Unhappy campers have been stung for up to £16,500 as luxury camping company Yurtel folds.
From the Schadenfreude Files: a month out from the 2025 Glastonbury Festival, a number of punters have been left ticketless and ticked off as glamping outfit Yurtel goes into liquidation, taking their tickets with it.
The BBC reports that Yurtel ceased operations on May 8, leaving customers clueless as to what to do next. Going to Glastonbury is off the To Do List, though. The festival reports that Yurtel, which was offering ticket packages with prices up to £16,500, never booked entry for its clients. In a statement, Glastonbury explained that the company had not secured any tickets. “…We have no involvement in Yurtel’s operations and are not able to incur the cost or responsibility of their loss or replacement.”
The High Cost of Glamping at Glastonbury
Now, a weekend pass to Glastonbury Festival has a base cost of £378.50, and I want you to keep that number in mind going forward.
Yurtel, which was founded in 2005, is a luxury camping company – “glamping” in the fallen and crude language of our times – who offer (well, offered) decadent outdoor experiences for their customers at various festivals and events. Services including hot tubs, private bars, bespoke menus designed by celebrity chefs (MasterChef champ Thomasina Miers among them) and more.
But such luxury is not cheap, friendos.
Yurtel packages for the 2025 edition of Glastonbury, which runs from June 25 – 29, ranged from £10,000 for a bare bones experience, to £16,500 for a presidential suite (well, tent) with your own deck, king size bed, and sofa. That’s gotta be some sofa.
One put-out punter, Louise, is out a total of £13,500. Speaking to the BBC, she lamented, “It felt like a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach and also regret. Someone had just walked away with our money and we had nothing to show for it.”
Other customers are reporting massive losses due to group bookings.
No Sympathy for Unhappy Glampers
But the sheer cost has found many commentators short on sympathy. At a time of increasing wealth disparity and cost of living pressures, the plight of those able to cough up that much dinero for a weekend away has elicited a response best described as “sucks to be you.”
On social media site X (formerly useful), the commentary has been predictably brutal.
When another miffed Yurtel customer, Alice, observed that her father would have to shell out “another” 40K to replace their lost ticket and accommodation, the response was predictably savage. The revelation that Yurtel had insisted on payment by bank transfer rather than credit card, making it harder for customers to seek redress, did not help the plight of the punters, with comments having a general “Seriously, how dumb do you have to be?” vibe.
And rubbing a final shake of salt into the wound, this year’s festival, headlined by Olivia Rodrigo, The 1975, and Neil Young, will be the last for two years. Glastonbury is taking 2026 off to let the site recover from all that glamping.
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