As far as I can see the lower bowl of St James' fits 35k-40k, and some of those won't be sellable as many tickets are unreserved, so surely we can sell the bottom of the ground out for the Saturday at least.

The RFL have got to think of other ways to get round the accommodation issue though, even getting the 11 clubs (excluding Catalan) to fill just 1 coach each gets another 500+ on the gate.

Cardiff is 3 hours away for the Lancashire clubs!

Prices are crazy for accommodation and most seems booked up - I feel it could be killed off by the low crowd.
I am looking for accommodation for 4 - my dad, me and my grown up kids - and we do not want to share beds!!
I cant see anything under £1000. Which is crazy - it would cost more for that game than for all other games put together

I'm in Newcastle twice a week and I've not seen a single advert for the Magic weekend. The city is plastered with ads for the RU World Cup games at St James Park including a huge one draped across the Tyne Bridge. Maybe the council are prevented from promoting our event as part of their contract to be a host city for the RU tournament ?

Try some of the outlying towns. Hexham, for example, has regular trains into the city which take about 35-40 mins. Same with Morpeth.

Look for accommodation in Jesmond, Whitley Bay, Tynemouth, Byker, Wallsend, etc etc. All these places are in the suburbs and are less than 20 or so minutes away from the city centre.

The issue with Newcastle is that it's very popular on weekends for stag dos and night outs, never mind with this added on top. You get hotels being half booked regardless of events like this - and the city is remarkably small when you think about it, so accommodation was always going to be an issue.

I literally live a stones throw away from St James Park in the city centre - I can clearly hear matches if I open a window on match days. Yet I haven't seen a lick of advertising - fingers crossed that changes soon.

Lovely part of the world! Stayed in a farmhouse there before a GNR one year and it's great!
Probably clear a hangover quick too!

Same issue for us....4 of us looking to go for the full weekend, cant find any sensible accommodation so we probably won't bother.

We don't really want to stay in Hexham or Sunderland or Darlington or anywhere else. After travelling 3 hours to get to the North East, we don't really want to spend another couple of hours travelling to and from Newcastle.

The event is in Newcastle, so people will rightly want to stay in Newcastle.

It literally takes 15 minutes or less to get to all 3 of those places on a train that stops 5 minutes from the stadium, if that.

Like I said, after travelling to the North East, we don't want to be buggering around with more travelling around the local area constantly.

Drive to Sunderland, train to Newcastle, train back to Sunderland to get refreshed and changed after the rugby, train back to Newcastle, train back to Sunderland to sleep; then repeat on Sunday. That would be assuming the train timetables fitted with our schedule on the day, and they ran late into the night (both days) otherwise you are messing around with taxis etc...

Actually it looks like the last train on Saturday night to Sunderland is 23:18 and takes 28 minutes.

The event is in Newcastle, so we want to stay in Newcastle.

I did - nothing under £1000


absolutely! we've managed to get somewhere in Darlington - but we will have the same amount of travelling by train as if we were going to Manchester - on top of that we have to drive back on the Sunday night as the bank holiday is the Monday before!
Bad bad move by the RFL.