Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Prices for hotels and Airbnbs in Edinburgh have soared as a run of sold-out Oasis concerts coincides with the annual Fringe arts festival, heaping pressure on the Scottish capital’s strained accommodation market.
About 200,000 fans are expected to attend Oasis’s three-night run this weekend at Murrayfield stadium, on top of the hundreds of thousands of people who travel into the city at the time of its world-famous festivals.
The increased accommodation costs have left many of the festivals’ less well-known acts struggling to fill seats, Fringe workers and performers have warned.
Average hotel room rates in Edinburgh rose 91 per cent for Friday, the first Oasis date in the Scottish capital, to £613 from £321 in the previous week, according to audit, tax and consulting firm RSM UK.
Demand for short-term rental accommodation in the city is up more than 20 per cent on the nights of Oasis concerts compared with a year earlier, according to data by AirDNA.
Upcoming concerts by veteran rock band AC/DC and American singer-songwriter Chappell Roan have also driven surges in demand for places to stay across the city well above regular levels for August.
Festival performers and attendees alike have long complained of the difficulty in finding affordable accommodation, with the situation worsening this year. Some have resorted to camping on the outskirts of the city, sleeping in their cars or couch surfing.
Jack Scullion, a London-based poet and comedian, said he and four other performers were paying £2,500 more than they did two years ago to share student accommodation during their pub quiz themed stand-up shows’ month-long run.
Other performers and festival staff fear the costs are keeping punters away.
Fringe worker Sofie Miller told the FT that wealthy attendees were more likely to book tickets in advance to already-established performers, undermining the festivals’ reputation for breaking emerging acts.
“People used to turn up and pop in to see anything . . . [Now] they go to see a massive comedian they’ve seen on television [instead of] taking a chance on a comedian they’ve never heard of.”
“The Fringe itself feels quieter than ever,” said stand-up comedian LP Kent, who has attended the festival for 20 years. “Many [smaller shows] are struggling to get people in, which is having a massive knock-on effect . . . Some performers have invested thousands of pounds in promotion costs.
“Oasis are milking people for thousands of pounds a ticket — at the other end people are literally paying audiences to attend their show. It’s not a great model for creativity,” she added.
Consumer spending on the Manchester band’s reunion tour in the UK is expected to reach more than £1bn this year, according to Barclays, exceeding even the levels reached by Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in the UK last year.
Concertgoers at the Gallagher brothers’ gigs intend to spend £766 in total, of which about £170 is on the ticket itself.
Rail operator ScotRail expects more than 2mn people will travel into Edinburgh during the month of August.
In 2022, the Scottish government introduced a mandatory licensing scheme for short-term lets in a drive to ensure quality accommodation and address frustrations among residents about the ballooning sector.
In Edinburgh, hosts also have to apply for planning permission to operate a short-term let.
Edinburgh now has a “drastically reduced pool” of licensed short-term let properties, according to the Association of Scotland’s Self-Caterers, a body representing the £1bn sector.
In July, it said there were fewer than 4,000 active licences, with about 700 applications still under review.
“This falls far short of both previous provision and current needs,” it said, citing an expected 25,000 performers and production staff.
Edinburgh is the UK’s second most-visited city, with 5.3mn overnight tourism visits in 2023, roughly 10 times higher than the local population of about 520,000.
“It’s not like Edinburgh at this time of year needs more promotion,” said Kent. “It’s already full.”
Read the full article here