Driving to the Cheltenham Festival without spending the day in a queue

Nobody plans an outfit around a car park, and at Cheltenham a good many people wish they had. The public parking is on grass, on a slope, in March. Boots go on in the boot of the car and shoes come out of a bag at the gate, which is a small ritual that a surprising number of regulars have adopted.

Our part of that is simple. The car sets down on a hard surface, the bags with the shoes stay in the boot, and the same boot is open at the pick-up point at the end of the day. It is not a service anybody advertises, and it is the thing guests mention afterwards.

Cheltenham fills for the week, and so does everywhere within half an hour of it. Guests end up in Broadway, Cirencester, Stow-on-the-Wold, Tetbury and Gloucester, and the drive in from each of those is a different problem. Broadway comes down the A46 and the A435; Cirencester comes up the A417 and hits the ring road from the south.

The practical consequence is that collection times vary far more than the distances suggest. A twenty-minute drive from a Cotswold village can take fifty on the Gold Cup morning, and we build that in rather than discovering it.

Cheltenham is well placed for the west and the Midlands, which is part of why the Festival draws the crowd it does. From Birmingham it is the M5 south, around fifty miles and an hour without traffic. From Bristol it is the M5 north, a similar run. Both become considerably longer between eleven and one on a Festival morning.

For guests flying in, Birmingham and Bristol airports are both realistic, and both are around an hour from the course on a normal day. We build the same padding into an airport collection as into a hotel one, because a flight that lands at ten and a first race at one is tighter than it looks.

Friday afternoon at Cheltenham combines the largest crowd of the week with everybody wanting to be somewhere else by evening. The result is a queue that starts before the last race has finished and takes a long time to clear, made worse if the ground has been soft enough to slow the car parks down.

Anyone facing a two-and-a-half-hour drive home should think hard about leaving after the fifth. The alternative is spending most of the first hour stationary and arriving late anyway, which is a poor way to end a good week.

A fair number of guests solve the departure problem by not departing. Staying locally on the Thursday and Friday nights turns a hard drive into an easy one, and the same car can take you to dinner in the evening rather than sitting on the M5 in the dark.

Where that suits, we tend to price the two days as a continuous booking rather than as separate transfers. The chauffeur stays nearby, the car is available in the evening, and the run back to London happens on a Saturday morning when the road is empty.

Festival parties are typically larger than Ascot parties, and eight to twelve people is common. That is one van or two saloons, and the answer depends less on cost than on whether the group wants to leave together. A van keeps everyone in one place; two saloons give two departure times.

For a group of eight travelling from London, one van is usually the sensible arrangement for the outward leg. Splitting on the way home is where the second vehicle earns its keep, particularly on the Friday.