Many New Year’s Eves tend to take on the same exact quality of the one before; it is the same overpriced bars, the same music, the same people, over and over again. Want to break the cycle? Spend your New Year’s Eve in a castle.
Fortunately, that’s a lot easier than you think.
According to Airbnb, people are royally obsessed with the idea of ringing in the new year in a drafty stone building that may have once housed nobles — and the vacation home-booking site is more than happy to oblige.
Castles available to book on the site grew by nearly a thousand over the past year, leading to a grand total of 4,500 available. New Year’s Eve is the most searched-for date for castle bookings, with 56,000 people reportedly searching for them over the New Year’s period going into 2019. Six and a half million people searched for castles over the course of the year.
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The reason behind the uptick in castle desire might be fairly straightforward. Who wouldn’t want to spend a New Year’s Eve pretending to be a background character on Downton Abbey in a ”fairytale” castle in Devon, England?
In fact, the popularity of castles could conceivably be tied to the ever-increasing presence of royals in the collective consciousness. 2018 saw the Royal Weddings of Meghan Markle and Princess Eugenie, and 2019 will have even more royal content with the third season of The Crown and the Downton Abbey movie.
Anyway, if you’ll excuse us, we’ll be hard at work searching for last-minute castle bookings for this New Year’s Eve.