Traffic flow, construction headaches, sanitation woes, cash handling, craft mix, culture clashes… and that’s before we get to the musicians who can’t find their lute strings.

Most owners and administrators figure it out by trial and fire.

They spend years duct-taping fixes, learning lessons the hard way, and reinventing wheels that didn’t need to be square in the first place. It’s expensive.

It’s exhausting. And frankly, it keeps our industry smaller than it ought to be.

⚜️That’s why I built The Renfaire Foundry.

Because when you finally grok the intricacies of this industry—the stuff no one writes down—you stop running your faire like a scramble and start leading it like a living village.

Here’s what that transformation looks like:

• You’ll see your lanes differently. Understanding Pinball Placement Theory means that guest flow stops being a mystery and becomes an art form. Dead corners disappear, and every turn of the path is alive with possibility.
• You’ll know exactly when and how to expand. Adding shops or stages becomes a confident move, not a roll of the dice.
• You’ll run operations with ease. The invisible systems—cash, food service, sanitation, HR—hum quietly in the background, supporting the magic instead of interrupting it.
• You’ll never fear construction again. You’ll know what drawings should look like, when a builder is bluffing, and how to prevent five-figure mistakes before they happen.
• You’ll curate balance like an art form. Craft, food, and entertainment blend into a seamless experience, not a chaotic patchwork.
• You’ll carry the unspoken knowledge of the guild. Those cultural codes and traditions that outsiders stumble over? They’ll be second nature to you.
• You’ll move from firefighting to foresight. Instead of bracing for disaster every weekend, you’ll anticipate problems before they flare.
• You’ll scale without losing your sanity. Your systems and teams grow stronger, so you can step back without watching it all fall apart.

And most importantly—you’ll craft a legacy that lasts.

A festival that outlives today’s hustle, standing as a thriving village your community, your team, and even future generations will carry forward.

That’s the transformation The Foundry offers.
It isn’t theory—it’s decades of real-world experience distilled into tools, systems, and wisdom you won’t find in Google searches or dusty board minutes.
If you’re ready to stop duct-taping fixes and start leading with confidence, the next step is simple:

👉 Join the Waitlist for The Renfaire Foundry

Seats are limited, because this is hands-on work, not a mass download. Join the waitlist now, and you’ll be first in line when the doors open.

Let’s make your faire the legacy it deserves to be.

For decades now, I’ve had a front-row seat to both the magic and the mayhem of the Renaissance festival world. I’ve seen the triumphs, the heartbreaks, and the flat-out disasters that happen when people love this industry but don’t yet understand its rules.

And let me tell you: this industry has rules.

They’re not written down anywhere you can Google. They’re whispered from one coordinator to another, tested in the mud of build season, and buried in contracts and county permits that nobody bothered to explain.

👉🏻That means too many passionate founders, marketplace managers, and site managers wind up reinventing the wheel, or worse, repeating the mistakes of those who came before them.

I don’t want that for us. I don’t want that for you.

🌟My Vision for the Renaissance Faire Industry

I want our industry to be sustainable.

 

Not just this season, not just for one generation, but for the long haul.

 

I want shows to be designed with beauty and practicality.

 

I want vendors to invest with confidence instead of fear.

 

I want coordinators to have the tools to manage people (and all their drama) without losing their sanity.

 

Most of all, I want the Renaissance Faire industry to keep flourishing because the world needs this magic.

 

We’re not just selling turkey legs and trinkets. We are creating villages where people glimpse a different way of life, where imagination gets to breathe, where community feels real. That is worth protecting.

💎 Why The Foundry, and Why Now

After a lifetime of learning this business from the ground up, carpenter’s helper, booth designer, vendor, coordinator, builder, restaurateur, and now consultant, I’ve come to a simple truth:

If we want the industry to thrive, we have to stop gatekeeping the knowledge that keeps it running.

That’s why I built The Renfaire Foundry.

The Foundry is the resource I wish I had when I was thirty years old, standing in the Georgia clay, trying to explain to a county inspector why Halfwit Harbor stage needed different handrails than the deck code required. It’s what I wish my fellow vendors had when they were blindsided by construction costs or traffic flow nightmares.

It’s everything I’ve learned *the hard way and the expensive way* packaged into a place where you and your team can find answers before the fire starts, not after you’re already burning.

💎 What I Want For You

I want you to have fewer sleepless nights.

I want your teams to speak the same language.

I want your festival’s growth to feel intentional instead of accidental.

And I want you to succeed because every strong show strengthens the entire ecosystem.

When one faire gets it right, we all benefit.

So that’s why I’ve created the Renfaire Foundry. It’s not just a database. It’s not just my voice on a video. It’s a gathering place for the wisdom this industry has earned the hard way, so the next generation can step onto this stage with confidence.

Because my darlings, the show must go on, and if I can help light the way, then that is exactly what I intend to do.

⚜️ Welcome to The Renfaire Foundry.

Let’s build the future of this industry together.

🔗Click to get started

We’re creeping toward September, which means my brain has fully pivoted from “summer projects” to “festival mode,” and specifically, to the little jewel box of calm that lives above the bustle in Aberfeldy —

Tea & Strumpets.

For those who’ve not yet found us, we’re not just a restaurant. We are the only place inside TRF where you can push pause without losing the plot of your Renaissance day. Tucked on an upstairs deck above the marketplace, we let you sip your tea while still watching the Kingdom whirl below.

On a normal festival weekend, we host three High Teas and one special Renaissance Tea. These are ticketed experiences, and yes — the conversations about this season’s reservations have already begun. Consider this your nudge.

High Tea

Your Mid-Day Reset (and then some)

This isn’t a dainty cucumber-sandwich affair. High Tea here is a full meal, with sweet and savory temptations arriving in generous tiers, bottomless pots of our Tea du’jour, and the option to order from a rather wicked craft cocktail menu at the Upperdeck Bar.

🗓️ Saturdays at 11:00 AM — Start your day with elegance before the jousts and jigs.
🗓️ Daily at 3:00 PM — The perfect breather before your evening merriment.
💰 $65 per person

Renaissance Tea

NEW for 2025!

Sundays Only

A lighter service for families, gentle starters, and anyone who wants their tea without a food-induced nap. Royal and Children’s menu options (same price, just gentler flavors for the littles).
You’ll get tea sandwiches, a fresh scone, a dessert treat, and — of course — a bottomless pot of our featured tea. Mimosas and Bloody Marys are available at the Upstairs Bar for those with brunch priorities.

🗓️ Sundays at 11:00 AM
💰 $40 per person

How to Book Your Seat

1. Go to the Texas Renaissance Festival website → “Things to Do” choose “for Families” scroll to → Tea & Strumpets.
2. Make sure your tea date and your festival date match.
3. Choose your seat from the ticket map.
4. If you need the vegetarian menu, select it at purchase.
5. If stairs aren’t your thing, choose “Limited Mobility” and we’ll have your table ready at ground level.

or go directly to our site to book it — Book in our site

If you are bringing kids, don’t forget to check the Renfest Family page so you can coordinate all the activities at once (including the High Tea) — Take a look here

Pro Tips from Your Hostess

⚠️Tickets do sell out online, but a few seats may be available for same-day purchase at the tearoom — come early and ask.

🍰We love accommodating mobility needs, but we cannot accommodate allergy-specific requests. Our kitchen works with many ingredients and cannot guarantee zero cross-contamination.

🫖The upstairs tearoom is reserved for ticketed guests during service, so we can maintain the magic.

This tea program started as my love letter to tea culture, paired with the pastry wizardry of The Queen’s Pantry.

We’ve refined it into a true pocket of serenity in your festival day — the perfect blend of fantasy and restorative calm.

📖 Let me tell you a story.

Because like most truths in this industry, it’s easier to hear when it’s nestled inside a real moment.

Years ago, at a northeastern show I won’t name (but if you know, you know), I was in my third year of vending from a tent. That’s the magic number at most permanent parks—three years.  👀 After that, it’s time to build a shop or make your exit.

I’d been saving up for this build. Had plans. Had dreams. Had already picked out my potential location like a hopeful raccoon circling a trash can of opportunity.

🎪🧐Then the Vendor Coordinator—a man, naturally—came up with a clever little plan.

If he could talk me into taking over and rebuilding an existing booth (one built by a face painter who wasn’t planning to build anything new), he could kill two birds with one bureaucratic stone: get me into a structure and shuffle her somewhere else to build another one. Two new buildings on paper, when he was slated to only get one.

Everyone wins, right?

❌Except the face painter wasn’t ready. She hadn’t budgeted for a build. And she was panicking because, like many women in this industry, she’d been conditioned to say “yes” to authority even when her gut said “no.” I watched her twist herself into knots trying to be agreeable.

👉🏼And when the General Manager finally came to me asking why this “perfectly good plan” wasn’t moving forward, I took a breath and gave him the line that shifted the whole tone of the meeting:

“There’s an assumption being made here—that because both the face painter and I sleep with carpenters, we don’t pay for construction.”

Let me tell you, that sentence landed.🔥

The GM did a full-body flinch, probably checking his mental tapes to make sure he wasn’t the one who made the assumption. (He wasn’t.)

But he heard me.

And after that, the plan changed.

⚒️ Because here’s the thing: this industry still wrestles with covert patriarchy. Not the dramatic kind that shows up in lawsuits—but the kind that assumes women have help, that we’re not the money behind the build, or that “catering” is our default skill set until proven otherwise.

⭐ But I’ve built shops. I’ve built teams. I’ve built nine-figure businesses out of kitchens the size of a broom closet. And I’ve built a reputation in this industry by not letting assumptions stand unchallenged.

So no, a booth swap isn’t just a booth swap.

It’s a window into the power dynamics that still need naming.

💡 If you’re a festival owner, take a moment this week to look at the unspoken systems in your park:

• Who gets asked to build?
• Who gets asked to bake?
• And whose imagined budgets get quietly padded by assumptions no one says out loud?

Change starts with awareness. Let’s start there.
Until next time—

💡 Sidenote: We have assumed for decades that this was related to driving and yielding to the right… But studies show it may have more to do with the dominance of right-handedness, as even in left-driving countries there is a tendency to turn right when given an opportunity.

👥 The Real Factors That Control Crowd Movement

The flow of customers is strongly steered by sight lines, which are different at specific levels of crowdedness of your festival… And that crowdedness has multiple elements:

• Performance troupes
• The “display creep” of artisans and merchants
• Hawkers
• Temporary signage
• The audience themselves
• Shops that increase in size over time beyond simple display creep

🚶‍♀️For Marketplace Managers:

Walk Your Grounds

If you are a marketplace manager, you need to walk your festival grounds both when the site is closed and at varying levels of busyness in order to spot bottlenecks and diversions that will impact some locations in a negative way.

🏪 For Vendors:

Know Your Approach

If you are a seller inside said marketplace, you need to walk upstream of your shop to be clear about how the audience approaches your location. This is important for your signage and display placements, as well as allowing you to have informed conversations with the marketplace manager when you’ve noticed detrimental traffic alterations around your shop.

⚠️ Common Traffic Disruptors

• A long line at a pub can bounce traffic away from the following booth line
• A pair of cast members doing a bit with no situational awareness for the traffic they are blocking… can be a barrier to commerce

This is more common in festivals with narrow pathways. With wider paths, the performance may only be altering the traffic flow, which can be used in a purposeful way if you have need of a pinball bumper to push guests into an under-trafficked area of the park.

📊 The Attendance Number Myth

In festivals that share attendance numbers with their concessionaires, astute merchants can decipher the traffic level at which their shop works best or does not perform well.
🔑 It is important to understand that there is both a low traffic lull in sales AND a high traffic lull in sales. More people in the park is not the answer to every problem.

🎯 Location Strategy for Merchants

If you are a merchant, be it artist or service provider… ideally, you will study the traffic before purchasing or building in a specific location in the park.

Many products or services have a time of day and a location that is ideal for guests to interact with it. Thus:

• Some vendors would rather be near the back of a park
• Some vendors would rather be near the front gate

If you don’t yet know which is perfect for your business, try different types of locations in the different festivals you participate in. The speed at which a guest walks past your shop might be more important than whether you’re at the front or back of a festival.

🔍 What to Watch For

All of these things can be determined by watching how a crowd moves through a festival:

• What are guests’ eyes landing on? 👀
• Are they reading signs?
• How far ahead are they making decisions about their next stop?
• What times do the nearby stage shows release their audiences?
• What time is the last performance on the stage near your shop?

🚀 Next Steps

There are some techniques for driving in-park traffic to your shop, but that is another article. Here we are building awareness of the traffic patterns you might want to alter with one or more of the in-park traffic strategies…
And you can’t easily change what you don’t understand.

It’s building season at some of the festivals, and I’ve got thoughts.

I just posted a new vlog walking through the Maryland Renaissance Festival, talking roof lines, visual theater, and why three boxes in a row can look like magic with the right details.

But here’s the thing that’s really on my mind:

“We don’t have enough builders in this industry.”

We’ve all aged out of walking top plates, and the Renaissance Festival world is in a huge state of growth.

If you’re a builder who’s tired of apartment complexes and houses, and you love renaissance fairs- call the festival nearest you. Find out what it takes to get on their builders list.

Everything starts as a sketch. You know how to make water run downhill. You’ve been to festivals. You can do this.

📺Hit play to watch the full video walkthrough👇🏼

(And if you don’t know how to make something look Renaissance, well… I have a guide for that too. Take a look here)

Now go make something beautiful!

Yours in Medieval Merriment,

Rhonni

What PR actually looks like for a festival

Hint: It’s not all hashtags and sponsorship decks. Sometimes, it’s about knowing the president of the Rotary Club and getting on the chamber board so the guy who owns the hardware store will put your poster in his window.

Let’s talk real-deal, relationship-based PR strategies

The kind that don’t just fill seats, but build goodwill that lasts.

There are many ways to build relationships.

🏢 One great way is to be part of the Chamber of Commerce for the township where your festival is located. You should even have office team members take time to serve in board positions for the Chamber. That way, you’re networking with the same business people who have to deal with your traffic problems—or who benefit from that influx of visitors.

Your associates within the Chamber of Commerce are far more likely to hang up your posters inside their places of business if they already have some sort of relationship with you, rather than being cold-called by someone with a stack of posters and a roll of tape.

The Chamber is tasked with informing visitors about the fabulous businesses in town. They do this through old-school networking as well as advertising.

🧑‍🧑‍🧒Service organizations are networking organizations. 4H kids are great workers, and now you’re seen as helping the local youth. Elks Club, Kiwanis, Rotary, Scouts, VFW, American Legion, Volunteer Fire Departments—these groups are always looking for funding and may be willing to arrange to deliver a set number of volunteers in exchange for a donation to their organization.

You’ll expose folks who don’t yet know about Renfaires to your event, and many of them will return as guests and bring their friends. Plus, you get a tax write-off for the donation.

🎭If there’s a local college, network with the drama or music department for Shakespeare shorts or madrigal singers on one of your stages. Consider offering presentations to these departments—or to local high schools—about historical costuming or armor in the off-season. This keeps your venue front-of-mind in the community.

🗺️If your area is a tourism-driven region, there may be a hotel and tourism tax—and a group that is spending those tax dollars to drive traffic to your area.
Talk to your tourism board. Find out whether tri-folds, card stock, or magazine ads get more attention at the welcome centers. Offer a video clip tour for welcome center staff if you’re unable to host one of the statewide tours that those organizations do for their advisors.

If your venue is helping fill local hotels, there’s no reason those hotels shouldn’t be thrilled to have your posters or brochures in their lobbies.

👉🏼And while we’re on posters… send out a poster crew in a 50-mile radius one month prior to your event. Circuses still do this because it works.
Thinking about the demographics of who attends outdoor venues—it’s smart to have a presence at other events. Comic cons, regional art shows, local parades, charity drives like blood banks or school supply efforts—these endear you to the community, which in turn helps spread the good word about your venue.

✉️These venues are also great places to build your email list. Offer a giveaway (like a chance to win free tickets) to build that list. Email marketing is still the strongest, most direct way to control your outreach. Social media platforms come and go, and algorithms change drastically in terms of how much you get seen.
Exit surveys are a powerful way to let your audience know you’re listening—without having them air their (sometimes nitpicky) complaints in a more public forum.

PR isn’t flashy. It’s not always fun. But it works.

These kinds of community-first strategies build your festival’s reputation in ways social media just can’t reach.
The kind of ways that help you sell out Saturdays and get your festival poster behind the hotel check-in desk before you even ask.
If this post made your wheels turn, there’s more where that came from.

👉🏼 Want help building your own community-focused festival PR plan? That’s what Bespoke Consulting is for. Book a 10-minute discovery call and let’s talk about your show.

I see it constantly in festival circles: folks use “PR” and “marketing” like interchangeable parts in a booth design.

⚠️Spoiler alert: they’re not the same, and getting them confused can cost you big.

Let’s break it down, festival-style.

🫱🏻‍🫲🏼 PR … Public Relations … is all about relationships.
👠 Marketing is how you look from across the room.

Marketing

It can be boiled down to how good your posters look, how clear your font is, and whether your colors are consistent across your branding.
👉🏼 Marketing teams direct photographers to capture imagery that makes their graphic design more eye-catching—or that makes it easier to promote specific acts or artists within your venue. (They might run a photography contest to generate imagery from the eyes of guests).
Marketing might also be related to your social media presentation.

Public Relations

But public relations is about how you interact with people within your social media, regardless of how your post looked or how often you posted it.
👉🏼 This is why the PR team is usually in charge of sponsorship arrangements.
Sponsorships are about getting more people to say good things about your venue. And yes, many sponsorships are directly related to Marketing—because they are in-kind arrangements or you’re trading for a certain number of impressions on that sponsor’s social media, soda displays in grocery stores, magazines, or whatever. But it’s still a relationship with that sponsor—and so it’s part of the PR team’s job.

Understanding the difference is step one.

Next up?

🧠 Let’s talk tactics—because even the best understanding won’t help if you’re not putting it into action.

➡️ In Part 2, I’ll cover the boots-on-the-ground PR strategies that still move the needle in 2025—especially if you’re running a regional or seasonal event.
Think: service clubs, poster crews, tourism boards, and why exit surveys are your new best friend.

Tune in to Part 2 Now!

Renaissance festivals have been doing “experiential retail” for over 50 years, long before it became the latest buzzword in marketing circles.

🛍️I just read an article about how malls are now embracing experiential retail to try to lure people back. And I had to laugh—because Disney’s been doing it, and Renaissance fairs have been perfecting it for decades.

👉🏼We’ve always known something that the retail world is just now figuring out: people crave human connection, especially now that our work lives have become so digitized.

⚜️ What Makes Renaissance Festivals Different

At a Renaissance fair, you don’t just shop—you get to interact with people while playing as your most imagined self.

What is your favorite version of yourself? Well, you can be that person at a Renaissance festival.

Think about it: where else do guests get to dress up completely? Disney even has rules against it (that’s why “Disney Bounding” became a thing). But at Renaissance festivals, we encourage full costume participation. We want people to feel that they’re part of the world we’re creating together.

🗝️And here’s the crucial part: that creation, that crafting of the experience, is the responsibility of everybody who works there.

You can be selling soda, and you’re responsible for helping push the experience forward with dialect and costume.
You can be selling jewelry, and you’re going to be doing that in character and in period speech.

That’s what you sign on for when you decide to sell at a Renaissance festival.
If you don’t want to do that, then you should be doing standard art fairs or selling your products at a flea market somewhere. Because this is what we do:

🧚🏼‍♀️We create an imaginary world, and then we invite people into it.

🧙The Magic of Disconnection

In that experience of disconnection from their normal world, guests have a heightened sense of fun.
They may have a looser relationship with their wallets—they may be more willing to spend in a themed environment than they are when they’re just going shopping.

There are several reasons why this works so well:

🎫The Entry Fee Effect: By charging admission, Renaissance festivals establish a cost of entry that tends to attract people with more disposable income than you’d find at free events.

👩🏼‍🎤The Escape Factor: People are paying not just for products, but for the experience of being transported to another world for the day.

👯‍♀️The Community Feeling: When everyone around you is playing along with the fantasy, it creates a unique sense of belonging and shared experience.

🏰 A Personal Industry

Even after 35 years in this business, I’m still amazed by how personal and connected this industry remains.
I started selling custom moccasins—my first job was working in their workshop, and they sent me off to work at a Renaissance Fair. My second show, I was a carpenter’s helper because I met this carpenter while I was selling moccasins. Eight months later, I ran away with him. Thirty-five years later, he’s my husband, and we’re still together and still having a blast.

The number of people I know who met their spouses at Renaissance festivals is another story entirely, but it speaks to the deep connections this industry fosters.

💼Despite being a 50-year-old proven industry, even the largest, most corporate-style Renaissance festivals are still owned by individuals or families. The biggest companies might own three festivals at most.

🤝 As a whole, it remains a mom-and-pop industry where all these festivals are run by individuals, family groups, or small partnerships. They all have their own priorities and their own way of seeing things, while still falling into industry norms.

And “industry norms” is funny for an industry that’s so far outside the norm!

✨ What Every Vendor Should Know

After spending decades chatting with both festival management teams and vendor communities, I’ve learned there are things we all know would make life easier for everyone involved.

📋 Every vendor coordinator has a mental list of things they pray vendors understand before they pick up the phone to apply.

Through my conversations with industry pros—both on the management side and successful vendors—I’ve been able to identify the common mistakes that keep getting repeated, generation after generation of new vendors. There’s a wealth of knowledge that most of us figured out the hard way, through trial and error.

But here’s the thing: we now have 50 years of industry wisdom.
We know what the biggest mistakes are.
We know what makes applications irresistible and what makes vendor coordinators hit “delete.”
We know the best practices for handling rejection and turning it into future success.

📈 The Bottom Line for Vendors

If you’re considering Renaissance festival vending, understand that you’re entering an industry built on experiential retail before that term even existed. You’re not just selling products— 🧚🏼‍♀️you’re contributing to a shared fantasy that transforms ordinary weekends into magical escapes.

🏆 The most successful vendors understand this from day one.

They embrace the costuming, learn the dialect, and see themselves not just as merchants but as characters in an ongoing story that unfolds every festival weekend.

The vendors who struggle are often those who think they can treat Renaissance festivals like any other retail venue. They can’t understand why their perfectly good products don’t sell when they’re standing behind their booth in street clothes, speaking in a normal voice, treating customers like they’re shopping at a regular store.

⭐️Renaissance festivals work because everyone—vendors, entertainers, and management—commits to creating something bigger than the sum of its parts.

When it works, it’s retail magic.
When it doesn’t, it’s just people in funny costumes standing around.

⏳The Future of Experiential Retail

As the retail world scrambles to figure out how to create experiences that draw people away from online shopping, Renaissance festivals continue to thrive using principles we’ve refined over five decades.

👉🏼We’ve always known that people will pay for connection, for fantasy, for the chance to be their best imagined selves.

That’s not likely to change anytime soon. If anything, as our world becomes more digital and isolated, the human connections and shared fantasies that Renaissance festivals provide become even more valuable.

So while malls are just now discovering experiential retail, we’ll keep doing what we’ve always done: creating magical worlds where people can shop, play, and connect in ways that transform an ordinary day into something extraordinary.

💎 P.S. -- If you’re inspired to take a deeper dive into what it really takes to thrive in our industry, I’ve compiled 35 years of insider knowledge into the Ren Faire Vendors Blueprint: Secrets of Successful Shop Owners.

🎪This comprehensive guide includes everything I wish I’d known when I started:

• How to craft applications that vendor coordinators cannot ignore
• Best practices for what to do when a show turns you down (and how to turn rejection into future success)
• Insider tips from industry pros who’ve built thriving Renaissance festival businesses
• The biggest mistakes vendors make—and how to avoid them

👉🏼 Instead of forcing you to learn these lessons the hard way like most of us did, the Blueprint gives you 50 years of industry wisdom in one place.

GET THE REN FAIRE VENDORS BLUEPRINT HERE

Don’t spend years making the same mistakes we’ve all seen a hundred times. Join the vendors who understand that success in Renaissance festivals isn’t just about great products—it’s about mastering the art of experiential retail in our magical, medieval world.

Patron Campgrounds.

Not a lot of shows offer them, but if you follow Renaissance Festival social media, you’ll see how passionately people talk about campgrounds. The folks who’ve experienced them just can’t imagine why anybody would have a festival without one. Meanwhile, many festival owners have never even considered adding one—and for good reason.

The truth is, the vast majority of Renaissance Faires in the US operate just fine without patron campgrounds.

But if you’re considering whether to add one to your festival, there are some serious factors to weigh:

🍎The Appeal – Why Patrons Love Campgrounds:

There’s no denying that patron campgrounds create devoted fans.

Part of that enthusiasm comes from the extended experience they provide—the festival doesn’t end when the gates close.

👉🏼Instead, it transforms into a nighttime party where guests can continue socializing, sharing stories from the day, and extending their immersion into the Renaissance community.

For many festival-goers, especially those traveling long distances, the campground becomes an integral part of their annual pilgrimage. It’s where friendships deepen, where the magic continues after dark, and where the Renaissance experience becomes more than just a day trip.

⚠️The Reality – Liability Comes with the Territory:

But here’s what festival owners need to understand: that nighttime party atmosphere comes with significant liability.

Your insurance rates are going to go up—sometimes substantially.

👉🏼Having people on your grounds overnight creates risks that don’t exist during regular operating hours.

You’re going to need a police force overnight. This isn’t optional. From my voice of experience, having seen problems at other campgrounds, you absolutely have to control access to the campground.

If outsiders can get to the party happening in your campground, rough actors will start to show up. It quickly becomes a market for activities that your security team will spend considerable time shutting down because they’re not legal.

In most situations, the liability outranks the value of having a patron campground. That’s not to say it’s never worth it, but you need to go in with your eyes wide open about what you’re taking on.

🌳When Campgrounds Make Sense:

Whether or not you need a patron campground has a lot to do with the distance your park is from major metropolitan areas or hotels.

If your festival is in a remote location where guests would otherwise face long drives home or expensive hotel stays, a campground might provide genuine value that justifies the risks.

The campgrounds that do work well typically have adult sections and family sections, unless the show is specifically geared as a family event and that attitude spills over into their campground policies.

💰The Hidden Benefits – Year-Round Revenue Potential:

If you do decide to build a campground, there are additional benefits beyond festival weekends.

A well-designed campground becomes another asset at your park that can generate revenue throughout the year:

⚜️Event hosting: You could host concerts, barbecue cook-offs, or big fundraising events
⚜️Facility rentals: Lease the space to other organizations during your off-season
⚜️Land banking: A campground is relatively inexpensive infrastructure to maintain while keeping land under your control for potential future expansion
This last point is particularly strategic. If you’re paying taxes on a large chunk of land, a campground allows you to utilize that space while keeping your expansion options open. In 20 years, if you need to expand your festival footprint, you have adjoining land that you could conceivably develop by relocating the campground.

💎Revenue Enhancement Opportunities

Well-run campgrounds also offer multiple ways to diversify your income:

⚜️Premium hookups: Locations with more services for RVs can command higher fees
⚜️Rental accommodations: Cabins or glamping tents for guests who want the campground experience without bringing their own gear
⚜️Vendor opportunities: Food trucks and other vendors specifically for campground guests

However, you’ll need clear policies about campground vending.

If food trucks want to come in for the weekend, you need to know what you’re going to charge them—and whether this might compete with vendors from within your park who you’ve promised exclusivity, and who’ve made substantial investments into your park’s infrastructure.

⚙️Practical Considerations

Before committing to a patron campground, consider these questions:

⚜️Noise ordinances: Do you need them, or are you far enough out in the country that weekend music and revelry won’t be an issue? Keep in mind that your regional Burning Man fans might bring EDM music, and there could be live concerts happening late into the night.
⚜️Insurance implications: Your insurance company will specifically ask if you’re open for anything overnight. This affects your coverage and premiums significantly.
⚜️Security requirements: Beyond just police presence, you’ll need controlled access, adequate lighting, and emergency procedures for overnight incidents.
⚜️Local regulations: Check what permits or additional licensing you might need for overnight accommodations. (Don’t forget hotel taxes if applicable.)

📊The Bottom Line

Patron campgrounds are definitely “a thing” in certain parts of the country, while other regions have never even heard of such a concept. If land is really expensive where you are, it’s not necessarily a good deal.

The decision ultimately comes down to your specific situation:

⚜️How far are you from hotels and major population centers?
⚜️Can you handle the increased insurance and security costs?
⚜️Do you have the space and infrastructure to do it properly?
⚜️Are you prepared for the year-round management this requires?

I know some of you reading this are thinking, “Why would anyone even consider the hassle?” while others are wondering, “How do festivals operate without them?” Both perspectives are valid, and both types of festivals can be incredibly successful.

The key is understanding what you’re getting into and making an informed decision based on your festival’s unique circumstances, not just the enthusiasm of campground advocates on social media.

Remember, my darlings: just because something is a fan favorite doesn’t mean it’s right for your festival. Sometimes the best decision is knowing what not to add.