I’m sat on a crisp white sofa overlooking a stream of pristine men, women and everyone in-between filtering in to Harrogate’s Love to be Festival. The one-dayer, being held on a reassuringly warm day in September, was founded in 1994, a time when DJ culture met mainstream celebrity. While Love to be leaned into the superclub, Gatecrasher-esque sounds of house music, emerging sounds like UK Garage were built on champagne soaked club raves. It was a time of luxury, defined by dance music.
Love to be haven’t strayed too far from its roots. From this white sofa in the middle of September, I see revellers sipping champagne at tables that cost £3000 a pop. Others are enjoying cocktails made with high-end tequilas. Waiters and waitresses dressed as though they should be serving in Michelin starred restaurants. This is all in a town centre park that’s usually reserved for dog walkers.
This is perhaps to be expected at an event where the music leans more towards Ibiza luxury than the general filth we tolerate at the average UK festival. But Love to be is still very much a festival, just one that offers table service for the price of a small house deposit.
“In the 1990s, I used to play in 3000 capacity superclubs where you needed a VIP club,” remembers Marc Dennis, Director at Love to be. “That died down, but around 2015 we saw in places like Ibiza really ramp it up on that experience. We then thought this is something that could work as part of a festival.“
Love to be were tactical in offering (and delivering) something on this level. The brand’s sister festival, which in 2025 was held in a warehouse in Sheffield, is not the place where multi-thousand pound packages are commonly sold. But a place like Harrogate, where the average house price stands at around £380,000, offers some unique opportunities.
“Harrogate is an affluent area where there are lots of nice wine bars and things like that. We can really recreate that vibe but in a field,” says Marc.
The clientele of Harrogate is a major factor in why the Love to be Festival’s VIP packages is a sure fire sell-out every year. “It’s a really, really quick seller, and that allows us to make it bigger and better every year,” says Marc. But with that promised value comes pressure to deliver.
Love to be not only offered a VIP package, but a ‘very’ VIP package. “When you put ‘VVIP’ on something there is an expectation there,” says Marc. That doesn’t just mean clean toilets and no bar queues, but “lots of extras such as drinks packages, table service, entertainment and more,” thinks Marc.
Either way, these VIP experiences are a far cry from the days of old. Spending three nights in a wet, hellish tent was not framed as a grim experience, but a right of passage for many. But those days seemingly behind us.
While Download may welcome a very soggy-yet-die hard troupe of metal and rock faithfuls year on year, they can now find respite in a host of VIP sections, complete with special accommodation. Those performing at the pop-punk festival Slam Dunk encourages fans to ‘open up the pit’ while asking punters to open up their wallets to enjoy bean bag seats and queue-free food stalls behind the scenes. It’s the mark of a changing festival market where mud is out, mimosas are in.
“Experiences are changing,” says Adam Gregory, Director at the Derbyshire rock and metal festival Bloodstock.
While VIP experiences have been part of Bloodstock since circa-2007, what customers expect for their money has evolved. When Bloodstock first introduced what Adam describes as a “VIP area…in some form” it included the stereotypical perks of a nicer campsite and a clean toilet, which were the general metrics of a VIP experience at the time.
Today, it delivers a real ale bar with around 120 ales and ciders and a stage for the VIP area that is “programmed the same as the main festival programme,” and hosts bands, comedians and talks. “What we don’t want to do is for this to be seen as a cash grab, one where you take away from the experience rather than add to it.”
“It’s basically a festival within a festival,” Adam goes on to say. “When I was young, the experience was all about the camping, not the festival. It was about the camaraderie, getting down and dirty and enjoying it without any restrictions. There’s a big element of that which still exists, but VIP tends to offer something different. People want to enjoy the show, but they want to enjoy the show in a nicer environment.”
But there is a risk in offering too much, and delivering too little, thinks Adam. “It’s important you don’t take the eye off the ball and you don’t become complacent,” he says. “You want people to keep investing in the events and keep them coming back and looking for those enhanced experiences.”
Everybody enjoys perks, especially when hot showers are hard to find in the middle of a field. But in all this talk of bougie bars and even bougier bogs, are festivals creating a tiered class system of festival-goer?
It’s no secret that the UK is still facing a cost of living crisis. In 2024, it was reported that ‘one in four adults are cutting back on holiday savings to afford a weekend music festival.’ It also stated that 29% have cut back on non-essentials to afford their festival ticket, while 26% have cut back on their savings.
While some research suggests that festival-goers are increasingly relying on split payment options to afford their summer festival, the weight of massively increasing ticket prices are still sending the average attendee into the red. “[I] whack it all on the credit card in an endless cycle of festival debt,” one festival-goer told The Guardian.
VIP packages are a relatively new, yet high value revenue earner for festivals, something “you have to have,” in the modern day, says Duncan King, Head of Festivals & Partnerships at Skiddle.
When asked if UK festivals are increasingly pandering to the pockets of the few at the expense of the many, Duncan pulls from his past experience of working within the music industry in Las Vegas, famously a place of lawless decadence where money is no object.
“People do like nicer things. You’re a festival and can facilitate that without it impacting your main crowd and ethos, then why wouldn’t you?” he says. “[The UK] is never going to go fully down that American-style road. What we’re good at doing here is that we’re thoughtful for the fans. We’re pretty good at making the VIP experience as an add-on, not the experience itself.”
While the encroaching hand of late-stage capitalism in the UK festival industry may not be happening anytime soon, VIP packages remain a big money spinner. Duncan thinks that some VIP packages could make up to 10% of all festival ticket revenue, so they’re not going away any time soon. “I think of festival VIP like going on holiday,” says Adam. “Some people are happy with a B&B, others want to stay at The Ritz.”
