Problems and Solutions

Woodford Folk Festivals attending patrons have dropped by an average of 20,000 each year, this can be attributed to extensive raining and flooding during the festival, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and with the large increase in patrons, some supply issues.

The WFF has implemented new strategies including, releasing early bird tickets at 25% off the full price half way through the year to attract back many of their faithful target audience that couldn’t normally afford it. They have also built more drainage, broader roads and now 18 of their 22 stages are all weather stages. 

As the number of patrons and deliveries has exponentially increased in the past 15 years, the numbers at the gates have also swelled causing problems in getting access to the site. Some companies have been known to not want to deal with the festivals at the site because of waiting times for entrance to the festival. This can also cause large delays in stall holders access to their stock orders. This filters down through to the attendee who was already annoyed that it took them 3 hours to get though the gate to begin with. Although the next year they had a private entrance for deliveries this has slightly damaged Woodfordia’s host/guest relationship.

Each year the QFF has quite obviously put great effort into attempting to fix the problems raised by the previous attendees as their relationship is very important to the staff. This and the management’s desire for honest feedback has promoted a healthy relationship between the Festival organisation and their guests.