Four days in mid-August saw the Fiesta’s 32nd year, with 500,000 visitors enjoying the spectacle of over 100 hot air balloons of all different shapes and sizes, the legendary RAF Red Arrows, and a range of complementary ground-based attractions.
Brought in by Richmond Event Management, it was AP’s first time at the event and something rather different from the live music circuit which tends to dominate the company’s summer workload.
“We were really looking forward to the new challenges that the Fiesta presented,” said AP’s northern regional manager Simon Miller.
“As always we started planning well in advance, in this case in April, and attended monthly meetings in Bristol where all the partners would meet and discuss the event and their roles within it.”
Festival of gates
AP’s staff covered the entire site except the car parks, including all staff gates and public entrances.
Miller said: “It is a festival of gates, so to speak. Making sure each gate works in tandem with the others is the real key to smooth operation.”
One major difference to AP’s experience at live music events is that there’s no real focal point on the ground.
Miller said: “The public treats this differently because all the action takes place in the sky.
“It’s a very family focused, picnic audience, with the ground based attractions an aside to the main show going on as the balloons are inflated and take off above them.
“The fact that everything takes place in the air does alter things for us. There’s no real crowd movement for any of the different elements.
“The site is also very weather dependant and it’s easy for the balloons to be grounded. So if you have a couple of bad days weather-wise and then a nice one, the site will have three days worth of attendance at once.
“This is almost the exact scenario that we faced on the Sunday of the event, but the advance planning worked and everything went very smoothly.”
Helicopter brouhaha
That’s not to say that unexpected things don’t crop up. One occurrence that the AP staff had to help with was helicopters blowing away the Fiesta staff tents – while people were sleeping in them!
“It would be all too easy to take a job at face value and believe it will be easy. This was no exception and highlights why the months of planning that we put in for every event are so necessary,” Miller said.
