Tadej Pogačar Lost Out in the Tour de France Hotel Room Lottery

Hotel rooms are the great leveler of the Tour de France.

In a race split between $60 million superteams and minnow squads funded by scraps, riders get the rooms they’re given, and they have to make do.

Race organizers ASO assign hotels to teams at random every night. ASO ranks all the hotels they book across the race and ensure all teams get an equal share of five-star luxury and two-star squalor.

Teams are prohibited from booking their own alternative accommodation or using motorhomes. Remember the short-lived Richie Porte-wagon?

Tadej Pogačar and UAE Emirates-XRG definitely didn’t get winning tickets in the Tour’s hotel room lottery Monday.

According to Spanish reporter Sergi López-Egea, the world’s richest team was allocated a hotel without air conditioning – not ideal given the Tour de France is cooking right now.

What’s more, the hotel’s wonky power supply reportedly couldn’t handle the portable aircon units that team UAE drags around France.

Visma-Lease a Bike must have been laughing at their rivals after the Killer Bees suffered through days riding a team bus with broken AC.

Meanwhile, Uno-X Mobility riders shared images of their accommodation for Monday’s rest day.

It looked like it needed a little TLC.

Anders Halland Johannessen posted a video of filthy floors and cobwebbed corners in his hotel room. He and his twin brother, Tobias, even suggested they decided to sleep on the balcony in a follow-up reel.

That’s not to say every night at the Tour de France would be this way.

The peloton was hunkered down in the unpopulated, untouristed Massif Central ahead of Tuesday’s stage from Aurillac. This remote region is certainly not crammed with city-center hotels or Alpine ski lodges for ASO to choose from.

Smart mattresses and ‘sleep staffers’ insure against Tour de France horror hotels

However, superteams do buy themselves something of an insurance policy in the hotel room lottery.

Extra-rich squads like UAE and Visma make the most basic hotel rooms bling with portable AC units, blackout blinds, and dehumidifiers.

In most cases, they have a dedicated team of staffers who check in to rooms in advance, armed with hoovers, mops, and a cleaning kit.

UAE Emirates-XRG has taken it one step further for 2026 by partnering with EightSleep.

We covered these $3k “smart mattresses” in depth, here – but in short, they track a user’s body temperature and use an internal cooling-heating system to maintain an optimal sleep environment.

EF Education-EasyPost uses the competitor “smart sleep” brand, Somnus.

At the other end of the financial spectrum, riders from low-budget teams do their best with the pillow they brought from home, and not much else.