Entertainment
23 October, 2024
Festival on the front foot
FOLLOWING an enormously successful year for Savannah in the Round, organisers are already looking ahead to sustain the growth of the festival and even teased that “two major headline artists” have been locked-in for 2025.
“After having a bit more time to properly analyse our numbers, the growth is actually better than we first reported,” director James Dein said.
“We could not be happier. We’re going against the trends with a festival that’s growing.”
Around 25,000 people attended the festival over four days, with a 30% increase in ticket sales compared to last year.
“We’ve also got some very, very exciting news to announce in regard to artists in 2025. We have two major headline artists already locked in,” he said.
Mr Dein also noted that the overnight visitor expenditure figure for last year injected approximately $5.5 million into the local economy and after the success of the festival this year, he expects that figure would have jumped up to around $8 million.
The sudden growth of the festival compared to previous years was somewhat unexpected and saw the whole camping area and car park reach full capacity.
Nevertheless, these were seen as “nice problems” and strategies to accommodate a growing audience are already being talked about.
“I didn’t picture us running out of camping, but that happened. It’s a nice problem to have and we’ll expand the campgrounds to include adjacent paddocks as part of the Mareeba Rodeo Arena facility,” Mr Dein said.
“We’re not land-locked, we have plenty of room to expand and we’ll be looking at that very shortly before the wet season, so that we have an understanding as to how we’re going to accommodate increased growth.
“We’ll always be able to accommodate onsite parking for accessible patrons, the elderly and families with young children.
“But for the greater audience, parking offsite may be a part of the norm for the future.
“We’ve got an ongoing arrangement with Mareeba International Club, they have a vast amount of land and have offered to work with us, and we will work with them to further expand ‘park and ride’.
“We will also be looking to have increased and improved amenities on site, it’s fine to grow a festival but you’ve got to keep pace with your facilities and so on and so forth, and we’re very focused on that.”
Mr Dein is also proactive about instilling a bigger presence of the festival throughout the main drag of Mareeba and will also work to improve advertisement and the shuttle services.
“We’ll start earlier with our messaging. We got caught at the last minute this year and we’ll better plan for it,” he said.
“The ‘park and ride’ shuttles will be very much a part of the norm and we’ll also be working very closely with Mareeba Shire Council to develop some more signage presence in the Mareeba CBD.
“We’ll also work closely with the Mareeba Chamber of Commerce to get the message out there. It’s good for business, it’s good for Mareeba and the greater region.
“So, there will be some conversations that will come out of this year’s festival, and we’ll engage closer with business leaders and council to better prepare for 2025.”
Although the festival brings tens of thousands of people and millions of dollars to the Mareeba area, it was noted that local supermarkets weren’t well-prepared to accommodate for the “influx of people into the region”.
“I’m also going to work with the Mareeba Chamber of Commerce and major retailers such as Coles and Woolworths to better prepare for the festival,” Mr Dein said.
“The shelves were bare and empty, they definitely need to do more to prepare.”
