AHA want a cut of the Floriade action

oh no you had to pay!

what else do you expect for free ?

They had a $10 fee for ’98-’99 I think. I turned up and then went away when told I had to pay. Told them where to shove it. Frankly the flowers are not that great year-after-year, maybe once every three years is it a worthwhile thing to see. They scrapped the fee when the number of attendee dropped to less than a half over the previous years approx 162k pax. The Village people were struggling to pay the rent.

Just did a bit of research via Google and they reckon that by 2012 there will be 900,000 visitors to Floriade paying $20 per head entrance fee.

There’s an easy way for floriade to make money, and everyone would be happy!
Remember The Great Bulb Grab? Well, they could make it an annual event, and sell tickets to the spectators. I mean, the running of the bulls at Pamplona is free, and look at the money that generates. This could be similar. They could set up bleachers to the paying customers, and then: Release The Bulb-Grabbers!
I’d pay money to watch it, for sure.

Yep, I’m happy for the government to spend money on entertaining people who aren’t me (I couldn’t care about either Floriade or fireworks). Means that those people leave me alone more…

Maybe I’m just a grumpy recluse.

Floriade has a huge attendance and hotels are booked out during the time it is on.
It isn’t all pensioners, there are vast crowds of families + couples etc.
It is already fenced + had volunteers counting the numbers etc.
Governments should put on the odd free event for their citizens. I’d rather have floriade than endless fireworks.

You probably could get volunteers to collect. Having actually attended Floriade, I happen to know that it is already staffed by volunteers every year who hand out maps, answer questions, etc.

I’ve lived in Canberra 8 years and have attended Floriade maybe 6 of those. Everyone here seems to have forgotten that there actually was a fee to attend Floriade at one point. In my opinion it was grossly inflated – $5 concession, $10 everyone else. I think there were family tickets as well.

The fee system only lasted for about 2 or 3 years. I’m not sure why it was scrapped, but it very well might have been because people stopped going because it seemed way too high a price to pay for a bunch of flowers.

I know that I didn’t attend when there was a fee except for the one year I was working for Ticketek at Floriade and was able to attend for free.

They already have vast numbers of staff standing around tending to the old dears, they also have significant revenues from all the businesses that set up shop inside the precinct over the course of the festival.

You’d need to pay someone to collect it – which I’m guessing would take a fair wedge of it.

Either that or get volunteers…any takers?

what about setting gold coin donations to try and make Flowerfest reasonably self funding.

would something like that be plausible?

Sorry bonfire. That wasn’t fair. My apologies. Need coffee.

Also – on further analysis, I rescind (sp?) my earlier comment about a fee being a good idea.

People are conditioned into thinking that Floriade should be free – so the bleating will be deafening should a fee be levied. Not attractive for a local govt with enough bleating being levied at it already.

Another problem with a fee is that someone has to collect it, and you have to fence off the area for a couple of months. Not to mention the fact you’ll need security to make sure people don’t climb the fences. All of these are expensive.

Suddenly, the cost of Floriade skyrockets. The levied fee hits $5+ to cover the cost of the additional infrastructure. People say “I’m not paying 5 bucks to see some flowers” and attendance plummets. The gubmint abandons the whole shebang as a bad thing and Floriade is no more. The tourism sector takes it in the neck for x-amount-of-dollars.

Probably better we don’t, really.