South by South East is an event that aligned itself with the FIFA event. The event is relatively expensive. It is four days long, which spans from Wednesday all the way to Saturday. The festival primarily celebrates Asian and Latin American culture.
The weather was not good for the event. It was very hot and extremely windy. Wednesday overnight was the worst day as a lot of the tents got completely destroyed overnight by the wind. On Thursday, a lot of tents had issues staying up due to the wind. I think the organizers could have notified vendors about the weather.
The festival itself was not well organized. A lot of the booth spots were not sold and there are no vendor zoning between food and retail vendors. A lot of the vendors got moved around the venue at the last minute.
The event itself did actually attract a lot of people because of the FIFA World Cup. The problem is that these people are not interested in shopping or entertainment, but they are rather just there to watch the soccer games. We noticed that there would be a large influx of people coming in when a match starts, and everybody would leave immediately after a game ends.
The vendor quality is also noticeably lower, where the venue is being filled mostly with food vendors. Food vendors actually did alright because soccer fans actually need food when they watch the games, but most of them would admit that the event isn’t great in comparison to the other ones.
The lesson that we learnt is that it is better to avoid sports events in the future. We would also start prioritizing festivals that are held by bigger organizers in the future.