How much do hotels charge during the Cannes Film Festival?

With eight months left until the 2027 Cannes Film Festival, all but one five-star hotel has already stopped taking bookings.

I know you’ll be upset that you can’t book a five-star room today. Especially considering that during festival 2024a room at the Carlton cost €1,708 per night, at the Mondrian €1,680, and a 75m² suite at the Majestic cost €7,524. For one night.

What if you’re willing to slum and stay in less than five-star housing? Surely the cost won’t be too astronomically high?

Hmm… about that.

Today I am looking at the cost of hotels in Cannes. More precisely, the markup applied during the festival.

This topic bothers me every time I look into housing in Cannes, but instead of just being outraged, I thought I’d be outraged by the data this year. So, I researched the cost of a hotel night over the course of a year at 224 different hotels (97 in Cannes itself and 127 within driving distance).

Although much of Cannes’ conference infrastructure was originally created for the film festival, it is not only used by film fans. There are a number of major conferences held in Cannes throughout the year, including:

• MIPCOMThe world’s largest television market, October 12 to 15, 2026

• ILTMLuxury Travel Industry Annual Market, November 30 to December 3, 2026

• International Games Festivalthe largest gaming festival in the French-speaking world, from 26 to 28 February 2027

• MIPIMThe real estate industry’s giant annual market, March 15 to 19, 2027

• Cannes LionsAdvertising Industry Festival, June 21–25, 2027

• Cannes Yachting FestivalEurope’s largest boat show, held every September.

Here’s how much a hotel night in Cannes will cost for each night in the coming year, all prices for the same day via Booking.com. It is clear where each event takes place and the pressure it puts on the hotel pricing system in Cannes.

A night without a conference in Cannes will cost you approximately €from 100 to €140. On the contrary, during the festival it increases to 390–500 euros. MIPIM week alone sees a spike in growth, and that €806 peak reflects the eleven luxury hotels still on sale, not the entire city.

On Sunday 9 May 2027, the average room in Cannes (bookable at the time of writing) will cost €160.

The Cannes Film Festival opens in a few days, and the median amount rises to 472 euros.

Three days after the closing ceremony, the median was back to €194 and the city reopened.

If you really wanted to stay just before the festival, you can choose from one of the third of hotels that Cannes has to offer. However, ticket availability for the premiere drops to one in eight.

Thus, if you add up all the data, it turns out that the average markup at the Cannes Film Festival is 3.8 times. (Calculated by comparing the first Wednesday of the festival with the average of seven other spring Wednesdays when no events are scheduled).

Below are some examples:

(Note: I’m not trying to single out these establishments as good or bad.only those for which good data are available right now).

I noticed that some hotels do not provide prices for one day, but accept requests for longer stays. They realized they could require a minimum number of booking nights and deal with fewer people arriving and departing.

So I also looked at the total cost of accommodation for the entire twelve day festival.

• The cheapest holiday bed in the city costs €2,019 at a bed and breakfast four kilometers from the Palace.

• A central three-star ibis asks 6,264 euros.

• The five-star Belle Plage hotel, selling full accommodation, wants 12,710 euros.

• And the four-star Le Canberra hotel wants €17,760, which is €1,615 per night for eleven nights.

The festival may be eight months away, but availability is already dwindling.

This can be difficult to measure, as hotels sometimes hold rooms from certain customers or release rooms in waves when they are confident they can offer a higher price. So we can’t say “the hotel is fully booked” but we can say “the hotel is no longer accepting reservations”.

Unsurprisingly, large events in Cannes result in reduced availability, as shown below.

Where can a tired director lay his head without spending money? The farther from the Palace, the higher the chances. Each hotel’s coordinates allow us to measure its straight-line distance from the red carpet, and availability corresponds to the sidewalk.

Within 500 meters of the Palace, one of the thirteen hotels will still be selling out during the festival week. After walking two kilometers, almost half will pass.

The same picture continues outside the city limits, only more sharply. Hotel prices in eight cities within a bus or train ride of Cannes for the same festival and target dates, as well as hotel-by-hotel comparisons, show that the markup is largely limited to Cannes itself.

In Cannes, the markup increased by 3.8 times, and in Mandelieu-la-Napoule, a city located just eight minutes away by train.

• Antibes, located eleven minutes away, has 1.2 times the time.

• Nice, thirty-eight minutes straight with 56 matching hotels, performance 1.3.

• The only cities above this level are Mougins and Grasse, with rates of 1.6 and 1.3, and Mougins is where the villa crowd goes anyway.

This means the festival awards are less about the Riviera in May and more about filmmakers wanting to cruise along the Croisette in a tuxedo.

Each Cannes price represents a Booking.com quote for the same fixed basket of 97 hotels and apartments collected at the beginning of September 2026, one night, two adults, base price excluding extras.

A hotel shown as unavailable may be sold out, closed, have rooms left, or not yet sold as of that date, so each unavailability value represents a floor measured through one display. Booking.com lists most, but not all, of the city’s approximately 120 hotels.

Comparison of hotel prices in each city for the festival environment and three spring target dates, comparison of hotels in each city, from 3 (Grasse) to 56 (Nice) corresponding hotels per city.

And the five-star opening prices are Nice-Matin’s figures for the 2024 festival, not my own collection.

Everything in this article is my own primary research, but I would like to briefly share external validation.

Trade organization for hoteliers in Cannes publishes a monthly barometer compiled by MKG for the Palais des Festivals, which records what guests at 34 hotels actually paid.

I didn’t rely on it to get the main conclusions because it averages out each number so much. Whole months, so holiday nights merge with quiet ones. All types of rooms: from singles to suites. And all kinds of hotels, from palaces on the seashore to two-star provincial hotels. Their luxury segment is defined by a price threshold (four and five star hotels averaging above €400 per night) rather than a named list, so I can’t say for sure which hotels are included.

I don’t dispute their numbers. If anything, they are the best proof that I am in the right territory, because their May holiday months are about three times larger than the normal spring months, measured by a completely different method.