£16,000 for a tent? How the wealthy ‘do' Glastonbury, without getting their feet dirty

Telegraph

6 days ago

It is less than a month until Glastonbury Festival opens its doors to more than 200,000 revellers. While most are happy to trudge onto Worthy Farm with a trusty pop-up tent and camping backpack, many have opted to pay multiples of the £378.50 ticket price to party in style.
Customers of Yurtel, for instance, shelled out between £10,000 up to £16,500 per head to enjoy the use of its luxurious tents – complete with proper beds – as well as a restaurant, cocktail bar and wood-fired hot tubs. After a warm shower each morning, they were to be ferried into the middle of the festival site and driven back to their home-away-from-home whenever they liked.
That, at least, was the plan. Yurtel, however, went into liquidation at the start of this month, meaning nobody will be able to experience its luxuriousness in Somerset. It has also emerged that Yurtel had not actually secured festival tickets for its customers before going bust, leaving the well-heeled would-be revellers scrambling to get into Glastonbury at all.
Shame on you YURTEL! There is no record of any bookings by Yurtel for Glastonbury 2025. So they have kept all the dosh from customers (minimum £10000!) - who now lose their Glasto booking as Yurtel gone into liquidation. Disgusting.
— morcette (@morcette) May 22, 2025
Online message boards and social media sites are full of misery and outrage at the demise of Yurtel. Disappointed customers claim that Yurtel, which operated for 17 years, insisted on payments to be made by bank transfer. That means, unlike with credit card payments, they will not get a refund from their bank and will instead become creditors of the company – meaning they may only stand to recoup pennies in the pound during the insolvency.
One disappointed customer, Milly, said that she was 'absolutely heartbroken' at the prospect of losing thousands of pounds as well as not being able to go to Glastonbury after having recovered from cancer. 'We can't get our money back from the bank. Yurtel have stolen thousands from me and my fiancé. We saved all of this just to go.' Others have variously described themselves as being 'totally gutted', having a 'sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach' and bursting into tears when they heard the news. Yurtel's founder, Mickey Luke, has not yet commented on its liquidation.
Rather amusingly, several scammed glampers have tried to absolve themselves from their super-affluent lifestyle on a Reddit thread that verges on parody. 'Some posts have quite rightly challenged the whole glamping/bought privileged approach. I am with you on this BTW. Behind many situations like this there's a back story...' writes one. 'All I can say is the person who gave us the ticket is an awesome philanthropist and I'm proud to know him.'
Another writes: 'I personally don't approve of glamping/VIP tickets. It can, in some, lead to a degree of entitlement. My brother works on the gates for Oxfam and has had issues specifically with the VIPs.' And yet: 'Mine was given to me by a very good friend after they received some very bad news which meant they couldn't go. So no idea of the actual cost, some I know are in excess of £10k. Way outside my budget to be clear. Believe me or not, I really didn't care about the glamping. It was a very generous offer from a friend which would have been beyond rude to turn down. Add to this my partner has had a hip operation this year it all made sense to say yes.'
Glastonbury's official line about unofficial glamping outside the festival walls is that 'some of these sites have done a good job, by being fairly priced and well managed. Unfortunately, this is not true for them all'. Michael Eavis, Glastonbury's founder, is quoted on its website as saying: 'I want to warn anyone who might be spending their money on these sites that we are not responsible for them, and cannot guarantee that they won't let you down.'
The Yurtel debacle is a rare failure in what is an otherwise booming industry. Since the first festival glamping sites appeared at Glastonbury 20 years ago, they have become a staple of the British summer and are adding services that would please a minor oligarch. Some have swimming pools, others have private helipads; many will book big-name musicians and DJs to play for their customers while, just down the road, the actual music festival is happening.
While luxurious tents are nothing new – think the meeting of Henry VIII and France's Francis I held a summit on what became known as The Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 – the idea of luxury camping for festival-goers is a much more modern one. The first glamping sites popped up at Glastonbury in 2005, while 'glamping' itself was only added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016.
The luxury camps encircling Glastonbury today are a world away from when the festival was first held, 55 years ago, when 1,500 punters paid £1 each to hear the likes of The Kinks – and get a free pint of milk. 'People expect a different level compared to 1970,' John Giddings, founder of the Isle of Wight Festival, tells me. 'People want comfort, they expect more professional treatment and to be looked after better. You can't just chuck 50,000 people in a field and expect them to get on with it.'
While many aspects of the festival experience have modernised – from phone charging stations to the proliferation of 'wellness spaces' – the basic camping proposition has remained the same: pitch a tent and lie on the floor. 'The general camping offering at a festival hasn't changed since the 1970s,' says Melvin Benn, the man behind Latitude and Reading & Leeds. 'The production levels have got better, the security has got better – even the toilets have got better. But the camping offering hasn't got better.' Enter glamping.
The boom in luxury camping at festivals has partly been driven by the cohort of revellers who attended these jamborees in the 1980s and 1990s growing older and still wanting to – but also desiring, and being able to afford, more comfort than previously. 'It is very important to get a good night's sleep. When you are a young person you probably don't need that, you can party all night and get going the next day,' says Mark Sorrill, founder of The Pop-Up Hotel, another Glastonbury glamping site. 'There are tons of people that still access that incredible aspect of Glastonbury. But there's a growing number of slightly older attendees who are looking for a bit more comfort, and it just extends the experience.'
Those in the industry insist that the Yurtel episode is an isolated one and its demise does not reflect the sector as a whole. The growth of The Pop-Up Hotel shows how big a wave the glamping operators are riding. When it first opened, in 2011, it had 17 tents; this year Sorrill expects to fill 350 rooms (with some possibly disappointed Yurtel customers).
Its Glastonbury prices start at £3,699 (tickets not included) with more deluxe options including an American-style RV (£19,999) to a tipi suite with en-suite shower room and up to five bedrooms (£28,999). Business has been so good of late that, for the first time, Sorrill is launching a standalone room with four proper walls (£14,999 for two guests) that will appeal to city folk. 'There's a place for something more urban in orientation,' he tells me.
The Pop-Up Hotel features a swimming pool, spa and private helipad, as well as live sets from the likes of Huey Morgan and Rob da Bank. 'We're aimed at the premium end of the market, and unashamedly so,' says Sorrill. 'But we are trying to keep folks in the magic of that moment for a longer period.' This level of decadence is not just a British phenomenon: at this year's Coachella festival there was, for the first time, an outpost of the super-posh sushi restaurant Nobu.
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The rapid growth of festival glamping makes Britain an attractive place for the super-rich to spend (at least part of) their summers, according to Benn. 'Those that can afford £32,000 to attend wouldn't be coming to Glastonbury or spending their money in Somerset unless those facilities were there,' he says. 'They'd go and spend it in Monaco or Las Vegas, or somewhere else.'
Festival-goers now expect such high levels of comfort that organisers are making the camping experience more luxurious even for those who have not paid astronomical sums to be there. Benn tells me that at Reading & Leeds this year he is launching five new campsites, such as one for solo revellers, or a calmer one that will have a more relaxed vibe. He promises that there will be 'slightly nicer facilities, there'll be a café and that type of stuff: a semi-glamping experience but within the main campsite, without having to pay more'. It may be a good option for any unlucky Yurtel customers who cannot get to Glastonbury this year.