Sara Montebrusco
2/5
I honestly don’t understand why everyone is praising the festival so much.
Everything has a hidden cost and there were lots of problems. If the others don’t mind spending so much money for bad service and experiences, good for them.
I’ll try to make it short because if I go too much into details this is going to take forever:
- They don’t tell people what kind of plug you need for the festival. Just that you need a 50m cable (which was not true, so we spent 100€ for nothing). So, when we arrived we needed an adaptor but they just had one type of adaptor. Not only was it a whole odyssey to get the right one but it cost me 20€ (+ 20€ of deposit). I find it a bit extreme to charge 20€ to BORROW an adaptor.
- Speaking about extremely high costs: 90€ to get electricity?! I don’t even spend that much money at HOME in a MONTH.
- They force you to take the “festival card” pretending it’s more convenient (not at all) and then keep 3€ of commission for it + 10€ of tourist/city tax that was not mentioned before + 10€ trash deposit + 3€ card deposit. We got the money back for the trash but others didn’t understand where to bring it and could not get their money back or didn’t want to go back since there was a huge queue the last day to give this wonderful card back. In any case this means if you loaded your card with 50€ you were left with 24€.
- In theory. Because my partner’s card was not charged and we had to go through a whole other odyssey to get that money back. On the way to get it we also got treated poorly by one of the women working there who behaved nastily. Lucky for us another one helped us and she was nice.
- Facilities: Either you take a shower like in a place I’m not going to mention, meaning ice cold water sprinkling on you – but worse: all the showers open, next to each other, men and women all together. If you didn’t, you could pay 3€ per shower to get warm water and a minimum of privacy. Not that these showers were nice (nothing to put your stuff on, weird shower heads, not very clean, etc.).
- I know they did their best with cleaning the toilets and that it is a tough job with this kind of crowd but in my opinion putting more “real” toilets would be a better idea than so many portable toilets that stink like crazy (don’t know how people could have their tends next to them) since it's a few days and not just an evening. Maybe the problem is advertising the spot as a “camping” when it isn’t. Be clearer when you advertise it so someone can also decide to stay somewhere else and simply go to the concerts from there.
- Another thing: Once inside of the “camping” we were not allowed to move our car. This again is not usual for a camping and it would have been nice to know. It felt a bit like being trapped.
- We now go back to the adaptor. There was a problem to give it back and we had to wait for more than 1h30 to get the deposit back because there was a bug with their system and they couldn’t give us the money back without first putting it on the festival card again. Are we serious?
I could go on and on with other things that happened and didn’t work or problems we encountered, but I think this was long enough.
I will still give the festival 2 stars because the location was fantastic, the river is extremely beautiful and you can do fun things in nature to get away from the "camping". And also mainly for the bands: Testament, Tankard and Exodus. I made the mistake of buying the tickets in December thinking the other bands would at least partly match the genre of these 3 bands which sadly didn’t happen. Still enjoyed other concerts like Toxic Holocaust and Suffocation but with all the bands touring I expected a bit more Thrash since those were 3 of the first bands announced. Maybe this was also a trick of them to get more money since Testament played on Wednesday (first day) and Tankard/Exodus on Saturday (last day).
