Thank you for your continued support of Michigan Beer and our festivals. We realize that the quick sell out of the upcoming Winter Beer Festival has caused many to be left without tickets. Although we are unable to help everyone we are particularly concerned in helping our enthusiast members, many of whom have supported us for many years.
Therefore we aim to improve future festivals in the following ways:
* Implement a presale for members allowing the purchase in advance of the general public
* Limit the number of tickets in one transaction and/or per person
* Review our ticket vendors to ensure fair fees and functional web sites especially in rapid sale periods
Also, If you were charged for tickets not received the ticket vendor should have corrected this on Tuesday and you should see a credit on your account.
We also will aggressively pursue ticket scalpers. Today we located two larger quantity scalpers, figured out which tickets they purchased, and voided the tickets. We have a couple of others we have located and will void shortly after giving them notice. Beware of buying tickets from scalpers, it supports illegal activity and may leave you with an invalid ticket for a high price. These tickets we recovered will be offered for sale to existing enthusiast members. We will notify all members via email on how to apply in the next few days, please be respectful and only apply if you did not get a ticket.
On other concerns mentioned we discussed adding more tickets but did not purely due to the fact that we are not willing to cram people in creating longer lines in the process. We care deeply about the experience and will not compromise it. We also talked about moving to a two day festival, brewery members have previously expressed doubt logistically about this possibility. Beer lines may freeze if left overnight and the hours of light make it difficult to do two sessions in one day. Also we are already outside for multiple days with setup and breakdown and sickness is a factor. We will work on solutions to see what is possible with hosting more people although this will not be in effect in 2013.
For other comments, or if you are an enthusiast and did not receive a notice by the weekend you can submit feedback at
www.mibeer.com/feedback, we will reply as promptly as we can.
Thanks
The Michigan Brewer's Guild Board