Research Outline

UK City Cost Guide

Goals

In order to attract tourism, provide an estimate of the cost of a weekend trip for each city in the UK. This should be done by first creating a list of all UK cities, finding the average price of a hotel stay for Friday and Saturday night in each city, determining the average star rating of hotels in that city, determining the number of restaurants in each city and the average price, determining the average cost in each city for a pint of beer, determining the number of free attractions and their average rating, and finally crating a ranking system factoring in all this info, with hotel cost being the most important, to rank the cities in order from most to least expensive.

Early Findings

Cities

  • In the UK, cities are only granted official city status by the British monarch. A such, the list below includes only cities officially declared cities by the UK monarch.
  • In England, official cities are: Bath, Birmingham, Bradford, Brighton and Hove, Bristol, Cambridge, Canterbury, Carlisle, Chester, Chichester, Coventry, Derby, Durham, Ely, Exeter, Gloucester, Hereford, Kingston upon Hull, Lancaster, Leeds, Leicester, Lichfield, Lincoln, Liverpool, City of London, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, Norwich, Nottingham, Oxford, Peterborough, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Preston, Ripon, Salford, Salisbury, Sheffield, Southampton, St Albans, Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland, Truro, Wakefield, Wells, Westminster, Winchester, Wolverhampton, Worcester, and York.
  • In Wales, the official cities are: Bangor, Cardiff, Newport, St Davids, and Swansea.
  • In Scotland, the official cities are: Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, and Stirling.
  • In Northern Ireland, the official cities are: Armagh, Belfast, Londonderry, Lisburn, and Newry.

Bath

  • There are 37 hotels in Bath listed on TripAdvisor. For hotel class, six have five stars, thirteen have four stars, thirteen have three stars, and three have two stars.
  • By setting the check-in date for a future, non-holiday, Friday and the checkout date for the next day, we added up the cost of all the hotels for one room for two adults for a night and then divided by the total number of hotels. The average price for two people on weekend trip in Bath is USD$187 per night.
  • There are 400 restaurants in Bath. Twelve are considered fine dining, 253 are considered mid-range, and 67 are considered cheap-eats.
  • Since the TripAdvisor price rankings do not correspond with actual numbers, the research team reviewed the menu of one restaurant in each category to determine the average price for that entire category range. For cheap eats, we found that the average price of one dish was GBP£6.5. For fine dining restaurants, we found that the average seven course meal for one was GBP£90. For mid-range, we found that the average price of one main course was GBP£13. Therefore, we found that the average price for one meal in Bath was GBP£12.01 ((12x90) + (253x13) + (67x6.5)/400).