The Fyre Festival Was a Luxury Nightmare
By Jia Tolentino April 28, 2017
The Fyre Festival was announced in December, advertised as a dreamy, deluxe, and highly Instagrammable music-festival experience that would take place over two weekends in the Bahamas, on a purportedly private island called Fyre Cay. The organizers—including Billy McFarland, the founder of the troubled millennial-élite social club Magnises—promised attendees buried treasure, yacht parties, and concierge packages that cost up to fifty thousand dollars per person. Models including Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kendall Jenner promoted the festival with a series of swimsuit shots on social media; Ja Rule would serve as host. The lineup, which eventually included Blink-182, Major Lazer, and Migos, hadn’t yet been solidified, but the festival sold out quickly nonetheless.
On Thursday night, as the festival’s first weekend was about to begin, accounts began to surface on social media of stranded passengers, disaster-relief conditions, and no food. The private island turned out to be a beach adjacent to a Sandals resort. Blink-182 pulled out. By early Friday, all inbound flights chartered by the festival were cancelled. In a statement on the festival’s Web site, organizers announced that they were working “as quickly and safely as we can to remedy this unforeseeable situation.” (A spokesman said that the organizers were not immediately available to offer additional comment.) In the meantime, attendees who made it to the Bahamas were frantically trying to get off the island.
On Friday morning, around 9 A.M., I spoke to Maude Etkin, a twenty-three-year-old interior designer who lives in Manhattan. She was sitting on a plane at Exuma Airport, hoping she would be able to leave. Etkin had decided to go to Fyre Festival in December, when a friend had told her about an early-bird ticket deal: they could get an eight-person lodge—a furnished place with king-size beds, couches, and air-conditioning—for five hundred dollars each. “In reality,” Etkin told me, “there were white emergency-relief tents and nothing else. The site was barren and disorganized. The tents had holes in them, beds were missing, there was no way to secure your belongings. As soon as we got there, we knew we had to leave.” Her account below has been condensed and edited.
“Leading up to the event, Fyre Festival had stopped answering e-mails. We had sent them questions before paying in February. Would we have bathrooms in the lodges? We were told that we would. They wouldn’t provide pictures, but they told us we had to pay up front. I felt uneasy, but my friends and I were excited to see each other, to get out of our comfort zone. In the worst-case scenario—if the music was bad, if the festival wasn’t as advertised—we’d still be on an island with our best friends.
“Part of the festival’s package was a chartered flight between Miami and the Exumas. The flight to Exuma was just eighty minutes on Thursday morning, on an airline called Swift. When we arrived, instead of taking us to ‘Fyre Cay,’ or whatever they had been calling it, they said they had to take us somewhere else, because the housing wasn’t ready.
“There were about two hundred of us. We got on a bus, and they took us to a place called Exuma Point. For the first hour, they had some food—chicken, stuff like that. They were loading people up on alcohol. I don’t drink, but I actually had a lovely day with my friends. We met a really nice local guy who had a boat, and we went out on the water with him. Our friends were at the airport, asking us, ‘Should we come? We’re getting a little worried.’ And we were saying, ‘Yes, it’s a little weird, but the beach is beautiful.’
“It gets to be around 6 P.M., and people are really, really drunk. No one has their luggage: I had said that I had medication in my bag, so they let me keep mine, but no one else could. They brought around a rickety bus at about six-thirty and drove us to the so-called festival site, where there were more people, maybe about a thousand, who had been brought directly there. The conditions were disgusting. No one would talk to us or help us. We were e-mailing Fyre Festival from the site because these rickety concierge booths were all empty. They gave us pieces of bread with cheese on them, and lettuce on the side. There were two guys at a little table giving out wristbands by checking names off a Google spreadsheet, on a Mac laptop at twelve per cent battery. There were girls in teeny outfits running around with tequila and vodka bottles.
