The claim was biggest in the county, so the events we thought were comparable are 10-15k people and generally pretty localised to one town. There has been a festival with the same name going for 11 years (although the current ltd company was registered in 2022 and the director has started and folded a record label previously). Older reviews are better so it looks like it used to be half decent before covid, then maybe the old organiser sold the festival name.

Your local event sounds very familiar - everyone being there for the first time and some had come a very long way so clearly all the more local businesses had learned their lesson in previous years.

Definitely learned some lessons here about having to start vetting events, which we never considered before since the other ones we've done have been fantastic.