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Fyre Fest: How Service Went Up in Flames

Jordan Hood

Rosen College of Hospitality Management, University of Central Florida

HFT 3540: Guest Services Management I

Professor Diane Graebner

November 30th, 2021

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Introduction

Fyre Fest was a music festival in 2017 that was brought on by a man named Billy

McFarland and rapper Ja Rule. This festival is widely considered to be a huge service failure in

the live events industry because it was a fraudulent festival with the sole goal of scamming a

wealthy audience out of their money. What was supposed to be the biggest music festival the

world has ever seen turned out to be the most unorganized event that left attendees scared for

their safety. As a result of this festival, many attendees were left trapped on an island during a

storm, with no food, shelter, or any escape back home. Fyre Fest is now remembered as one of

the biggest fraud cases in entertainment history.

The expectation of this event didn’t come close to matching the true reality of the

experience. The event was marketed to be an immersive music festival that incorporated culture

with music and included the world’s most famous artists and celebrities. The founders used

social media to their advantage by creating a promotional video that shows supermodels on

beaches in the Bahamas with luxury boats and suites (Vargas, 2019). One huge positive aspect of

this event was the way they were able to use social media to their advantage to attract the right

audience as well as attract artists and celebrities. The reach this festival had on social media

played a huge part in creating this fantasy idea of what the festival was supposed to be, and that

is how the producers were able to trick so many innocent festivalgoers and celebrities into

believing Fyre Fest would pull off to be a huge event.

The reality of this event was drastically different from the image people saw on social

media. Upon showing up, guests immediately realized there was something wrong. Some

immediate red flags were that they were not flying on private jets as the advertisements said,

they were transported from the airport to the festival grounds on school buses, and once they
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reached the grounds, there were trucks, boxes, and equipment scattered everywhere, with no real

stage or anything in sight. The “luxury suites” that attendees bought were actually disaster tents,

and most attendees had to carry the mattresses to their tents. Nothing was as advertised, and

attendees immediately knew they were in danger. There was also a huge storm across the island,

which prompted all artists to cancel their trips out to perform. Attendees were now stranded on

this island, getting burnt from the scorching sun, and deprived of food, water, or any shelter.

Some attendees paid upwards of $50,000 to attend this festival, and those are the circumstances

they were met with (Fyre Fraud, 2019).

This festival can be a teaching experience for many members of the hospitality and

entertainment industry, specifically those looking to work in the festivals and live events

industry. This event is a prime example of all the ways an event can go wrong if the people

planning the event are unorganized and have skewed motives. There are many things to learn

from this event such as how long an event should be planned prior to opening, the kind of money

and effort that goes into it, and how it takes more than just passion and a vision to make an event

happen. Hospitality and entertainment managers would need to use this topic as a way to learn

what not to do want to when planning their own event in the future.

Infamous Billy McFarland

For several months following the inevitable conclusion to this event, news articles were

coming out left and right regarding the events that occurred on that island in the Bahamas and

gave first-person accounts from attendees that were there. There were even two documentaries

released, one on both Netflix and Hulu. The Hulu documentary contained a personal interview

with Billy McFarland and focused a lot of their content on his personal motives with the festival
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(Hulu, 2019). While most of the blame should go to McFarland, there is a lot to say about his

team of people and the amount of planning (or lack thereof) that went into this festival.

Billy McFarland referred to himself as a successful serial entrepreneur but was truly just

a con artist at work. Many events leading up to the creation of Fyre Festival reflected the

fraudster that he truly is, such as his creation of Magnises, the millennial’s version of a black

card (Huddleston, 2019). McFarland was able to get $500,000 out of an investor and attach

rapper Ja Rule to the project to make it more believable. Ultimately Magnesis is what planted the

idea in Billy’s mind that he could make a lot of money from defrauding millennials and investors

(Hulu, 2019). Once Magnesis began to fall off, the idea of Fyre Festival was created. This shows

that McFarland’s career is just a series of scams that eventually ends in his imprisonment for

defrauding “over 100 investors out of more than $26 million” (Huddleston, 2019).

Fyre Festival Planning Problems

The first red flag for this festival was in how long it took the organizers to plan the event.

This event was marketed to be the biggest most immersive music festival in the world, so one

would expect that this event spent years of planning in preparation for its fruition. According to

Chris Smith, the director of the Netflix documentary Fyre, “The organizers had six to eight

weeks to pull off something that should have taken close to a year” (Baggs, 2019). Coachella, for

example, is one of the biggest and most renowned festivals in America every year. Each year

“Coachella is normally held in April, but planning is done far in advance. In fact, organizers state

that they begin booking acts for the next year’s festival as early as August.” (gotügo, 2015).

There is a lesson in this for all future event planners as well as the organizers for Fyre Festival,

which is that festivals need to be planned months in advance, and had McFarland known this, he
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wouldn’t have waited until a month or two shy of the event weekend to begin figuring out

logistic details.

Another important aspect of this event that was not planned well has to do with the

location of the event and the weather for the weekend. McFarland had chosen a small island in

the Bahamas to host his event and did no further research into the location before showcasing it

to the attendees. One huge problem leading up to the event weekend was that the island’s biggest

event each year, the regatta, was planned to happen the same weekend as the festival, which

McFarland had not considered. (Fyre Fraud, 2019).

A recurring theme throughout this

event is that there were promises

made in the marketing and

advertisements that were not kept for

the actual event. For example, the

festival boasted that the festival

would be an immersive experience of

music, food, and culture. The

organizers “touted ‘a uniquely

authentic island cuisine experience,’

with ‘local seafood, Bahamian-tyle

sushi and even a pig roast.’ It was

Twitter Screenshot, Source:
Twitter Screenshot, Source: https://twitter.com/TrevorDeHaas/status/
https://twitter.com/TrevorDeHaas/status/857776562615308288?lang also allegedly said to be catered by

renowned restauranter Stephen Starr…but Starr…confirmed with PEOPLE that they were not

involved” (Spence, 2017). What the attendees received however was not authentic cuisine in any
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form. This tweet from @TrevorDeHass on Twitter explains that they received bread, cheese, and

a salad with dressing as their VIP meal. Another huge logistic failure of this event was the

housing they provided for attendees. Just like how attendees with VIP tickets were meant to

receive an authentic meal prepared by a famous chef, they were also promised VIP Villas for

about $20,000, and then upon arriving at the festival, attendees learned that everyone would be

sleeping in disaster tents, some without mattresses (EDM.com, 2017). As mentioned before, the

recurring theme with the organizers of this event is that they made many promises that they

could not keep. Had the

organizers not made any

promises leading up to the

event, and waited to tell

attendees what food and

housing options they had

available once they actually

secured the caterer and VIP

Villas, these issues could have

been avoided.

Social Media Strategy

Fyre Festival utilized a social media strategy that worked in their favor greatly, and many

lessons can be taken from their marketing approach. Firstly, the way that the organizers were

able to create a name for themselves (considering this was the first time this event was taking

place) was through what is called influencer marketing. They were able to market the festival

through social media influencers, who proved to be very helpful in spreading the message of
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Fyre Fest (LiveArea, 2019). Millennials and youths are known for the trust they put into the

celebrities they follow on social media, and the organizers wanted to capitalize on that. An event

“that had not happened before was able to sell thousands of tickets because simply based on

trusting people they had never met” (Melville, 2019). Other than boosting ticket sales, this

marketing strategy proved to be effective because it helped them reach their target audience and

allowed for mass awareness of the event more quickly (Kaur, 2019). Their initial strategy was to

post a neon orange tile on Instagram as a way to stop people from scrolling. This, along with

their promo video was an excellent way to catch the attention of an audience whose lives revolve

around social media. The promo video featured this unattainable, fantasy vision of what a

luxurious music festival could look like. Though it did not nearly reflect the actual festival, it

was a great way to set an expectation and make people want to attend.

Managerial Implications

One of the biggest implications as to why Fyre Festival did not turn out as planned was

due to the amount of time that was allotted to plan the festival. According to Vargas from

Refinery29, the idea for the festival was original born in 2016, but other than going island

hunting for a location, McFarland didn’t begin to act on planning the festival until December

2016, just four months before the festival was set to happen (Vargas, 2019). This was the

creators’ first mistake, among many others. Future festival producers and hospitality managers

can learn from this because there is so much work and planning that goes into any event, and

four months is not nearly enough time to figure everything out. Even McFarland himself owned

up to his mistakes, though it came much later in 2021 while he was still behind bars. “McFarland

says his biggest mistake was setting an unrealistic timeline for the festival, and that if he had a

year or two more, he would have been in a better place,’” (Bueno, 2021).
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Another huge takeaway from this event is how Fyre Festival was able to market the event

and their social media campaign that brought in so much attention. As mentioned in the

discussion, the social media managers and marketers that Fyre Fest hired were very smart with

their decisions. “The influencer posts were evocative, giving just enough information, whilst

leaving the audience wanting more,” (LiveArea, 2019). The promotional video, along with the

orange-tile on social media worked greatly in their favor to target the exact audience they were

going for and to put the festival’s name out into the world.

A final note that has been a recurring theme through this analysis is that for an event to

take the world by storm, all the fancy promises need to be followed through with. Though it

doesn’t happen often, festival producers and marketers should plan and hope for the best-case

scenario and strive to live up to that expectation that’s being set. Fyre Festival made promises

they couldn’t deliver and created a fantasy event that would never realistically be pulled off.
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References

Baggs, M. (2019, January 18). Fyre Festival: Inside the world's Biggest Festival flop. BBC
News. Retrieved November 15, 2021, from https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-
46904445.

Bueno, A. (2021, March 3). Fyre Fest Organizer Billy McFarland Admits From Prison That He
'Knowingly Lied' to Get Money for Event. Entertainment Tonight. Retrieved November 29,
2021, from https://www.etonline.com/fyre-fest-organizer-billy-mcfarland-admits-from-
prison-that-he-knowingly-lied-to-get-money-for.

Case Study: What Can Marketers Learn From the Fyre Festival Fallout? LiveArea. (2019,
February 14). Retrieved November 29, 2021, from https://uk.liveareacx.com/trends/fyre-
festival-marketing-lessons/.

EDM.com - Music Partners. (2019, April 20). The Envision Festival VIP Experience is the Fyre
Festival that Actually Happened. EDM.com. Retrieved November 20, 2021, from
https://edm.com/events/envision-festival-fyre-festival-actually-happened.

Huddleston, T. (2019, August 22). Fyre Festival: How a 25-year-old scammed investors out of
$26 million. CNBC. Retrieved November 19, 2021, from
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/18/how-fyre-festivals-organizer-scammed-investors-out-
of-26-million.html.

How To Plan An Event Like Coachella. gotügo. (2015, June 9). Retrieved November 14, 2021,
from https://www.gotugo.com/blog/events/plan-event-coachella/.

Jenner, F. and Nason, J. W. (Directors). (2019). Fyre Fraud [Documentary]. Hulu.

Kaur, T. (2019, March 17). The Power of Influencer Marketing: Fyre Festival Case Study.
Meltwater. Retrieved November 15, 2021, from https://www.meltwater.com/en/blog/the-
power-of-influencer-marketing-fyre-festival-case-study.

Melville, A. M. (2019, February 13). Fyre Festival - A Social Media Strategy that Ignited Chaos.
Sparkloft. Retrieved November 29, 2021, from
https://sparkloftmedia.com/blog/2019/2/12/fyre-festival-a-social-media-strategy-that-
ignited-chaos.

Spence, S. (2017, April 28). 'Literally Bread, Cheese, and Salad': How Fyre Festival-Goers
Were Duped After Promise of Celeb Chef Meals. PEOPLE. Retrieved November 20, 2021,
from https://people.com/food/fyre-festival-food-ja-rule-bahamas-fest/.

Vargas, A. (2019, January 18). Keep Track Of The Fyre Fest Disaster With This Detailed
Timeline. Refinery29. Retrieved November 29, 2021, from
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/01/221816/fyre-festival-timeline-what-happened-
netflix-documentary.