Bestival organiser Rob da Bank has admitted he is ‘very envious’ of the speed at which Glastonbury sold-out last month.
In early October 120,000 tickets for Glastonbury 2014 were snapped up by eager fans in a record time of one hour and 27 minutes, in stark contrast to the struggles being faced by most other festivals at the present time.
“I’m very envious of Glastonbury who can go and sell all their tickets in 20 minutes,” Rob Da Bank told BBC Newsbeat. “I’d love that, it would take so much pressure off. Give it another 30 years and we might be doing that as well. Competition every year has been more intense and people’s budgets are stretched. It’s never easy. You never come out of a show and go, ‘Alright cool, we can just sell the tickets’.”
Glastonbury suffered its own major scare in 2008 when slow ticket sales that year came close to bankrupting the iconic Worthy Farm festival. And despite Glastonbury now going from strength to strength, the near-miss of ’08 proved to foreshadow the similar problems now being faced by many other summer events.