Football fans’ travel guide to Euro 2016: It could pay to book your travel before the draw

​Travel prices will soar when the draw is made. Simon Calder shows you how to be ahead of the game

Stade de France

At 5pm GMT tomorrow, football fans from England, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as 21 other European nations, will have their sights on a conference centre to the north-west of Paris. The Palais des Congrès is where Europe's biggest sporting event, Uefa's Euro 2016 football championships, will be decided. We already know the tournament's architecture, in the shape of the 10 venues dotted around France where the matches will be played. From north to south, the grounds are in a 4-2-4 formation: Lille, Lens and the two Paris stadiums (Parc des Princes and Stade de France); St-Etienne and Lyon; plus Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseille and Nice.

The draw in Paris will assign the teams to six groups of four, whose teams will play each other between 10 and 22 June. Those results will decide who progresses to the knock-out stages, from 25 June until 10 July, the day of the final.

Every fan wants to know: who will we play, and where? Whether your team will face a “group of death” or a “walk in the park” is in the lap of the footballing gods. But if you're keen to be in France during the tournament it makes sense to act ahead of the draw. Airlines do not yet know where the demand peaks are going to be. While they realise some of their flights to and from France are going to be in very high demand, they don't know which. But within seconds of a team being placed in a group, travel websites will be hit with a spike in bookings.

If England are drawn in Group D, for example, playing in Toulouse, Nice and Bordeaux, fares on British Airways, easyJet and Ryanair to those cities will soar in line with demand.

It could pay to take a punt on where your team will play and book your travel before the draw. Eurostar is extending its normal 180-day booking horizon to seven months to cover the whole tournament. From today, trains from London St Pancras to Lille, Paris, Lyon and Marseille will be on sale at football.eurostar.com. Of those cities, Lyon is the ideal place to base yourself.

The maths behind that assertion are as follows (skip this paragraph if you prefer to take my word for it). Because France are already assigned to group A, and seeded England are guaranteed the first position in one of the other groups, it narrows down the range. For four of the venues, there is a one-in-five chance of England playing at least one match. That rises to two-in-five for Paris, Nice, Bordeaux, Lyon and St-Etienne. It is fair to regard the last two cities as a single entity, because the train between them takes only 46 minutes. So England fans opting in advance for Lyon/St-Etienne have a 60 per cent chance that their team will play at least one match in the zone. If England are drawn in Group F, they'll get one game at Lyon's Stade des Lumières and a second at St-Etienne's Stade Geoffroy-Guichard. For Northern Ireland and Wales, the computations are slightly different because of a higher number of possibilities about how teams can be assigned. But it remains the case that the Lyon/St-Etienne combo is most likely to deliver at least one game.

Even if your team is drawn in a group with no Lyon/St-Etienne fixtures, Lyon is still a rail hub in southern France so venues are reasonably accessible; the most distant, Lille, has a direct train link taking three hours. French Railways' domestic services, at least between the provincial host cities and Paris, are on sale already at Voyages- sncf.com (or, if you prefer to talk, on 0844 848 5 848). Extra trains – football specials – will be laid on for key matches. So you could book yourself on a train or plane to Lyon at the current low fares – around £120 return from Gatwick, out on 9 June and back on 23 June – then watch air fares soar. (Though airlines are likely to lay on extra flights and, in BA's case, use bigger planes, these seats will be sold at a fat premium.)

The budget option is to pack your pals into a car and take advantage of cheap Channel crossings from Dover/Folkestone to Calais/Dunkirk. Demand will be highest if home teams are drawn to play in the four northern venues, making day-trips possible. Eurotunnel says “We are prepared for additional bookings once the draw has been made and will put on capacity to match the demand.” The ferry firms have oceans of capacity, and you should find fares under £100 return for a vehicle and up to nine people, even on key dates. P&O Ferries is offering Northern Ireland fans a discount if they book Larne-Cairnryan and Dover-Calais ferries on the same reservation. And Brittany Ferries says fans are already booking western Channel crossings from Portsmouth to Le Havre (for Paris) and Caen and St-Malo (for Bordeaux and Toulouse).

One more point to consider: tickets. The one certainty about Euro 2016 is that the touts will clean up, though a tranche of 800,000 tickets is due on sale on Monday – see bit.ly/2016tkts.

The Independent's host city ratings

St-Etienne **

The capital of the Loire is not an elegant riverside city – St-Etienne is way u priver from classic châteaux country. While there is some stirring Massif Central scenery beyond the city limits, the boast “Twinned with Coventry” rather sums up this slighty glum venue.

Lens ***

“Gritty” suits this northern French town well, but three years ago an outpost of the Louvre opened here. The dazzling structure now shows a changing selection of works sent from HQ in Paris.

Bordeaux ****

The capital of Aquitaine earned Unesco World Heritage Site status in 2007, reflecting its well preserved good looks and rich history, augmented by its knack for making some of the world's finest wines.

Toulouse ****

“La Ville Rose” is the heart of south-west France's rugby country, but for football fans with time on their hands there is much to appreciate. At the city's heart is the large, handsome Place du Capitole, and the nearby Musée des Augustins contains works by Delacroix and, appropriately, Toulouse-Lautrec.

Lille ****

The capital of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region gained a star this year, thanks to the miraculous rescue and restoration of the Villa Cavrois, an Art Deco chateau. The old town remains a profoundly atmospheric fragment of Flanders.

Marseille ****

France's second city and main port, midway along the country's Mediterranean coast, has been a multicultural hub for millennia. Its spell as a European capital of culture in 2013 freshened up the city, making it one of the nation's most enticing locations.

Lyon *****

Around the confluence of the rivers Saône and Rhône, Lyon has risen to become France's third most pre-eminent city. It is compact enough to be easily navigable (especially using the city's low-cost bicycle-hire scheme), yet also big enough to be rich in interest. The Alps are temptingly close for rest-day excursions.

Nice *****

Squeezed between the mountains and the Med, Nice is a French city infused with the best of Italy – and the most atmospheric of Provençal cities. There is no better place to celebrate victory or to drown your sorrows.

Paris *****

The French capital has two Euro 2016 stadiums: the Parc des Princes and the Stade de France, where the tounament's opening match kicks off on 10 June and its Final will be played a month later. Despite the tragedies that befell it in 2015, Paris retains all the qualities of a great world city: a diverse and welcoming powerhouse of culture and cuisine, and outrageously beautiful besides.