Balloon Fiesta 2026: Bristol Short Lets by the Numbers

The city is nearly full

The Bristol International Balloon Fiesta runs this weekend, 7 to 9 August 2026, at Ashton Court. Here is what it has already done to the city's short lets, measured on Monday 3 August by Upgraded Intelligence, the in house data engine behind our Bristol Market Reports, across 217 tracked properties within ten kilometres of the city centre.

• Fiesta Saturday, 8 August: 92% of Bristol short lets are already booked.
• Fiesta Friday, 7 August: 86% booked.
• The median nightly rate among professionally priced portfolios: £220, against roughly £100 midweek the following week.

Put simply, five days out, fewer than one in ten Bristol short lets still has Saturday night open, and the going professional rate is more than double a normal night.

Area by area: how booked is Fiesta Saturday

The fill is not even across the city. Share of short lets already booked for Saturday 8 August, by area, with the number of properties tracked in each.

• Clifton: 92% booked (48 tracked properties)
• Redland and Cotham: 92% booked (62 tracked)
• Easton and Greenbank: 92% booked (25 tracked)
• Harbourside and the city centre: 87% booked (70 tracked)
• Bedminster and Southville: 86% booked (50 tracked)
• Totterdown: 79% booked (33 tracked)

Two things stand out. North Bristol is effectively sold out, Clifton, Redland and Easton are all at 92%, and even the city's quietest forward calendar is transformed. Totterdown normally has just 31% of its next 90 nights booked, the lowest of any area in our demand report, yet for Fiesta Saturday it is at 79%. A single event more than doubles the booked share of the city's slowest neighbourhood.

Where the value is, for guests and for hosts

Sunday 9 August is the quiet opportunity of the weekend. It is 66% booked, twenty six points below Saturday, and rates step down with it. For guests still looking, Sunday is where availability lives. For hosts with an empty Sunday, a guest already in town for the weekend is the easiest booking there is, a sensible rate beats an empty night.

The other number worth knowing: the Monday to Thursday after the Fiesta drops back to 55 to 60% booked with professional rates around the £100 mark. The spike is sharp and it ends fast, which is why a flat August price gets both halves of the month wrong. Our full breakdown of how Bristol's events move the market is in the Bristol events calendar for hosts.

Citing these figures

These numbers come from our live tracking of the Bristol short let market, they are not survey estimates. Booked percentages cover all tracked properties, nightly rates are the median among the professionally priced portfolios in our sample, and the readings were taken on 3 August 2026. Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite them with credit to Upgraded PM and a link to this page. If you need a different cut of the data for a story, a specific area, a different date range, a comparison to last month, ask us and our data science team will run it for you, free.

If you own a Bristol short let

The Fiesta is the clearest annual reminder that a handful of dates carry a disproportionate share of the year's revenue, and that the market prices them weeks in advance. If your property sold out early at a standard rate, that gap is what professional pricing exists to close. Our Airbnb and short let management service prices every night from this same live data, and the free short let valuation shows what your property should be earning across the full Bristol calendar, event weekends included.