Everyone knows hotels are cheaper out of season. Almost nobody knows by how much, in the place they actually want to go, on the night they were thinking of.
So I priced it. Eight cities, four months, the same kind of night in each — a mid-month Tuesday, deliberately, to strip out weekends and bank holidays. Live rates, cheapest bookable room per hotel, median across the city. All searched on the same morning, so nothing here is a memory or a rule of thumb.
What the same room costs in four different months
- Venice — Sep £357 · Nov £145 · Jan £122 · Mar £163 — peak is 2.9× the trough
- Edinburgh — Sep £326 · Nov £166 · Jan £122 · Mar £163 — 2.7×
- Dubrovnik — Sep £247 · Nov £106 · Jan £117 · Mar £121 — 2.3×
- Rome — Sep £351 · Nov £188 · Jan £159 · Mar £201 — 2.2×
- Prague — Sep £130 · Nov £88 · Jan £72 · Mar £92 — 1.8×
- Reykjavík — Sep £242 · Nov £176 · Jan £156 · Mar £183 — 1.6×
- Amsterdam — Sep £191 · Nov £220 · Jan £132 · Mar £171 — 1.7×
- Barcelona — Sep £239 · Nov £191 · Jan £284 · Mar £193 — 1.5×
Snapshot taken 10 August 2026 · mid-month Tuesday nights · median cheapest bookable room · 6km radius · one guest.
Venice in January costs a third of Venice in September. Not a sale, not a deal code — the same city, the same hotels, a different month. On a four-night trip that is roughly £940 of difference for two people, which is most of the flights, all of the food, and a decent bottle of something at the end of it.
Edinburgh is nearly as stark. Rome, Dubrovnik and Prague all sit comfortably above 2×.
The part the rule-of-thumb gets wrong
Look at the bottom two rows again.
Amsterdam is dearer in November than September. And Barcelona's January — supposedly the deadest month in Europe — was the most expensive of the four nights I checked, at £284.
I went looking for a reason in our own event calendar, which is the obvious suspect. It didn't explain it: nothing was on in Barcelona that Tuesday night. Amsterdam had a run of arena shows that week, which might account for some of it, but I'm not going to pretend to a certainty I don't have.
Which is exactly the useful finding. "Off-season" is not a month, it's a night. City-break demand, trade fairs, school holidays, a single arena show and the simple fact that some cities are winter cities all cut across the neat seasonal story. A guide that tells you "January is cheap in Europe" would have sent you to Barcelona and cost you £160 a night more than Venice.
How to actually use this
- Price the specific nights, not the month. The gap between two Tuesdays three weeks apart can be bigger than the gap between two cities.
- Shift by one month, not one season. Most of the saving in this table is between September and November — you don't have to travel in the depths of January to get most of the benefit.
- Winter cities charge winter prices. Reykjavík moves least of the eight, because people go for the thing that only happens when it's dark and cold. The off-season discount is largest where the appeal is summer.
- Check what's on before you assume it's quiet. Our events pages exist for exactly this — a market, a match or a festival will move a city's prices more than the season does. Which cuts both ways: Christmas markets make November and December dearer in precisely the cities that are otherwise cheap then.
The honest caveats
- These are prices as sold today for future nights. They will move — that's what prices do, and we record them so we can tell you which way.
- One night per month is a sample, not a season. It's a fair comparison because every city got the same treatment on the same morning, but a Tuesday in mid-January is not the whole of January.
- Medians, not averages: one £2,000 suite can't distort the number, and the median tracks what an ordinary traveller would actually pay.
We're going to keep recording these cities, so this piece can stop being a snapshot and start being a curve. That's the whole reason we keep the prices in the first place — as the by-election and the eclipses showed, the interesting thing is rarely the number today. It's the direction.
Nick, founder