
The Disastrous Fyre Festival May Have Wrecked It for Everyone - petethomas
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-06/how-do-you-insure-a-fyre-festival
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Animats
Nothing in the article indicates that insurance will be harder for other
festivals to obtain. The insurance executive quoted says that insurance
probably wouldn't have covered the organizers of the Fyre festival. The event
did not fail because of an external event; it failed because the organizers
didn't have the money and organization to prepare for it.

Fyre Media is being forced into bankruptcy by their many creditors. The WSJ
article is "Lenders Seek to Force Fyre Festival Into Bankruptcy". (If you
search for that in Facebook, you can read it for free. Searching for it in
Google won't help. This, as an aside, reflects the changing power situation
between Google and Facebook.)

~~~
acomjean
I think the article indicates insurers need to do some due diligence on these
festivals. Its unclear if Fyre even had insurance for a festival on a remote
(basically unpopulated) island in the Bahamas. Most festivals aren't that
ambitious in location.

The Fyre organizer basically didn't have it together: "Farland, 25, is alleged
to have cheated at least two investors out of about $1.2 million by lying
about the revenue and income of Fyre Media Inc., which he founded in 2016. He
gave them phony documents claiming the company generated millions of dollars
in revenue from thousands of artist bookings in a single year, when it really
earned just $60,000 from about 60 performances, they said."[1]

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-01/u-s-
charg...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-01/u-s-charges-fyre-
festival-founder-mcfarland-with-fraud)

~~~
slap
Just for your information, it wasn't on an unpopulated island but on Exuma,
specifically 1 mile north from the resort "Sandals Emerald Bay" .

~~~
mikeyouse
Yep, they tried really hard to make it sound like it was some far flung place
and showed a lot of cleverly oriented pictures to make their case, but this is
where the festival was meant to be located:

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Exuma,+The+Bahamas/@23.635...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Exuma,+The+Bahamas/@23.6357712,-75.9198686)

Zoom out a bit to see exactly how 'remote' it really was.

 _Edit: Meh, mobile GMaps is messing with the link, but their property was on
the north side of the island a few hundred yards from a marina._

~~~
slap
Exactly, they advertised it to be on an island “once owned by Pablo Escobar”
implying that it was on Norman's Cay (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman%27s_Cay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman%27s_Cay))
but Norman's Cay is 100 miles away. Just lies...

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simplicio
Weird article. As others have mentioned, it uses the Fyre Festival as a hook
for an article about insurance, but the Fyre disaster doesn't have anything to
do with insurance, and the article doesn't even try to make the case that it
did.

Also, the article tries to make the case that festival insurance is expensive,
but the actual costs quoted in the article seem...not that bad? Basically a
few percentage on top of the ticket price. They multiply that number by a
million, saying that if you had a festival that big, the absolute amount of
money would be large, but that doesn't really mean anything. Lots of numbers
are big after you multiply them by a million. Presumably the organizers care
about the cost as a percentage of revenue.

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oblib
Responding to the misleading headline (as opposed to the content) Fyre only
"wrecked it" for themselves.

As to the content, had they shown that "DesertTrip II" or some other festival
was not held because they couldn't find an insurer they might have something
to talk about but I didn't see that in this piece.

I did learn a bit about how festivals are insured though so it wasn't a
complete waste of time, but I don't like clickbaited titles and "trusted"
media sources would be wise to avoid them imho.

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charlesdm
Risk vs reward. An insurer only wants the gains, but without taking a risk on
the outcome? That's why you have insurance -- insurers just need to have
proper risk management in place and correctly determine a price they want to
charge to insure an event.

A festival that has had 10+ annual successful runs will likely be (much)
cheaper to insure than a startup project.

If drugs and/or alcohol are the problem, then you raise the premium to account
for that.

~~~
andrewljohnson
>> insurers just need to have proper risk management in place and correctly
determine a price they want to charge to insure an event

Is that supposed to be a definition of the insurance industry?

The article discusses a number of tactics the insurers take to make this
happen, including walking the event site before and after, and monitoring who
manages the event, down to the boots on the ground.

This comment seems to say all the dummies are doing it wrong and just need to
wise up and crunch a few numbers.

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draw_down
A lot of talk about attendees' use of drugs and alcohol creating risk, but
this catastrophe had nothing to do with that.

~~~
TillE
Also, you'd think that requiring a commercial flight to a remote island would
filter out most of the drugs anyway.

~~~
symlinkk
LSD can be stored in liquid form inside of eyedrop sized containers. MDMA and
coke are powders which can be stored in a makeup bag without arousing
suspicion. Weed can be baked into edibles (brownies, cupcakes, etc) or added
to candy (gummies, lollipops). Basically the only thing you need to do is make
sure they visually don't look like drugs, since the TSA isn't going to be drug
testing everything, they'll just be passing it through an x-ray machine and
visually inspecting it.

~~~
magic_beans
What about dogs? Dogs can certainly detect weed in an edible, as well as very
small quantities of cocaine and mdma.

~~~
kingkawn
I've heard that most dogs in airports are specifically trained to detect
explosives, not marijuana.

~~~
mrgriscom
Airport security != customs

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zitterbewegung
The article makes the claim that due to the fact that Fyre failed so
spectacularly that Festival insurance's rates would rise such that Festival
organizations wouldn't be able to throw the Festival. I think that insurers
will be more conservative on out there Festivals for the first time and do
more due dilligence. Also, they will inccrease fees to the other Festivals and
that may limit Festivals or they might insitute new rules and Festivals may be
forced to figure out how to decrease their risks.

