Adding Fuel to the Fyre Leaving it late at Vestiville

Abstract

The necessity and virtues of meticulous event planning cannot be extolled highly enough in ensuring successful outcomes for key stakeholders, the event organization itself, and the wider event community. For stakeholders, the benefits include: excellent consumer satisfaction, positive word-of-mouth recommendations, and media attention. The event organization benefits from enhanced reputation, attainment of event objectives, profit and longevity. Previous media coverage and existing events management literature highlight numerous cases of successful events and festivals (e.g. London 2012 Olympic Games). There are also many high profile examples of unsuccessful events verging on the edge of disaster (e.g. Fyre Festival and Hope & Glory Festival), which achieved notoriety because organisers failed to anticipate and address challenges encountered within the event planning and implementation process. In retrospect, event failure raises numerous questions from teaching, learn- ing and practitioner perspectives, not least regarding the reasons for failure (Kinnunen & Haathi, 2015; Getz, 2002) contributory factors (Nordvall & Heldt, 2017) and, whether or not these were within the organization’s control. In today’s challenging times, where resources are both limited and stretched, organisers can ill afford to take chances or short cuts in relation to attendee health and safety, as the resulting consequences can be dire, if not fatal, in worst case scenarios. Yet, despite advances in the sector’s professionalisation and the availability of event planning software, event failure and mismanagement recur. The Vestiville Festival is an example of such a failure and is the main case study examined in this chapter. Scheduled to take place in Lommel, Belgium, in June 2019, this music festival was shut down by local authorities over safety concerns on its opening day.