Fyre Festival: The Year's Biggest Customer Experience Scam

“An immersive music festival...two transformative weekends...on the boundaries of the impossible,” reads the tagline in the promotional video for the 2017 Fyre Festival, a “luxury music festival” in the Bahamas now facing a firestorm of litigation after charging festival-goers up to $400,000 per ticket for music, food and private villas that, well, simply didn’t exist.

Promoted by an elite stratosphere of social media influencers – including Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski, all of whom are being subpoenaed – the festival promised an immersive experience rivaling Coachella. Over two weekends, one in late April and one in early May of 2017, guests were promised gourmet meals by celebrity chefs and music acts like Blink-182, Tyga and Major Lazer.

What festival-goers actually got was a nightmarish 24 hours on a gravelly embankment resembling a construction-site-turned-refugee-camp. They slept in plastic disaster-relief tents on rain-soaked mattresses, used porta-potties and ate cheese sandwiches served in styrofoam containers. When they tried to leave the next morning, they were stranded on the island after the Bahamian government barred any more flights from landing.

We could say that Fyre Festival wrote the handbook on how not to provide a great customer experience, but that oversimplifies it. More shocking is the power the organizers wielded to shape customer expectations using little more than a website featuring Futura font, plenty of white space and high-resolution photos of bikini-clad supermodels as part of an ingenious social media campaign.

Add the fact that it was backed by rapper Ja Rule and New York-based serial entrepreneur Billy McFarland, now serving a six-year sentence in federal prison.

Bear in mind that there’s no marketing collateral other than a two-minute promo video produced in-house by Fyre Media’s marketing team. No, the firestorm of social media marketing stirred itself.

Aside from appearing in the promo video, models Alessandra Ambrosio, Elsa Hosk, Hailey Baldwin, Gigi Hadid and many others were paid to simultaneously post an orange square to their social media accounts four months before the event, captioned with a call-to-action and the hashtag #FyreFestival, making it seem as if they would all be attending. In retrospect, it’s an eerie, behind-the-curtains jolt of reality into the dark side of influencer marketing.

Here are some red flags that should make you as a consumer or service provider think twice before you buy or sell a customer experience.

1. There were no photos of the supposed luxury accommodations on the website

Private villa options started at $4,395 per person and the most expensive package, ‘Artist’s Palace,’ topped out at $49,999 per head promising access to “models, comedians, and influencers,” but there was not a single photo of said lodgings, a site map, or even an explanation of the type of lodging – is it a hotel, a bungalow, a tent, a tepee? A visit to the now-defunct Fyre Festival on Wayback Machine reveals that it was short on photographic evidence of the product and long on enticing-sounding bullet points.

(Screenshot of the top-tier package from the now-defunct Fyre Festival website)

What’s more, the sheer logistics of such elaborate itineraries is already head-scratching – coordinating the dinners with talent, the expedited check-in with the airline carrier and security details for backstage access. And to have so many high-profile celebrities mingling freely with the riff-raff? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

2. The festival site was moved, but the organizers didn’t tell customers why

Initially, the festival was to be sited at Norman’s Cay, the private island of drug lord Pablo Escobar. McFarland and his team made an agreement with the owners to lease the island on condition that they refrain from mentioning the link to Escobar in their marketing.

Incredibly, Fyre Media releases the promotional video touting “A remote and private island in the Bahamas...once owned by Pablo Escobar,” thereby violating the contract. Ironically, all of the promo footage was shot at Norman’s Cay, and festival organizers didn’t bother to tell customers that the product they purchased was not the one pictured on the box.

The frantic team scrambles to find an alternate site, before the Bahamian government issues a permit for them to host the festival at Roker Point on Great Exuma. Again, the festival website skimped on details. Site maps were photoshopped to make it look as though Roker Point was a detached island instead of an embankment on the edge of Great Exuma – and, fishiest of all, the only site photos on the Fyre Festival website were computer renderings, not photographs.

3. Customers found out about canceled acts from the musicians themselves, not the festival organizers

Fyre Media kept a series of increasingly dire behind-the-scenes catastrophes under wraps, like the fact that they found a replacement caterer just two weeks ahead of time after Starr Catering Group pulled out, and shrank the food budget from the $6 million originally allocated for luxury cuisine to $1 million to feed 10,000 people over the course of 6 days.

When rock group Blink-182 pulled out 24 hours in advance, customers found out through a post on the band’s Instagram page, because at that point, Fyre Festival’s customer service phone line was not answering any calls, and questions from increasingly frustrated customers on Instagram and Twitter were not being replied to.

pic.twitter.com/lMjXQSMPqC

— blink-182 (@blink182) April 27, 2017

4. The influencers didn’t disclose that they were paid

The lawsuits against the influencers contracted by Fyre Media to promote the festival are grounded in the fact they didn’t disclose that they were being paid for their endorsement. Legally, the Federal Trade Commission requires you to disclose when something is an ad for the sake of transparency, but Kendall Jenner, who was paid $250,000 for her post announcing that some member of the record label G.O.O.D. Music would be performing did not tag it as an #ad.

An article on MTV.com published about three months before the festival pondered, “What’s Kendall Jenner’s role in all of this?” and also pointed out the fact that Jenner did not disclose which of the record label’s hitmakers was actually performing – Kanye West, Big Sean, John Legend, Tyga?

5. Once it became obvious the festival was not going to happen as planned, organizers said nothing

With no experience in the events business, McFarland hired veteran event producer Yaron Lavi to make the magic happen. After the festival site was moved to Roker Point, Lavi told McFarland’s team that it was impossible to host the sort of event they’d envisioned at the site – there was no running water, electricity, WiFi or cell phone service, and there simply wasn’t enough lodging for the 10,000 ticket-holders arriving over two weekends.

With four months to go, McFarland’s team didn’t have enough time (or the budget) to build temporary villas, so Lavi suggested they erect tents instead. He urged the Fyre team to warn its customers in advance of the change in accommodations, but to this day, there is no evidence if an email communication was ever sent.

The astounded reactions from festival-goer’s when they arrived at festival grounds in videos posted to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook suggests it wasn’t. In video footage obtained by Netflix for the documentary FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, one customer can be heard half-shouting, “Turn the bus around!” as the vehicle approaches the sea of domed white tents.

When the first batch of festival-goers arrives on a plane from Miami at 6:20 am the day of the festival, they’re sporadically ferried in buses to a beachside restaurant, while Fyre Festival staffers work frantically to assemble the remaining tents and single stage. They wait six hours on the beach while being plied with alcohol and blasted with music from loudspeakers, before they’re finally taken to see the tents.

It’s not until around 2:30 am the next morning when McFarland publicly concedes that the festival isn’t happening, tweeting from the official Fyre Festival account: "Due to unforeseen and extenuating circumstances, Fyre Festival has been fully postponed.

"After assessing the situation this morning and looking at best options for our guests, we cannot move forward as we hoped we could. At this time, we are working tirelessly to get flights scheduled and get all travelers home safely."

Takeaway: Communication and transparency would have done a world of good

Fyre Festival was clearly a logistical fiasco, but more so than that, it attests to the power of influencer marketing to shape customer expectations - and to disappoint. It also illustrates the level of trust customers were willing to place in a company which had never produced an event of this scale before, and the type of next-level customer experience they were hoping to gain, which the company sadly failed to produce.

No one had ever produced an event of that scale before, and even though there was no playbook on how to do it, had Fyre Media been more transparent with customers about the difficulties they were facing or put their customers first, they might have been able to manage the situation by moving the date for the event or letting customers find their own accommodations.

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