Festival sold out in hours

Huge demand for this year’s Abbey Medieval Festival led to tickets selling out in “less than 12 hours”, yesterday.

Around 25,000 tickets were snapped up for the Festival, on July 10-12, which will have visitors from across the country and overseas at Abbey Place, Caboolture.

The sell out came hard on the heels of Abbey’s gold medal in the Australian Tourism Awards Festivals and Events category last month.

“Selling out so quickly was a definite surprise,” Joel Stephens, the Abbey Museum Events and Public Programs manager, said.

“We were not expecting the huge demand we saw yesterday and a full sellout in less than 12 hours. It shows how popular and exciting the Festival is.

“We experienced some challenges with the high influx of customers trying to get tickets yesterday morning and unfortunately crashed their site.

“It was a little bit of a perfect storm, to be honest. We made some improvements to the process, made a few tweeks and unfortunately they backfired a little bit.

“But we’re constantly working to improve the systems and structure in place and deliver the smoothest experience possible to our customers.”

This year’s Abbey Medieval Festival will again bring life from the Middle Ages in Europe and Africa to life with jousting, re-enactments, performers and food stalls.

Organisers are also still working on a “couple of plans to bring to public,” Joel said, adding the national tourism award was “probably more of a surprise” than the sell out.

“We won the Queensland Tourism Industry award late last year which put us in the running for the national awards and were not expecting to take that out,” he said.

“So we’re really honoured the judges looked at the festival we offer and had the same feeling the public does.”

Abbey Museum is also working on a new two-day history festival which is locked in for September 26-27.

“Our main festival does have a limit on the timeline in terms of the middle ages, so we’re looking to launch the Abbey History Festival” Joel said.

“This will bring a broader timeline of re-enactments, culture and food to our Abbey Precinct helping us celebrate 40 years of the Abbey Museum, which is what all this goes to support.”