road “touches so many communities at so many levels,” Martin said. “It isn’t just good for the towns, it’s good for the story of the country.”

New Delhi, India – Both daughters of S Budhiraja live in the United States. Yet, when he and his wife head out to the market in Gurugram, a bustling business district on the outskirts of India’s capital, a young man walks beside them.

It is 26-year-old Roney Raju, their “hired grandson”.

Across Indian cities, a small but growing number of companies are now selling what families once took for granted: someone to take care of ageing people. Chores include taking them to the temple, sitting with them during a hospital visit, playing cards, or simply listening to them.

Some firms call such workers “children for hire”; others call them a “grandchild for rent”.

India, the world’s most populous country, is growing older quickly.

People over 60 made up 10.5 percent of its population in 2022, a demographic projected to nearly double to 21 percent by 2050, according to the India Ageing Report 2023 by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the International Institute for Population Sciences.

That means about 347 million elderly Indians – a number almost equal to the entire population of the US, the world’s third most populous nation – will need specialised care by 2050.

Several Indian startups see the opportunity, with the Indian government estimating the senior care industry at about $7bn.

Raju, holding a master’s degree in social work, works for one such company in Gurugram. He has been looking after the Budhirajas for the last few months.

“I was comfortable with him from the get-go,” Budhiraja, who is in his 80s, told Al Jazeera. “I feel he understands me 200 percent.”

Raju describes the bond in the same vein. “Right now, he is family to me,” he said. The couple, he said, see him as “their proxy child, and much more than a service companion”.

The bond has deepened over the past months. When Budhiraja was admitted for surgery, Raju kept track of the doctors and the medicines. He would even call to check on them after his shift had ended.

Growing industry

Raju’s boss Gaurav Mittal says many clients actually come to treat their companions “like their own grandchildren”.

He charges 450 rupees ($5) an hour for 10 hours of service in a month, or 400 rupees ($4.5) per hour if it is 25 hours. Like a mobile phone recharge, unused hours are rolled over to the next month.

In a country with an average per capita income of about 220,000 rupees ($2,750) a year, Mittal’s service caters to a small minority of urban, financially secure families.

Mittal said the idea for his company came from home. After his father died four years ago, his mother had to leave their hometown and move in with him. She was sociable and had money to spend, but depended on family members to go anywhere.

“The world is not designed keeping the senior citizens as the central pillar,” Mittal said.

The idea for such startups, however, is not entirely new.

A 2017 report counted at least five startups offering young companions to seniors. In 2022, the late Ratan Tata of the Tata Group promoted a Mumbai-based startup whose tagline says: “Everything Grandkids Do!”

The companions who work for these companies undergo police verification before they start working for a senior person. Before working alone, they often shadow a senior staff member on home visits.

Most companions are trained in psychology, social work or hospitality.

Vinay Kumar works as a companion for a firm based in the southern city of Hyderabad.

“We are not just taskmasters, but we develop a relationship with our clients. We support them and spend quality time with them so that they don’t miss their close ones,” he told Al Jazeera. “They may still do, but we try.”

Lonely seniors

The 2023 United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) report projects that older Indians will outnumber the country’s children by 2046. And many of these seniors are lonely.

In 2022, India conducted the Longitudinal Ageing Study, a national survey of more than 72,000 people. It found that 20.5 percent of middle-aged and older adults reported moderate loneliness, while 13.3 percent categorised their loneliness as severe.

Among people over 60 who lived alone, more than a third (37 percent) reported feeling lonely, the study found.

Globally, a study commissioned by the World Health Organization in 2025 found that loneliness affects one in six people and is linked to about 871,000 deaths a year.

Santosh Abraham, CEO of a Bengaluru-based startup founded in 2015, says while the children of elderly people are worried about medical emergencies or market errands, their parents mostly had a different concern.

“I am lonely, I don’t have anyone to talk to,” Abraham recalled one of his clients as saying. “I have done so much for my family and society; there is no recognition for it.”

Abraham said the most common request he gets is one that “nobody says out loud”.

“A senior calls us claiming to feel unwell. A care manager arrives, finds nothing wrong, and is then asked to sit and talk for an hour,” he said. “They just want company.”

Kumar said companions like him have to “understand their pain”.

“Most of the seniors who are living alone are very lonely. They want someone to play cards or indoor games with. Someone wants to go to a movie, or a temple, or parks, or attend local programmes,” he said.

Abraham said some seniors find a stranger easier to confide in. “With a companion, there is no baggage,” he told Al Jazeera.

For the young people doing the work, the line between their job and a relationship blurs quickly.

Raju says the visits to the Budhirajas are harder than office work. “Forming an emotional connection is never easy and is different each and every time,” he said.

Kumar, in Hyderabad, agrees. He said his clients often tell him about health problems that they hide from their children living in another city or abroad so as not to worry them.

He recalled a client who went from shutting the door on his face because he did not know English or Hindi to paying for his driving lessons and introducing him to people as his “god-gifted son”. When the man died in 2023, his son asked Kumar to perform the final rites alongside him.

Kumar once even cut short his 12-day marriage leave because one of his clients kept calling, asking him to come. “I genuinely feel these seniors are my own parents and grandparents,” he said.

‘Older person feels seen, heard, safe’

Others are more cautious about what the job demands.

Prashanth Reddy, founder of the Hyderabad-based company that Kumar works for, said companions must understand boundaries.

“Companions are there to provide support, not to replace doctors or mental health professionals,” he said.

Abraham agreed. He said he underlines one golden rule during his training sessions with aspiring companions: “Talk less and listen more.”

The children of such elderly people who buy the services of these companies say paying takes out the awkwardness of asking neighbours or relatives for help.

“When you pay for a service, you don’t have to feel like you’re asking someone for a favour,” says Vinnay K, a US-based software professional, who has been hiring a companion for his ageing mother for five years.

Shilpa Bandyopadhyay, assistant professor at Jindal Institute of Behavioural Sciences near New Delhi, told Al Jazeera that hiring a companion “should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that their families have failed”.

She said a growing demand for professional elderly care raises harder questions about a family-centric society like India’s.

“Do we recognise ‘companionship’ as a legitimate and continuing need of our older family members or see eldercare mainly as food, shelter, healthcare and physical help?” she asked.

She argued for “a more balanced ecosystem of ageing” that brings together families, community networks, accessible public spaces and affordable professional services, without romanticising traditional family structures or dismissing new ones.

“At the end of the day, the question isn’t who lives with an older person,” she said, but “rather whether the older person feels seen, heard, safe, valued, and meaningfully connected”.

Back in Gurugram, Budhiraja is asked how he would feel if Raju did not show up for work tomorrow.

“I will make sure he comes after finding out why he couldn’t come,” he said. “I need him. As you grow older, the needs are more.”

The surge in soccer fans this summer was bad for some businesses in Los Angeles.

World Cup host cities had lofty economic expectations for the summer tournament. But the city’s hotels only got a 1% bump in occupancy, according to a report published this week by Hospitality Education and Research Organization, a project of the Hotel Assn. of Los Angeles.

Seventy-two percent of surveyed hotels said the tournament hurt their 2026 finances, and 48% called the impact “extremely negative.” Just 2% said it met projections.

Downtown occupancy reached 66% in June, down from 71% a year earlier, the report says. Room nights fell between 10% and 12%.

Hotel guests at the Metropole restaurant just opposite the main lobby at the Hotel Indigo in downtown Los Angeles in May.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Ahead of World Cup tournaments, FIFA holds large blocks of rooms. But FIFA canceled or released up to 70% of the hotel room blocks it had reserved in host cities, including Los Angeles.

“We understood that we were maybe going to be disappointed with attendance going into the World Cup simply by the volume of cancellations that came out of the room block agreement,” said Jackie Filla, president and CEO of the Hotel Assn. of Los Angeles.

The disappointing turnout led to staff reductions. Of the hotels surveyed 82% reduced seasonal staff and more than six in 10 reported reducing employee shifts, scheduled hours, or permanent staff.

Hotels did raise prices, with the average daily rate hitting $228, the highest of any comparable L.A. event in three years. But occupancy was 71%, well below the 83% recorded during Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.

A visitor walks in the lobby of the Hotel Indigo in downtown Los Angeles.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The survey drew 58 responses from 210 hotels, and the analysis was done by travel-data firm Rove using CoStar and AirDNA data. International visitors were also scarce, with Los Angeles welcoming 700,000 international arrivals in June and July — roughly 80,000 visitors below 2024 levels for the same period, the report says.

“We particularly didn’t see a lot of foreign visitors and that’s something that was disappointing,” Filla said. “Foreign visitors do spend three times the amount of money as the average domestic traveler.”

Short-term rentals, meanwhile, gained. Their demand rose 23% and revenue 21% versus July 2024, while hotel revenue fell 3.3%. Airbnb, the tournament’s official fan accommodation, offered new hosts $750 incentives.

The city is currently weighing a temporary proposal to ease its short-term rental rules through the end of 2028 to accommodate tourists. “That will really, truly undercut the business of hotels,” Filla added. “We saw some of that with the World Cup.”

The worry is carrying over to the Olympic Games, set to be hosted in Los Angeles in 2028. Six in 10 surveyed hoteliers expect an Olympic rental surge to hurt their bookings and rates, the report says.

The World Cup “gave us false hope to recover from a negative year,” one Los Angeles hotelier said, according to the report. “I also feel [the] same thing will probably happen for [the] Super Bowl and Olympics.”