A long Reddit post from a longtime Bonnaroo attendee lays out what a lot of people are grumbling about this year: the effective ticket price is ballooning once you add a separate camping pass and fees, the festival feels smaller (the Thursday programming is gone), and longtime “legacy” headliners have largely disappeared.
The poster says a basic weekend — ticket, camping pass and fees — now runs near $600. For comparison, they remember 2013 tickets landing around $250–$300 and including camping plus an extra day of music. That gap, plus a perceived drop in marquee legacy acts, is the core of the complaint: fans want the chance to see big, once-in-a-lifetime artists like Tom Petty, Paul McCartney and Elton John, and they feel the current lineups don’t deliver the same draw.
The post breaks down concrete site and service issues that have rubbed people the wrong way this season:
– Camping and ticket decoupling — attendees call it a bait-and-switch that tacks on at least $100 to what used to be an all-in ticket.
– Porta‑potties and showers — reports of overflowing portos, nonworking flushable units, low‑pressure or broken shower heads and rising shower prices.
– Fewer on‑site offerings — the removal of features like Where in the Woods, the Cinema and Comedy tents, the silent disco, plaza balloons/wayfinding, the festival newspaper, and distributed guides/maps.
– Vendor and plaza changes — fewer food booths around plazas and shakedown, and a reduction in small comforts like trash/recycling bags and plaza TVs.
– Camp plot sizing and parking — long-time campers note tighter parking, denser plots and smaller spaces for fuel‑efficient cars compared to trucks/SUVs.
Not everything is negative — the post also gives credit where it’s due: water hookups at fountains, plaza programming, slowly improving traffic coordination, and earlier investments like permanent showers were once a real step up. But the overall tone is that upgrades haven’t been consistently maintained while prices climb.
Responses in the thread track a familiar split: some fans point to inflation, higher artist guarantees and ramped-up production costs as reasonable causes for price movement; others call it profiteering by festival operators and say they’re bowing out on principle.
This is the kind of community pushback that comes with a long-running festival’s growing pains — people who’ve been there since the early days compare past and present in blunt terms. We’ll keep watching how organizers respond, and whether pricing, lineup strategy and site upkeep shift in the face of vocal fan dissatisfaction.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/bonnaroo/comments/1pf03r4/can_i_pls_complain_about_prices_real_quick/