The way blogs work, the most recent article goes on top, so you might see this first, but perhaps you should read “On beer festival season” first.
If that didn’t scare you a little when thinking about beer festivals, this will. Donovan Hall of Spirit World describes his effort to get into the Long Island Beer Festival:
When we get to the Huntington Hilton, we can hear the roar of conversation. The convivial banter of hundreds of people in an outdoor space drinking beer. Through the windows I can see wall to wall people inside, jam packed like commuters on a bus at rush hour. My wife and I head toward the door and a bald guy in a blue sport coat steps up making a sawing motion with his hands like some quarter back had just made an incomplete pass. “If you’re going to the beer festival, there’s no more tickets,” he says.
“But I have tickets,” I say. And I hold up my two tickets to prove it.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “They aren’t letting anybody else in. There’s too many people inside already.”
“But I paid $90 for these tickets,” I say.
“Too bad,” he says. “Nobody else can go in.”
Hall didn’t get in. He didn’t get a refund. That doesn’t mean he won’t, but don’t you think these promoters would have realized more than 1,000 people were likely to show up?
Too bad it was a beer fest, but this has nothing to do about beer. It’s about the promoters either failing to know the hall space or printing more than that number of tickets. It could happen to any show or event. Some folks guard well against failure and then get sucker punched by success.
In this case I think it was inexperience on the part of the organizer. It appears that cash sales at the door was the unknown in the organizer’s equation. Since there was only one line to get in, it was first come first served even if you had bought a ticket two months previous. If the organizer does this again, I assume that they will engage a larger venue and have two entrance lines, prepaid and cash at the door. At least that is some of the advice I would give.