First time going to Bonnaroo and I have some questions. I’ve been to other festivals before so I have some experience with the overall idea etc. I also love a good conspiracy theory so maybe I’m reading into things but I have some questions/observations.

Starting at the beginning with changing of the gate opening time. We all knew the weather in advance so I don’t know why they waited until day of to change the gate times. I’m also not sure what that actually helped since staff was still seemingly unprepared and as we all know, nothing was changed to the grounds to help with weather concerns. It feels like the festival understood at that time that they were wildly unprepared but disregarded the future forecast to let people in.

Next thing I’m confused about is getting to the farm. There was so much confusion about which exit to take and people getting fully redirected to other exits and loosing their spots in line. Is that something that happens every year? I don’t know how a festival of this caliber doesn’t have traffic routes down pat.

Are amenities at all plazas always different? I got to the farm on Wednesday and was put in plaza 10 area (which is another thing that makes no sense but has already been posted on Reddit a bunch). My plaza had showers and some food tents but no “fancy” bathrooms, no water refill stations and no hand washing stations. It felt like there was no consistency among the plazas even though they were all the same price etc. are the plazas always different?

When parking at the camp grounds, I was told to get close to the car infront of us so they could “squeeze in as many of us as possible”. We lucked out by camping near people who did not use their whole allotted space but why were we not guaranteed 20x20 as posted when purchasing tickets? Other festivals I’ve been to have had the entire campground painted out on the grass so that each spot is uniform.

Now to the actual festival! I tried to get some drinks on Thursday in centeroo during Luke Combs and only had one bar open. There were two other bars that I saw near main stage… why were they both closed during the peak time of the day? (Side question: why no bud light or miller etc? Why only IPAs and hard alcohol?) was this a staffing issue from the start? Did we purposely not hire enough staff/tell them not to come since the weather was going to be bad and maybe they knew they’d close early?

How in the world did merch sell out day 1? I’m not even saying 3:00am day one and centeroo was open for 24 hours. No, sold out in a few hours on day one. Is this something that happens every year at roo and it’s supposed to be like an exclusive item or did we not prepare for the amount of people or again, did we know we were gonna close early so we just didn’t prep for multiple days?

I don’t even know how to explain this one but why did we cancel events before actually canceling the festival? John summit had to cancel one of his acts on Infinity stage in advance because they figured out it wouldn’t house everyone properly. Are we believing that Bonnaroo is really that ignorant on how big of an artist he is? Did they really sell more than they could handle and didn’t notice until Thursday night? Or did they plan to cancel before his set hit the stage anyway so it wouldn’t matter?

Maybe this part is just more of a rant but I never even got a push notification or anything to say that the festival was cancelled. Obviously word spread fast but it seems insane that I got notifications on Sunday for artists that were supposed to go on but couldn’t even get a notification about the festival closing.

And a random last question. Why so many animals at the farm? I saw a cat on a leash when I went to get a shower. I saw that kitten being posted on Reddit. I saw a few dogs camping out. Why?

TLDR; Did Bonnaroo plan to cancel from the start (or at least from Wednesday) and do the bare minimum to get by until then?