I had my Maldron hotel booking for Oasis cancelled - now prices are so dire we have no way to get home

29 August 2024, 08:39 | Updated: 29 August 2024, 11:24

• Stephanie Staszko is a longstanding Oasis and music lover who runs an independent music blog.

When the news all us Oasis fans had been waiting 15 years for finally broke — they’re reforming and playing several nights at Heaton Park again — it was a dream come true.

Yet my boyfriend and I, both being huge music fans and obsessive gig-goers, remembered that Heaton Park gigs mean missing our last train home.

We promptly reserved one room for two people in Manchester, with flexible cancellation, for each night of the rumoured Manchester gig dates. Bear in mind, this was Monday, the day before the dates were announced. We successfully secured rooms at relatively reasonable prices. The best price being at the Maldron in Manchester, which had plenty of rooms left on Booking.com at £91 a night on Friday 11th July — no ‘last room left!’ warning. I was actually excited to check out the Maldron in Manchester, as we’d stayed with the chain in Newcastle for Sam Fender and loved it.

However, the next evening, hours after the Oasis tour dates were confirmed, a message dropped into my Booking.com account and email. It said there was an error with my booking and that a ‘cancellation request’ — an interesting choice of wording — would be sent my way and that I was to ‘accept promptly’. Obviously, by this time hotels in Manchester were double if not triple their typical Saturday night cost.

Within Booking.com, it was (and still is) showing as confirmed. Like every disgruntled customer, I took to social media to investigate. I quickly found lots of others in the same situation, who were ordered to accept cancellation requests from the hotel with haste. I reached out to Booking.com, who said they’d take this seriously and investigate but they've since emailed confirming Maldron is overbooked and would I like to stay in Wilmslow instead (over 16km away).

The urgent nature of Maldron’s cancellation requests raises suspicions. The logical explanation is so the hotel can list those rooms again for inflated rates, or so they can honour other bookings that were made at higher rates, even if they booked later on. It left a really bad taste and I will certainly not be considering booking with Maldron again.

Getting tickets for the event will be hard as it is, but now there’s the added stress of "how the hell do we get home?"

Although Maldron has behaved the worst in my experience (the other hotels haven’t cancelled), the inflated costs of hotel rooms in Manchester for the gig nights after the tour was announced are just despicable. So dire is the situation, a woman has offered out her garden for people to camp in.

Costs are three or four times higher than usual, if you can even get a room. I understand the economics of increasing prices to meet demand, but surely there’s got to be a limit? As a band of the people, many Oasis fans are working-class who don’t have £500 a night to spend on a hotel on top of a gig ticket. This isn’t west London.

No doubt taxis will be impossible too, and firms like Uber even surcharge for them.

I’m really keen to see Sacha Lord and Andy Burnham provide later public transport on local-running train services and neighbouring cities (Chester, Liverpool, Leeds) for big events like this to help people get home from the gigs that way.

I’m sure that would free up plenty of rooms and force hotels to reduce their rates to a reasonable level with the declining demand.

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