What a store actually is
A stay store is a lodging page that belongs to the event rather than to a booking site. It carries real, bookable places near that specific venue — houses, condos and hotels — priced for the event’s own dates, with the walk or drive to the gate on every listing. The organizer adds one link to it from their confirmation page or their site, and their visitors book from there.
The point is not that lodging gets easier to find, although it does. It is that the lodging money an event already creates stops being invisible to the event. Attendees were always going to sleep somewhere within a few miles of the venue. Today that spend lands on a booking site and the organizer never sees a cent of it.
Why the markets look unrelated
A marathon in Chattanooga, a songwriter festival in Destin, a music educators’ conference in Eugene, a cheer competition in Wildwood. The events have nothing in common, which is the point: the lodging problem is identical across all of them. A crowd arrives on known dates, needs beds near a known venue, and books them somewhere the organizer has no relationship with.
If you run something that puts people in beds — an event, a venue, a series, a destination — the block size calculator will tell you roughly how many room nights your attendance creates, and how many of them fall outside any block you contract for. That second number is the one these stores are built to capture.