Football is back, and with it the part of the season nobody sings about: working out where you are sleeping.
Some of these trips are enormous. Brighton to Newcastle is 291 miles in a straight line. Bournemouth to Newcastle is 293. Brighton to Leeds is 211. Those are measured between the actual grounds, from the coordinates behind our venue pages, so every real journey is longer than the number — and a 3pm Saturday kick-off at the far end of one of them is not a day trip, whatever the fixture list implies.
It is not only the away end, either. Every club has supporters who moved away and travel back: for them the London grounds are the easy fixtures and their own stadium is the 250-mile one. Football travel advice is almost always written for the visiting fan, and it quietly ignores everybody making the same journey in reverse.
The fixture list is not the fixture list
Here is the thing that actually costs supporters money, and it is specific to football rather than travel in general.
Kick-off times move for television. The fixture list is published in June; broadcasters then select matches through the season and shift them, typically on a few weeks' notice. A Saturday three o'clock becomes a Sunday two o'clock, or a Saturday half five, or occasionally a different weekend altogether.
If you live near the ground, that is an inconvenience. If you are travelling, it can be the difference between a day out and an overnight stay. A Saturday 3pm two hundred miles away is just about doable if everything runs. A Sunday 2pm is not. A Saturday 5:30pm is certainly not. So a television pick does not only move an existing booking — quite often it *creates* the need for one, weeks after you looked at the fixture list and decided you could manage without.
And the unpleasant version: a non-refundable room booked for the Saturday, and a match that is now on the Sunday.
And that assumes you get a ticket
The other thing the fixture list does not tell you is whether you are going at all.
Away allocations are small, and at the bigger grounds they go on loyalty points, membership tiers or a ballot. Plenty of supporters do not find out whether they have a ticket until a few weeks before the match — which is exactly when the rooms within walking distance of the ground have gone, and the ones left have noticed there is a match on.
So the order most people are forced into is back to front: decide, book somewhere to sleep, and only then find out whether you are actually going. That is an uncomfortable thing to do with a non-refundable room, and it is why a lot of supporters end up either paying over the odds late or not travelling at all.
Book early, on a rate you can change
The answer is not to wait and see. Rooms near a ground on a matchday do not generally get cheaper as the date approaches, and the places within walking distance go first — which matters more than it sounds, because the walk back at eleven at night is the part of the trip you will actually remember.
The answer is to book early on a free-cancellation rate. It covers both problems at once: the booking can follow the fixture when the broadcasters move it, and it costs you nothing if the ballot goes against you. You keep the price you found in August and the right to walk away in November. A flexible rate is often the same money, or a pound or two more; on a fixture that has not been picked for television yet, it is simply the correct way to book.
That advisory sits on every club page on this site for exactly that reason. It is not a nudge towards a pricier room.
The trains will not save you
Weekend engineering works exist because the weekend is when the railway is quietest — which is precisely when supporters travel. Sunday is when the heaviest work happens, and Sunday is where television likes to put the biggest matches.
Check the trains about a fortnight out, when the works are confirmed rather than provisional. If the fixture has been moved to a Sunday, check twice, and check the last service home before you decide you do not need a room.
The coach, which is not a lesser option
Plenty of supporters do not want a hotel at all, and I should say so plainly on a site that sells rooms.
The supporters' club coach leaves at seven in the morning, gets back somewhere past midnight, costs a fraction of the alternative, and for a great many people it *is* the day out — the singing, the service station at half six, the same seats and the same faces every fortnight. It is also the only way a lot of younger fans get to away games at all. I salute them, genuinely, and I am not going to pretend a hotel is an upgrade on something people choose on purpose.
This note is for the trips where the coach does not work: the Sunday kick-off it cannot get you home from, the fixture moved to a Friday night, the 250-mile round trip with a five-thirty start, the ones where you would rather see something of the city than a motorway in the dark. That is a smaller set of journeys than the fixture list suggests, and it is the only set I am writing about.
What we do about it
Every club has a season page listing all thirty-eight fixtures, home and away, and each match with hotels near its ground links straight through to them. The search is centred on the stadium, not the city centre, because on a matchday the question is how far you walk afterwards, not how central the postcode sounds.
We show the total before you commit, including what the property charges at the door where we know it. Where somewhere is cheaper booked direct, I would rather say so than hide it. There is no version of this site where the price depends on how carefully you read.
That is not charity. It is the only part of this market genuinely worth competing on.
Order of operations
1. Find the fixture on the club page. If it has not been picked for television yet, assume the date and time can still move. 2. Book near the ground, early, on a free-cancellation rate — before you know about the ticket, not after. 3. Check the trains a fortnight out, and again if the kick-off moves. 4. If the fixture moves, move the booking. If the ticket does not come, cancel it. That is what the flexible rate was for.
Away fans have a chant about drinking all your beer. The ones who booked in August will be there at closing time to try. The ones who left it late will be on a rail replacement bus outside Peterborough, wondering why they bothered.
HWTL.