For the customer

Reduced Capacity for Improved Comfort

The overall capacity at the 2026 Festival will be reduced from 68,500 to 66,000 each day. This follows a full review of racegoer feedback and will allow us to sell to an optimal capacity and deliver the highest level of customer experience for everyone.

We believe that reducing the capacity will not only help ease overcrowding in certain areas on the racecourse, whatever the weather, but also make for a more enjoyable experience for racegoers making their way to and from the racecourse.

Ladies Day is officially returning to Cheltenham Festival

High stakes racing. Head-turning style. A crowd like no other. This is Cheltenham at its best.

The day includes Four Grade 1 races, including the prestigious BetMGM Queen Mother Champion Chase presented by Her Majesty the Queen.

Look out for The Best Dressed Competition with over £10,000 in prizes up for grabs.

Start your day with ‘live music and sparkling tips’ hosted by Rosie Tapner in The Centaur where a dedicated racing panel of experts will be sharing their tips for the day, against a back drop of live music and fashion.

What's more Prosecco will be on sale across the racecourse, offering an affordable way to make the day that bit more special.

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Removal of All Drinks Restrictions

After the success of the drinks control release in 2025, we will be removing all drinks restrictions across the Club enclosure as well for 2026, meaning customers can take their drink and finish it at leisure, wherever they have chosen to watch the racing.

Revamped Tented Village and Bars

In 2025 we unveiled four magnificent bar refurbishments, The Home Straight Bar (previously known as the Winged Ox), The Winning Post (previously Persian War), The Moet and Chandon Village Champagne Bar and The Sales Arena. This season we’re delighted to announce that Cottage Rake and Mill House will be getting a refurbishment and will come become known as Prestbury View. This means that five of the seven bars in the Main Grandstand have been refurbished in 2025. These name changes are part of a broader effort to make navigation easier and help racegoers locate bars and meet friends more easily across the site.

The British weather springs many surprises but you won’t be caught out this year at The Festival, because we are introducing an undercover food court space in the Tented Village to provide more space for racegoers to enjoy a wide range of food and drink out of the elements should the March weather turn.

In addition, the Vestey Food Court will be transformed into the Green Grazer, supporting local produce as part of our sustainability commitment.

Enhanced PA and Racecourse TV

Racegoers are in for a sonic treat this season as we have invested in a brand new, state-of-the-art sound system to provide a world-beating audio experience to spectators on-course. The project has been three years in the making with expert consulting provided by our technical service provider RaceTech. The atmosphere at the Cheltenham Festival generates one of the loudest crowds in British horse racing, with the famous Cheltenham roar reaching over 100 deciBels. The new system will allow spectators to clearly and comfortably hear the commentary during the excitement of the races.

You’ll see a difference on the Big Screens too. We’re working with RMG to bring their RaceIQ statistics expertise to Cheltenham, including the RaceiQ Jump Index. This metric quantifies a horse’s jumping ability at each obstacle, It compares the efficiency, speed and fluency of a horse’s jumps against all those recorded in the RaceiQ database to objectively rate a horse’s jumping ability as a score out of ten. Allowing RMG to convert complex GPS tracking data into a simple and easy to digest summary of how well, or badly, a horse has jumped in previous races to give the viewer a quick and easy snapshot of a horses’ jumping ability.