It’s two weeks since the 2025 Gold Cup was run at Cheltenham Racecourse, and like many Cheltonians who execute a ‘race week survival plan’ each March, I would nonetheless hate to see Cheltenham Festival end or get any smaller than it now appears to be.

Growing up around Cheltenham certainly meant needing to become aware of how to avoid the impact of road closures, diversions and very heavy traffic as the Racegoers come in and as they leave each day. But the inconvenience somehow always felt like it was worth it for the extra business that it brought into the Town and wider area, which for some like local Taxi drivers in the past meant a bumper week that made the rest of the year not only financially viable, but also worthwhile.

Those following attendance figures during this year’s Festival week will have noted that there was a further significant drop in attendance, particularly during the earlier part of the week, which continues to follow an annual trend.

Whilst the price of a pint of Guinness at the Racecourse has become a guide of what the cost of attending any of the Race Days might now be, it is increasingly difficult to believe that the number of punters is dropping as quickly as it now is, just because of the price of the beer for the number of hours that you become part of the captive marketplace beyond the turnstiles.

The prices of drinks at large events certainly disincentivises attendance. As a follower of Gloucester Rugby, the premium charged for pints once within Kingsholm Stadium certainly make you think twice about buying a ticket. Especially when premium matches are themselves an increasingly expensive purchase for the demographics of people who have historically snapped each kind up.

However, there is one big difference between local races and ‘the rugby’: Most of the people who regularly watch matches at Kingsholm are from the local area and go home after the match. Most of those attending the ‘showcase’ event at Cheltenham Racecourse are not.

In a post-Festival interview with the local media, new Racecourse CEO Guy Lavendar acknowledged that the prices of accommodation for Race Week have begun to play a part in the problem telling Gloucestershire Live “We have heard both anecdotally and directly that the cost of accommodation is impacting attendance.”

Whilst I considered writing a blog about this a fortnight ago, it wasn’t until I called in to one of Cheltenham’s pubs yesterday and asked the Bar Manager how Race Week had been, that I started to see a much broader issue at work. One that is reaching far beyond the people most likely to have stepped back from going to an event like this one, because of the cost of living crisis and what that means when they question whether they can afford to buy a pint.

As Race Week kicked off, the media were carrying stories about punters traveling to Benidorm for Cheltenham via big screens. Simply because the cost of travel, good quality hotels, a constant flow of cheap pints throughout the week and better weather were making this alternative way to ‘go to the races’ appeal in a very different, but considerably more economically attractive way.

What I hadn’t expected to hear, was that many of the local pubs and bars have suffered – not just because the majority had added a premium to all drinks. (which in itself would certainly scare away a reasonable contingent of locals who would have liked to go out during Race Week, given how expensive local pubs now are). But because numbers had dropped so much for ‘race nights in Cheltenham’ that some bars had actually closed early on at least a couple of nights that week.

Why? Racegoers found it significantly cheaper to book premium accommodation as far away as Birmingham or Oxford, and even with the costs of travel between Cheltenham and their hotels added in each day, it meant that the costs were way cheaper, irrespective of any drinks premiums added in.

Historically, Cheltenham Races provided the helpful uplift that it did for the majority of businesses that benefitted, through the considerable increase in turnover or units sold, at prices that didn’t vary massively from any other week.

However, that has all changed.

Riding the back of the crisis that the hospitality trade is already experiencing – not only because of the response to Covid – but like so many other areas of the UKs business landscape, because of legislative changes that were overtly made as long as decades ago to ‘free markets’ and let ‘competition’ in, it is beyond regrettable that the panic over falling sales and rising costs may have encouraged the ‘let’s charge more because we can’ mentality that instead of helping in any meaningful way, could now be self-sabotaging the local trade by quickly amplifying the mess – not of their own making – that they are already in.

As I was growing up, stories abounded of the annual life ritual than many Irish Racegoers would undergo where they worked and saved all year so that they could blow the lot each year just as soon as Cheltenham came around.

Whether or not the detail is true, the picture this tale paints is a long way from fantasy and with people like a Postman I went to school with locally still going to the Festival every year and every day, you really do have to question just how expensive the whole experience is now becoming for those who have never seen Race Week as merely being just a day out, to really have become so very pissed off, that they are prepared to watch from a foreign bar; not go out drinking in Cheltenham into the early hours afterwards, or not bother attending at all.