If you are one of the thousands of Oasis fans to have secured a ticket to a gig far from home next summer, your next step is to book accommodation. Pronto.
Last week, hotel prices skyrocketed in Dublin, Cardiff, Manchester, London and Edinburgh after the Oasis 2025 summer tour dates were announced.
People have beennaming and shaming hotels on social media that have been accused of cancelling rooms and reselling them at higher rates.The Telegraph has been tracking hotel prices across the five cities, and has found examples of accommodation suppliers that have more than tripled their room rates over the gig dates.
One apartment in Cardiff which sleeps four, listed on booking.com, was available for £266 on Friday June 27 next year, but had risen to £791 on Friday July 4, the date of the tour’s opening night.
All is not lost. There are still rooms available, and if you take these steps you will find the best possible accommodation for your Oasis gig next summer.
Spread your search across multiple sites
The key to finding accommodation for your gig is to spread the net far and wide. Reliable websites include booking.com, uk.hotels.com, trivago.co.uk, airbnb.co.uk, expedia.co.uk, vrbo.com and hostelworld.com.The Telegraph also has 10,000 hotel reviews, including many options inDublin,Cardiff,Edinburgh,ManchesterandLondon.
Expect to pay more
If you didn’t book accommodation the moment Oasis released their tour dates last week, you are unlikely to find a bargain at this stage. In all five cities, many hotels have now sold out, and pretty much across the board the ones that remain have bumped up their prices. Whatever you consider to be a tolerable room rate for a night away in a British city, double it.
Book now
Bear in mind that most hotels and accommodation providers list rooms and rates around 12 months in advance. Given that all of the Oasis tour dates are less than a year away, you should work on the assumption that nothing better is miraculously going to appear. Given the demand around this tour and the number of fans expected to travel to attend the gigs, it is highly unlikely that there will be a market for cheap last-minute deals.
Group options are cheaper
Your options of finding somewhere to stay improve if you’re booking with a larger group. At first glance, an apartment listed for £1,500 looks expensive, but when you consider that is less than £200 per person when booking with a group of eight, it becomes one of the cheapest options available. Airbnb and Vrbo are your best bets for finding a larger self-catering option, though there are also aparthotels available on sites such as booking.com.
Beware deals that appear too good to be true
With thousands of people searching for accommodation after securing their tickets on Saturday morning, the scammers will be out in full force.
If you see a deal on social media that seems to be unusually cheap, or if it has a particularly high deposit, it could be a scammer.Which?hasa useful guide on how to identify and protect yourself against scams. Never make payments off-site, and don’t ever pay for accommodation via a direct bank transfer to a stranger’s account. Book through payment systems on legitimate websites only (check the URL is the official one, not a similarly named clone), and pay using a credit card rather than a debit card – this gives you a higher chance of getting your money back if anything does go wrong.
Consider an out-of-town option
Affordable inner-city accommodation options are already selling out fast. One option is to book somewhere out of town and to travel in for the gig. But you should only pursue this strategy if you are certain that you can make it back to your accommodation using public transport, or else book a taxi well in advance.
Cardiff
For the Cardiff gigs, you could consider booking somewhere in neighbouring Newport. It is a 12-minute train ride away, and Cardiff Central is right next to the Principality Stadium. While train times could change, there are currently services at 10.34pm, 11.12pm, 11.30pm and the last train is at 12.30am, meaning you shouldn’t have to miss the encore.
Manchester
For the Heaton Park dates, it is 18 minutes on the tram to Market Street in central Manchester, but only 16 minutes on the tram up to Bury. While there isn’t an abundance of hotels on the line, it’s worth taking a look at accommodation options in Prestwich, Whitefield, Radcliffe and Bury.
Edinburgh
Whoever decided to schedule the Edinburgh dates at the same time as the Edinburgh Fringe has a lot of questions to answer. Hotels are, inevitably, largely booked up across the city. One slightly outlandish but not entirely ridiculous option would be to get the train from Edinburgh Waverley to Glasgow (the last train is at 11.45pm), where you will find a far wider variety of options.
Dublin
Dublin is also getting booked up fast. The closest major train station to the gig venue, Croke Park, is Connolly, which has links up to the towns of Drogheda and Balbriggan if you fail to find anywhere in the city.
Wembley
As for London, you shouldn’t have any problems finding somewhere to stay in the city. If you would rather stay out of town, however, you could consider making the most of the Chiltern Railway line, which stops at Wembley Stadium. Gerrards Cross, Beaconsfield and High Wycombe are all options, less than an hour away direct.
