Every Day Is Not Created Equal!

Unfortunately, due to the schedule we set for ourselves, we can’t always visit a festival on its prime day (usually a Saturday). This sometimes causes a problem for us. The reason for this is that too many festivals plan all there big events and attractions for the prime day and leave the other day(s) with lesser events. For people coming from out of town on an “off” day, this is a big disappointment! It leaves a “bad taste” and they are likely not going to come back in future years. Worst still, they will tell their friends how awful their experience was. I’ll give you an example. A few years ago, Gary and I visited a very popular event just east of us. We had heard a lot of great things about the festival, so we wanted to see it for ourselves. Due to previous commitments, we could only visit it on a Sunday. After we had arrived, we started to look around the town for the attractions. We could find very little happening. We explored the few attractions that were there but left with a great sense of disappointment.

Festival organizers and volunteers put a tremendous amount of effort and time into making their events happen, so why spoil it with having only half a festival? To me, the solution is simple. Either spread the activities equally between all the festival days or cut down on the number of event days. You may think that by having more days you’ll have a better festival. This only happens when each day is as interesting as the other(s). The reality is that you disappoint all that are involved! Visitors are disappointed because they are not attending a quality event. Vendors are disappointed because of poor sales (lack of quality attendees). And, volunteers because they feel negative vibrations from both visitors and vendors.

If you have the attractions and can make all festival days meaningful and fun, go for it. If not, do everyone a favour, scale down your event and make the 1 or 2 days the best they can be!