Welcome back to the wild world of FyneFest – it feels like only a few months ago that we were breaking down the Main Marquee and packing away the bunting.

This is your first Five Things blog about FyneFest for next year – expect many, many updates between now and June 2020, but let’s kick things off with a look back at the mayhem that was #FyneFest19.

1. FyneFest 19 – Best. Festival. Ever.

The scores are in and it feels good to say that we can officially say that FyneFest 2019 was our best ever, despite the mud. 

Thanks to everyone who completed our post-event survey – we were blown away by your feedback which told us that not only was #FyneFest19 our best ever year for beer, food and music, but our overall satisfaction for the festival was an incredible 98%!

Our goal is always to put on the best festival we can and improve what we offer each year and we really tried to make some significant improvements to #FyneFest19, notably including:

• More outdoor seating and covered areas.
• The all-new Cocktail Teepee.
• A more exciting and diverse music line-up (Massaoke were great, eh?).
• Extra staff to make sure the beer kept pouring all weekend.
• More toilets!
• Rearranged camping areas to better cater to families.

So seeing in the survey scores reflecting the efforts and investments we made in making FyneFest 2019 the best ever is an amazing feeling – from the whole team, thank you!

2. #FyneFest20 – What Next?

As always, we’re not taking it easy for the next festival – preparations are already well underway to ensure that we make FyneFest 2020 even better than this year’s festival; which is good, because we’ve got our work cut out.

Alongside further improving the beer, food, music and activities on offer, we had some great constructive feedback from the survey that we’re going to work on for next year.

Most significant amongst the feedback was the Dogs Policy. Along with a lot of comments from people who understood the situation and that we did the best we could in difficult circumstances, there were some valid criticisms.

Criticisms that we’ve listened to, and already acted on…

3. Dogs Even More Welcome!

We’re very pleased to say that not only will dogs be welcome back at FyneFest 2020, but after a review of #FyneFest19 with local authorities, we’ve agreed a to tweak the policy from this year’s festival and dogs will now be permitted in all areas except the Main Marquee. 

The same registration system will apply as this year, so please have a read through the Dogs page of the website before buying your tickets and make sure you fully understand what it means for you and your pooch, should you choose to bring them along.

4. Tickets, please!

Now onto the important stuff, FyneFest 2020 tickets go on sale tomorrow morning at 10am – that’s Friday 27 September for those reading this in the future, you’ve missed it.

For next year’s festival, we’ve restructured the tier system to try and make it a bit fairer – after last year’s Earlybird tickets sold out in less than ten minutes, this year we’ve more than doubled the amount available and also extended the number of Tier 1 tickets available.

To try and give as many people as possible the chance to secure Earlybird tickets, we will be limiting the amount that can be added to your basked to four per person.

As with previous years though, when they’re gone, they’re gone and we’ll move straight onto Tier 1 when they sell out. Hopefully not in ten minutes. Good luck.

5. The bottom line.

It’s not fun to talk about money, but sometimes we have to – this is one of those times. While FyneFest 2019 was a massive success in many ways – financially? Not so much.

With all the improvements we made to the festival, without a significant price increase compared to 2018 tickets, we took a bit of a hit in making this year’s festival the best ever.

What does that mean? If we want to make FyneFest 2020 as good as FyneFest 2019 (and we don’t, we want to make it even better), we have to charge a little more for our annual party in the glen.

We can guarantee FyneFest 2020 will be excellent value – there’s nothing else quite like it – and the new ticket prices will allow us to make the improvements that we want to make to ensure it’s even better than FyneFest 2019.

6. Bonus surprise thing!

With all that said, we’re very excited to reveal the all new FyneFest website:

www.fynefest.com

Check it out and let us know when you spot a typo (you don’t win anything, there’s probably loads).

See you tomorrow morning!

Fyne Ales Team