Is Stoke Travel Fyre Festival 2.0?

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and over promises and under delivers like a duck, then…

Did you see in the news that Australian music festival Hot Dub Wine Machine had been beset by a tropical storm that brought with it floods, cancellation of the headlining act, and an evacuation of all revellers?

The press in Australia is calling it Fyre Fest 2.0.

Which has gotten the team here at Stoke Travel pretty riled up, because we always thought that we were Fyre Festival 2.0.

Well, not always, but the other day our Stoke Travel Guru team was chasing up an incomplete booking, and when they asked the almost-Stokie why they changed their mind they received the following response:

Cause ur fyre fest lol

And it got us to thinking, maybe we are Fyre Fest 2.0. We’ve disappointed more than our fair share of travellers over the years, and while the satisfied customer database is at 99%, or more, that still leaves 370 bitterly disappointed travellers in 2018, and maybe another 1000 or more over our history.

Let’s say we’ve disappointed about 1500 people in the 13 years we’ve been in this travel business.

Sure, we’ve pleased and pleasantly surprised more than 100,000 travellers since we started the crazy adventure that is Stoke Travel, but having 1500 haters is no mean feat. That’s about four Boeing 747s filled with people who wish you ill will, or about 30 city buses full of soggy sleeping bags.

It’s a whole lot of negative vibes being sent our way.

About 4000 people went to Fyre Festival, and let’s say that 1000 of them were chill, or drunk, enough to have a good time despite the shit show.

That leaves 3000 disappointed festival goers. We’re half way there, and I think Stoke Travel can get there, heck, maybe we can get there this year if it rains at Oktoberfest, or we have a few buses run late from the Running of the Bulls.

We could be Fyre Fest 2.0!

We make people sleep in pretty crappy tents.

You’d be hard pressed to describe our meals as gourmet.

Our content and media team do make our events look amazing.

Heck, we are Fyre Fest 2.0.

Well, we are unless you take the following things into account:

1. We’ve been running surf camps for 13 years; Oktoberfest, Running of the Bulls and La Tomatina trips for 11 years. We were Fyre Festival before Fyre Festival. If anything they are 2.0. We are the OGs.
2. All of our promo videos were filmed at real life, successful Stoke Travel events. We didn’t fly out Instagram influencers to have them pose on luxury yachts that we have no intention of providing to paying customers. Everything you see in Stoke Travel’s promos happened to real people on Stoke Travel trips.
3. We’ve never pretended to be a luxury option – far from it, we’re the fun option. We’re the place to go if you want to have the best time in your life and get your hands, and liver, a little dirty. If you want fancy you’re barking up the wrong festival.
4. Our musical acts actually turn up, like Yolanda Be Cool, Art Vs Science, Honey Haze, and about another 12 bands and DJs in 2018, with even more lined up for 2019 – including Dune Rats!

Other differences between Stoke Travel and Fyre Festival include – we don’t have the backing of a tiny-mouthed, but otherwise unhateable late-90s-early-noughties rappers; we’re not socially inept repeat-offending scam artists whose main goal in life is to pay bikini models to hang out with us — in fact, we wouldn’t know what to do with hot, buff guys, bikini models and Instagram influencers even if they did want to hang out with us.

And, I don’t know, Fyre Festival seemed to attract a bunch of entitled losers, whereas Stoke Travel trips are more for independent voyagers, legends, party animals, and the kind of people who travel to have fun with like-and-open minded travellers from all over the world, and who wouldn’t let sleeping in the tent, or dancing in the rain, ruin their experience.

Is Stoke Travel Fyre Festival 2.0? Maybe, but only if you’re the type of dweeb who’d want to go to Fyre Festival 1.0 in the first place.