Fan village setback does little to dent Cheltenham’s place as marquee event

I f the demand for hotel rooms in the local area is any guide to a sporting event’s popularity, the news that plans for a “fan village” near Cheltenham racecourse during the Festival this week have been ditched should, on the face of it, give the meeting’s organisers some cause for concern.

A local entrepreneur planned to use shipping containers, parked within walking distance of the course, as somewhere for racegoers to rest their heads after a hard day at the track (and, for a fair proportion at least, a harder night on the town). But only 16 of the 300 beds had been booked by the middle of last week. For now at least, the scheme has been scrapped.

Dig a little deeper, however, and the lack of demand is not quite as alarming as it might seem. Racegoers were being asked to sleep four-to-a-crate, which sounds cosy enough even for the closest of friends, and also to book for a minimum of five nights, for £950. A raging case of festival fever is one thing; the level of delirium required to pay £190 a night to bed down in a metal box is clearly quite another.

But the simple fact that anyone can see a potential market for sardine-style accommodation in Festival week is also, in a sense, a sign of how far the event has come in the past 30 years. In much the same way that the Economist’s Big Mac Index can track the relative value of currencies, the gouging on Cheltenham hotel rooms when race week rolls around plots the meeting’s rise over the past three decades to sit alongside the Open, Wimbledon and the British Grand Prix as one of British sport’s marquee events. As the Racing Postpointed out in January, four nights at TripAdvisor’s third-worst hotel in town was priced up at £280 in mid‑February, and £3,600 this week.

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