Boom Festival as many know is one of the biggest psychedelic trance festivals. I myself was always a big fan and supporter of it (I even made a flyer for it back in 2000).

Boom was never perfect it always had some logistic and organizing difficulties but despite that it was worth going there. This year (2008) it got just a little bit to much. I got to experience the true face of Boom's organization and support.

When you go to a festival, there is few things to expect to just work and be there:

- Quick entrance upon arrival
- Access to water
- Clean toilets
- Showers (that is a bonus)
- Good sound system on main stage

Boom Festival has problems with all of the above and fails completely on some. You may wait from 8 to 20 hours to enter the festival. Water on festival area is bad quality (even for cooking) or is just not there. The toilets are very filthy, they just do not clean them often (from reports there was even a small epidemic on the festival area this year).

Everything is under-dimensioned including the sound system, they never expect that more people with show up each year. And each year it creates more and more chaos.

These are not one time accidents, this has happened time after time. After they moved the festival location to Idanha-a-Nova it just got a lot worse.

This year we arrived at Idanha-a-Nova with our festival e-tickets in hand just few hours after they supposedly should have opened the gates. The car queue was already several kilometers long (7-8km). We waited there for over 12 hours and the line did not even move! Okey, it moved, maybe 100-200 meters, and that is thanks to all the people/cars that give up before us.

After 12 hours, we was no longer in a mood to wait any longer. We found it quite outranges of how they was handling the situation. No information, nothing. How much longer could we wait, 15-20 hours, a day, two? Waiting for so long to just enter the festival was definitely not on our wish list, it was not worth anymore.

We decided to leave the festival queue and take a week long trip around Portugal instead. As we could not sell or give away our personal e-tickets to the festival, I was in good faith that we could work it out with Boom after we got home.

I contacted Boom by email after the festival with a question of refund. At first I got totally ignored and then after third attempt the response was: "Its not our fault, we was not prepared. No refund.". If they was not prepared then is it not their fault? My further attempts to communicate with them was ignored, I just got same answer copy/pasted. Nice.

I really do not like being ignored like that, and I even more dislike when they do not take responsibility for their faults and bad organization. As festival organizers they could at least show some concern of what people have gone trough to just try to enter the festival. They don't, and that's very sad.

Consider this.

I will not go to Boom again until they show some improvement in logistics and organization. It is no longer worth it, it destroys way to much of your planed experience. And if they improve their "human-relations" department, that would be a bonus.

I also do not recommend anyone of going there if you are after a good festival experience, Boom can definitely not provide that. It may be THE psytrance festival, but in my eyes is now also the worst organized one.

/Andrzej

This is a warning to everybody planning on going to Boom Festival 2010. I will update this page after the next festival with information about theirs achievement. And we can only hope that they somehow will improve.

As the Boom Festival team do not want to listen, discuss or take responsibility for this situation, this is my only way to communicate this story and warning, and hopefully make someone listen.