Cheltenham Experience

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davidjohnson

At the Start
Joined
Jun 29, 2007
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£30 quid to get in*. A bar where draught lager is unavailable so a bottle of Magners at £4.50 is the prefered option and £4.30 for a cheese and onion pasty. Six races a day.

Okay you get good racing, but value for money doesn't seem a big priority.

*On a freebie myself but speaking up for the masses!
 
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Completely agree with that. They are selling Cheltenham as a brand though so they can charge as much as they want really.
 
Cheltenham is killing itself in terms of sport - I am sure commercially most if not all the recent changes stand up but I think in 5 years time it will be a disaster.
 
Got up at 420 yesterday morning to get there -lost my proverbials and had to listen to tales about bookies being hammered.much to the disgust of my mates I spent this afternoon on the sofa on our expensive rented house watching the action before getting hammered tonight.at the end of the day if you are winning or ahead you will put up with it.it's a different story when the tide has turned against you.
Anyway tomorrow is break out of jail day.wake up,cold shower,several thousand calories and the world will be a better place.
 
Loosen My Load is going to get you back in the game straight off the bat. How he is 3/1 is beyond me.
 
I believe Ladbrokes will be 3s in the morning and I have several leaflets from ladbrokes in Cheltenham offering a 10 per cent Bonus on all winning bets.
If that doesn't work Plan B may require a change of boxer shorts.
 
To be honest, I agree with Euro about £30 not being too bad for such a meeting. The price of the drink and snack quoted aren't any different to most courses, either. Lingfield was charging £25 last year for bog-standard AW fare with one hour's C to X-list music/singing after racing. Yesterday there, I bought a not-huge cardboard tray of fish 'n' chips and a Pepsi and it cost just shy of £8, from a grim fish bar with nowhere to sit.

Contrast that with Hove Dogs (Coral course) where today I've had a very good 3-course lunch for a tenner in their panoramic restaurant. The brunch is under £7 and is a whopping plateful of breakfast goodies, again served at a table with linen and full waiting service, comfy chairs.

It doesn't stack up by comparison, does it?
 
Well I'm just back and must say that meeting is much better better value than the festival. It was 25 in on Friday and Sunday, with no club split. £30 for club yest. Decent pork roll for £4.60, bottle of water for a quid and I thought the drink was reasonably priced. But then we are ripped off in Ireland where a beef roll is a tenner and you won't pay under a fiver for a sandwich and two yo yos for a cup of bloody coffee. And they charge €15-20 in for an ordinary days racing. I wouldn't be complaining too much with Cheltenham.
 
I tend to agree with Euro and Krizon - not that bad really when you consider that entrance to Newbury on Hennessy day is (and has been for a few years) £40 for members, £25 for Tatts; Kempton on King George day appears to be £45 and £30 respectively, looking on their website, although you do get a few bits thrown in with that.

The price of food and drink is another matter - yes, it's all overpriced but unfortunately that is the same at every racecourse, be it Cheltenham or an AW meeting at Kempton. I do think something should be done about it but there's two hopes of that.
 
It's not just the price for the food and drink in the official bars, it's the service. Absolutely appalling. No proper organisation at the bars or methodology in the approach of how to deal with the queues. Most of the staff can't pull a pint to save their lives,and drinks advertised which are not available once one does get to the front of the queue. Unbelievable in one bar they did not stock Red Bull. One of my friends had an apoplexy when told it was not available.
 
Cheltenham sent me a survey to complete so I have the food 1/10 I doubt they will take any notice of complaints if people buy the crap that Jockey Club Racecourses catering send out - how come York can do good food at reasonable prices and just about no other track can .
 
What kind of food are you talking about? If it's restaurant food, then I can say there have been nothing but very complimentary words about Brighton, Plumpton, and Lingfield (the latter now self-catering). If it's brasserie/bistro, that'll be a little different, and if it's off the assorted chuck wagons, it can be anything from delicious to utterly awful. You can't possibly throw them all into one criticism, any more than you can judging eateries elsewhere - you're hardly going to compare a Toby Carvery to the Savoy Grill, are you?
 
York is a class apart - not for restaurant food but cafe food , its sandwiches are made on site yet much cheaper than many others .
 
Most of the pre-boxed sarnies are around £3-4 each, which I think is pretty steep, unless they're really exceptional - sadly, most aren't. But I don't think you can lump 'racecourse food' into one heap for criticism. For example, Alice's chicken satay with noodles (or rice) at Plumpton is now £5.60 for a generous and delicious helping. She works from a mobile kitchen, so doesn't have overheads, but I'm pretty sure that if you bought it where there are, say in a caff or a bistro, it'd be a good £3 more.
 
krizon said:
Most of the pre-boxed sarnies are around £3-4 each, which I think is pretty steep, unless they're really exceptional - sadly, most aren't. But I don't think you can lump 'racecourse food' into one heap for criticism. For example, Alice's chicken satay with noodles (or rice) at Plumpton is now £5.60 for a generous and delicious helping. She works from a mobile kitchen, so doesn't have overheads, but I'm pretty sure that if you bought it where there are, say in a caff or a bistro, it'd be a good £3 more.
Click to expand...

Plumpton's different gravy.
 
Was at both Haydock and Aintree over the weekend and have to say I thoroughly enjoyed both days. Hard to fault either though I am probably in the small minority in that I couldn't care less about food prices (anytime I go racing I make sure to have a big breakfast or lunch before heading off) and am not a huge fan of drinking all that much on course either.

I never realised how sharp Haydock is (has become?) until I saw it in person by the way. The inside course they used for the fixed brush hurdle is practically a greyhound track. Crazy stuff.
 
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When they installed the new 6f straight last year they realigned the jumps course to make it into the dog track it has now become. You really can't get an idea of how tight it is until you've actually been there - the TV doesn't show how bad it is.

(I remember highlighting this last autumn! :p )
 
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