Two days ago I published a mid-study dispatch on what a 34-candidate by-election does to a seaside town's hotel prices. The honest answer then was "too early to say". It is no longer too early to say.
The week Clacton went national
Since Thursday the by-election has stopped being a curiosity and become a phenomenon. The Rest is Politics is running Count Binface clips that pull five-figure likes. The Times sent a film crew to the seafront. And on Saturday afternoon someone took a light aircraft up from Earls Colne and spent an hour tracing an enormous wheelie bin over the sea off Clacton pier, in full view of anyone watching Flightradar24. There is now, in the most literal sense, air support.
Five days before the poll, a small Essex seaside town has the entire country's attention — and the country's press corps, campaign teams and curiosity-trippers all need somewhere to sleep.
What the tape recorded
Our nightly price capture has been logging Clacton's bookable hotels since 26 July, and the surge shows up in the data almost to the hour:
- The median price for polling night jumped ten per cent in a single day as the clips went viral (6 to 7 August). That's the sharpest one-day move we've recorded for the town.
- Availability, this morning: 5 of the 16 properties we track have a room left for election eve. The budget end has gone entirely — every guesthouse that was quoting under £90 has sold out.
- One concrete example, same hotel, same night: a room for election eve that cost £86 when we baselined it on 26 July is £135 today. Nobody changed the wallpaper. Thirty-four candidates and a camera crew happened.
The study's method and its honest caveats are in the original piece — controls in Southend and on a quiet Clacton Wednesday, medians not averages, and an open admission that part of any median rise is the arithmetic of cheap rooms vanishing. All of that still applies. But a ten per cent single-day move against a flat control is starting to look less like seaside seasonality and more like the thing we set out to measure: democracy, priced by the night.
If you're going
- Book now or bring a tent. Five properties is not many, and the count crowd hasn't all committed yet.
- The event page has whatever remains near the seafront, from live rates, with no fees of ours on top — ever.
- If you miss the vote, the Clacton Airshow follows two weeks later — we're recording those nights too, not least to see whether the Red Arrows (still weather-bound in Canada as I write) make it home for it.
Full curves — election nights against both controls, baseline to ballot box — after the count.
Nick, founder