Cheaper ticket prices and improved car parking are among a raft of changes for the 2025 Cheltenham Festival in a bid to stop the rot of falling attendances at the meeting.
The Jockey Club aims to improve the experience for Festival-goers by giving better value with discounted multi-day and group ticket prices. There will also be three times the number of tracking roadways (rolls of plastic tracking to stop vehicles sinking in mud) for the car parks, more park-and-ride systems and regular coaches from Bristol and Oxford. Punters will be able to enjoy a drink in more course-facing areas and package trips will be available – including hotel rooms starting at £150 a night.
One of the problems at Cheltenham has been having enough time between races to buy a drink and finish it before going to have a bet and watching the race out in front of the stands. Now, however, there will be more areas out front where you can watch the race live with your pint of Guinness in your hand. Premium pints were sold at £7.50 for the last two years, but prices will now be capped at £7.80.
Stretching out the meeting to five days in 2023 was almost a fait accompli, and when the crowd returned in 2022 it did so in record numbers with 280,000 in attendance. Indeed, there were so many that the daily capacity was capped at 68,500 to give everyone a bit more space.
However, with hindsight, it now looks like that was just the post-Covid bounce of people glad to be out again after two years of being cooped up. Since then, the trend has continued downward; 241,000 in 2023 and 229,000 last March, a drop of 51,000 in two years, a figure which startled the Jockey Club and was a major contributory factor in the departure of the its chief executive, Nevin Truesdale.
On top of that, wet weather in March exposed the problems of parking in what are essentially grass fields for the other 360 days of the year. On the first couple of evenings, X, formerly Twitter, was awash with people’s negative experiences of getting stuck trying to leave the racecourse.
As a result, parking capacity will be reduced to 8,000 cars, with areas levelled to enable tracking access and bus companies bringing in more racegoers from further afield. Additionally, 700 spaces in a new multi-storey car park will be block-booked and enough tracking provided to cover 17 football pitches.
Meanwhile, in town – not something over which the racecourse has any control but very much its problem – hotels were doing their bit to kill the golden goose by charging exorbitant prices, with some low- to mid-range hotels charging £800 a night for a room. But the new package deal will allow punters to buy rooms at hotels at as low as £150 a night within the local area which will include travel to and from the racecourse.
The competitiveness of the racing is also being addressed, with changes to the conditions of five races, including opening up the meeting’s oldest race – the National Hunt Chase – to professional jockeys. Other key changes will see the Turners Novices’ Chase and National Hunt Chase both become novice handicaps, with the Glenfarclass Cross-Country becoming a limited handicap. All these changes come out of this year’s post-Festival annual review.
Ian Renton, the outgoing managing director of Cheltenham, said: “As part of the process of reviewing this year’s Festival, we analysed data and extensive feedback, including surveys, one-to-one meetings and focus-group sessions to seek views ranging from those who come every year all the way through to people who have never visited the Festival to find out why.
“Throughout this review process there have been three distinct strands which have been impossible to ignore – value for money, the need to provide the best possible experience and the competitiveness of the race programme. We understand that when people are paying to attend a premium event they expect a premium experience and that has been at the forefront of our minds when committing to significant investment to improve our car parks, launching a park-and-ride system and offering more course-facing areas to enjoy a drink while watching the racing.
“We also know that at a time when we are all impacted by the rising cost of living, value is more important than ever. That’s why we have looked carefully at discounts for multi-day packages, food and drink and even worked hard to find solutions to the increasing cost of accommodation through our partnership with Venatour Racing.”
The hope at Cheltenham, which gets Guy Lavender, currently chief executive and secretary at Marylebone Cricket Club, as its new chief executive at the start of 2025, is that the attendance can at least be stabilised somewhere near this year’s figure at Lavender’s first Festival at the helm before increasing again in 2026 and beyond.
