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York Food and Drink Festival

We have booked a trip for September which will start in London and fly home from Edinburgh. We would really like to stop in York on the way to Edinburgh. And have now while researching our specific logistics have discovered that this will be during the York Food and Drink Festival, which looks like a huge major event.

Does anyone know how big this is, in terms of will getting lodging for a couple of York nights be both highly difficult and with sharply increased rates? We are just coming off this "mistake", having last January booked a Germany trip that flew into Munich, and silly us, did not realize until a couple days later that we were arriving in the middle of Oktoberfest. Needless to say, our airfare savings disappeared rapidly for those first 3 nights.

TIA

Posted by
5553 posts

My experience of food festivals, both as a visitor and trader, is that they're overwhelmingly attenddd by local people and who therefore aren't in need of accommodation. I can't imagine prices would be impacted by the festival.

Posted by
28247 posts

You can do a bit of research on booking.com. Test out two time periods for next September (same nights of the week for both), one of them your potential dates. If no significant difference, that's an encouraging sign.

Posted by
121 posts

York will be busier during the food festival but mainly with locals and people coming for a day out so accommodation shouldn’t be particularly any busier than at other times. York is always busy so if you want a particular place to stay I would book as early as you can. Booking.com will be your best bet as you can then find something within your price range offering facilities that are important to you

Posted by
401 posts

I’d agree with others that this is a low-key festival of local rather than national significance. Certainly not one that is on my radar. The festivals that spring to mind as those that are likely to result in accommodation knock ons are the Edinburgh festival, Hay literary festival, Goodwood festival of speed. My local city of Cardiff has a large stadium which can result in no hotel rooms being free when it’s in use for sporting or music events but that reflects the fact that the stadium has a capacity which is equivalent to 20% of the city’s population!