We are eight months away from the 2027 Cannes Film Festival, and already all but one of the five-star hotels have stopped taking bookings.
I know you will be gutted to not be able to book a five-star room today. Especially when you consider that during the 2024 festival, a room at the Carlton cost €1,708 for a night, the Mondrian was charging €1,680, and a 75 m² suite at the Majestic was €7,524. For one night.
So what if you are willing to slum it and stay in lower-than-five-star digs? Surely the cost won’t be too astronomically high?
Hhmm... about that.
Today I am looking at the cost of Cannes hotels. Or, more precisely, the markup applied during the festival dates.
This is a topic that bothers me every time I sort out my Cannes accommodation, but rather than just being outraged, I thought this year I’d be outraged with data. So I investigated the cost of a hotel night throughout the year at 224 different hotels (97 in Cannes itself and 127 within commuting distance).
Multi-pack of Cannes
Although most of Cannes’ conference infrastructure was initially created for the film festival, it’s used by more than just cinephiles. Cannes hosts a number of major conferences throughout the year, including:
MIPCOM, the world’s biggest television market, 12 to 15 October 2026
ILTM, the luxury travel industry’s annual market, 30 November to 3 December 2026
The Festival International des Jeux, the French-speaking world’s biggest games festival, 26 to 28 February 2027
MIPIM, the property industry’s giant annual market, 15 to 19 March 2027
Cannes Lions, the advertising industry’s festival, 21 to 25 June 2027
The Cannes Yachting Festival, Europe’s biggest boat show, each September
Here is what a night in a Cannes hotel costs for every single night of the year ahead, all priced on the same day through Booking.com. It’s clear where each event is, and how much pressure it exerts on the Cannes hotel price system.
A conference-less night in Cannes will cost you roughly €100 to €140. By contrast, during the festival, it rises to €390 to €500. Only MIPIM week spikes higher, and that €806 peak reflects the eleven expensive hotels still selling, not the whole town.
Cost of a hotel per night at the Cannes Film Festival
On Sunday 9 May 2027, a median room in Cannes (which can be booked as of the time of writing) costs €160.
A few days later, the Cannes Film Festival opens, and the median rises to €472.
Three days after the closing ceremony, the median is back to €194, and the town reopens.
If you did want to stay in the days just before the festival, you could currently pick from a third of the hotels Cannes has on offer. But opening-night availability drops to just one in eight.
So, all the data combined, it seems that the average Cannes festival markup is 3.8 times. (Calculated by comparing the first Wednesday during the festival with the median of seven other spring Wednesdays when no event is planned).
Below are some examples:
(Note: I’m not looking to single out these establishments as either good or bad, just ones for which good data is available right now).
What would the whole festival cost?
I noticed that some of the hotels were not providing prices for a single day but would take enquiries about longer stays. They have learned that they can demand minimum-night bookings and deal with fewer people checking in and out.
So I also looked at the total cost of staying for the full twelve-day festival.
The cheapest full-festival bed in town is €2,019 at a B&B hotel four kilometres from the Palais.
A central three-star ibis wants €6,264.
The one five-star selling the full stay, the Belle Plage, wants €12,710.
And the Hôtel Le Canberra, a four-star, wants €17,760, which is €1,615 a night for eleven nights.
Is it already too late?
We may be eight months away from the festival, but availability is already tightening.
This can be hard to measure as hotels sometimes hold rooms back from certain customers or publish rooms in waves when they are confident they can command a higher price. So we can’t say “the hotel is fully booked”, but we can say “the hotel is not taking any more bookings”.
Unsurprisingly, the major Cannes events create troughs in availability, as shown below.
Distance matters
Where can a weary filmmaker lay their head without having to break the bank? The further from the Palais, the better the odds. Every hotel's coordinates let us measure its straight-line distance from the red carpet, and availability follows the pavement.
Within 500 metres of the Palais, one hotel in thirteen will still sell festival week. Past two kilometres, nearly half will.
The same pattern holds beyond the town line, only more sharply. Pricing hotels in eight towns within a bus or train ride of Cannes for the same festival and control dates, and matched hotel for hotel, shows the markup is mostly limited to Cannes itself.
Cannes marks up 3.8 times, but Mandelieu-la-Napoule shows zero markup, a town just eight minutes away by train.
Antibes, eleven minutes away, manages 1.2 times.
Nice, thirty-eight minutes down the line with 56 matched hotels, manages 1.3.
The only towns above that are Mougins and Grasse, at 1.6 and 1.3, and Mougins is where the villa crowd goes anyway.
Which means the festival premium is less about the Riviera in May and more about filmmakers wanting to run down the Croisette in a tux.
Notes
Every Cannes price is a Booking.com quote for the same fixed basket of 97 hotels and aparthotels, collected in early September 2026, one night, two adults, headline rate before extras.
A hotel shown as unavailable may be sold out, closed, holding rooms back, or not yet selling that date, so every unavailability figure is a floor, measured through one shop window. Booking.com carries most but not all of the town's roughly 120 hotels.
The commuter-town comparison prices each town's hotels for the festival Wednesday and three spring control dates, matched hotel to hotel within each town, with between 3 (Grasse) and 56 (Nice) matched hotels per town.
And the five-star prices in the opening are Nice-Matin's reported figures for the 2024 festival, not my own collection.
Epilogue
Everything in this article is my own primary research, but I wanted to briefly share an outside check.
The Cannes hoteliers' trade body publishes a monthly barometer, compiled by MKG for the Palais des Festivals, recording what guests actually paid across a panel of around 34 hotels.
I haven't leaned on it for the main findings because it averages a great deal into each number. Whole months, so festival nights blend with quiet ones. Every room type, from singles to suites. And every kind of hotel, from seafront palaces to backstreet two-stars. Their luxury segment is defined by a price threshold (four- and five-star hotels averaging above €400 a night) rather than a named list, so I can't see exactly which hotels sit inside it.
I don't dispute their figures. If anything, they're the best evidence that mine are in the right territory, because their festival Mays come out at roughly three times their ordinary spring months, measured by a completely different method.
Imagine paying €6,264 to stay in an ibis. 😂