Local spend from Westport festival could top €1.2m

Local spend from Westport Music and Food Festival to top €1.2m


Festival may take five years to turn a profit

Neill O’Neill

THE organisers of the Westport Festival of Music and Food hope to increase ticket sales beyond the 12,000 mark in 2014, and estimate that the spend locally from the two day event next June will be in excess of €1.2 million.
A survey of festival-goers showed that just under 70 per cent of attendees stayed in the locality in June 2012, when 9,000 people were on the grounds of Westport House, over the two days the festival was held. Excluding ticket sales, the average cash spend of each person was between €200 and €300, and among their responses for what else they did in Westport over that weekend, the majority had visited local pubs, shops and restaurants and engaged in activities in the area.

Positive reaction
Making a presentation to Westport Town Council last week, Olwyn Dawe and promoter Darryl Downey also outlined that 99 per cent of businesses surveyed had a positive reaction to the festival, primarily because of the benefits to tourism, local business, because of the publicity the event brought the town and because it was well managed.
In total, if you were to take all the promotion of the festival, and Westport relative to it, that occurred across all media in 2013, it would cost €4 million to buy the same amount in advertising and PR. It is no surprise therefore, that 87 per cent of business people surveyed were glad the event is making a return in 2014.
Next year there will be an enhanced food focus at the festival and tickets will be available through Ticketmaster for the first time, while new media partners will be The Irish Times and 2FM. Ultimately, the promoters hope to create a brand for the festival, albeit a family friendly one, which is as recognisable as the Glastonbury or Reading festivals in the UK.
The meeting was also told that it usually takes a festival of this nature five years to reach profitability, and that the cost of the artists this year was around €500,000, with turnover at €665,703. The projections are that this will rise above €826,000 in 2014 and hit the €1 million mark in 2015.

New set of challenges
Darryl Downey said that the festival shuts at 11pm each night to encourage the crowd to go and enjoy what Westport has to offer, and also that he is exploring the idea of bringing a one day concert event to Westport House. He added however, that such an event would bring a new set of challenges.
The cost of involving Ticketmaster in 2014 will be absorbed by the festival itself, rather than by a cover price increase, and while the advantages of having the event in Westport are many, it was stated that the small local population base makes it essential to attract people to the festival from other towns in the region.
Councillor Myles Staunton asked Mr Downey to consider allowing the relevant businesses of the town, who provide funding for the concert through rates paid to the council, to participate in the festival.
Mr Downey, in response to a question from Cllr Ollie Gannon, said the Clew Bay Pipe Band were a great success at this year’s festival and that he placed them in the Marquee Stage rather than on the Main Stage, as he knew it would make for an electric atmosphere which may have been lost on the bigger, open air stage. He added that he would like to see them return in 2014, that he would be looking for something different, and that he was ‘encouraging mad ideas from them.’