How to plan a festival across several small venues

You've found a handful of small venues, the owners are interested, and the programme feels possible. A church for the seated performances. A bar for the late sets. A gallery for something people can drop into between shows. Each place brings its own audience and character, without asking you to build an entire festival site.

Then you put the times together. Two popular acts overlap, the smallest room has the biggest draw, and a ticket buyer asks whether their weekend pass guarantees entry everywhere. That's when planning a festival across several venues becomes a different job from booking a collection of gigs.

Start by deciding what one pass promises. Choose venues and a timetable that can deliver that promise, agree who controls each room, and price the whole operation before you announce it. The festival works when people can move through a worthwhile programme without discovering that the next thing they wanted to see is already full.

We'll work through those decisions using a fictional town festival. Its room sizes, schedules and financial assumptions are examples, not industry benchmarks. The linked safety guidance is from Great Britain and the licensing example covers England and Wales; check the rules and professional advice that apply where you're operating.

Decide what makes these shows one festival

The first thing you want to settle is why someone should buy the festival pass rather than choose a single show. A connected programme can introduce people to artists they wouldn't book separately. A walkable cluster of rooms can make the town itself part of the experience. But neither happens just because the same logo appears outside several doors.

Write down the day you want a buyer to have. Perhaps they start with an afternoon conversation, catch an unfamiliar performer, get dinner nearby and finish with a seated concert. That description helps you choose the programme and exposes what has to work between performances. If the dinner break is actually a hurried walk across town, you've promised a different experience.

Be clear about the audience, too. Someone visiting for a weekend needs accommodation and arrival information earlier than a local buyer. A seated listening audience may accept a deliberate programme with few overlaps. A discovery festival can offer more choice, provided missing one crowded show doesn't leave someone with nothing appealing to do.

I'd start a first edition with fewer rooms than the ambitious version in your head. Every extra venue needs a working relationship, a door operation and a production plan. Add it because it improves what buyers can actually attend, rather than because the owner has offered a cheap hire.

Our music festival planning guide covers the broader budget and booking decisions. Here, the question is how those decisions change when the audience, equipment and responsibility are spread around town.

Make a venue shortlist you can operate

Visit every proposed room with the people who will run it. A venue's usual capacity and technical specification are starting information. You need to know what remains possible with your actual stage, seating, access arrangements and programme.

In our fictional festival, the shortlist contains a hall, a club and a gallery. The hall suits the main seated concerts. The club has established sound equipment but opens later. The gallery suits talks, although its entrance also serves another tenant. These differences should shape the programme before artist offers go out.

Ask when you can enter, when deliveries can arrive and when every item must leave. A low hire price becomes less attractive if the building cannot accept equipment until just before doors. Equally, a venue offering a sound system saves little if it lacks the microphones or engineer your performances require.

Look beyond the room. Where can a queue form without blocking neighbours, traffic or another business? Where do people go after a show? What happens when it rains? A covered doorway that looks helpful during a quiet visit might be the only route someone else needs to use.

HSE's crowd risk assessment guidance asks organisers to consider arrival, movement, exit and dispersal, and to establish a safe capacity for the chosen venue. Apply that thinking to the spaces between your rooms as well as the performances inside them.

Turn the visit into a short list of unresolved decisions, with a person responsible for each. The gallery entrance may need a different queue arrangement. The hall may need an earlier equipment delivery. Until those issues have workable answers, treat the venue as provisional, however good it looks in the announcement.

Agree the relationship with each venue in writing

A shared enthusiasm for the festival is useful. It doesn't tell you who pays when the sound engineer works late, or whether the venue can sell its own tickets into your allocation. Get the commercial and operating arrangement written down before the date becomes a public commitment.

Our event venue contract guide explains the main terms. For a festival across several venues, pay particular attention to the boundaries between the venue's normal business and your event. A bar might remain open to ordinary customers while a performance room is ticketed. A gallery might have free exhibitions alongside your paid talks.

Specify the exact spaces and times covered, including setup and removal. Agree the equipment and staff included in the hire, who supervises them, and who can approve extra spending. Record how damage, cleaning and overtime will be assessed, rather than discovering the basis when the final invoice arrives.

Settle ticket control explicitly. Who creates inventory, who can issue complimentary tickets, and who can change a room allocation? If the venue keeps an allocation for members, it comes out of the agreed audience inventory. It cannot become an additional batch after you've sold the available places.

Bar income also needs an actual agreement. If the venue keeps it, don't count it as festival revenue because your audience will buy drinks. If you receive a share, agree what sales qualify, what deductions apply and how you will verify settlement. A forecast based on an undefined share is difficult to trust.

Discuss cancellation, a room becoming unavailable, and a performance overrunning. You need to understand both what the venue owes and what you owe buyers. Have the relevant contracts and customer terms reviewed for your jurisdiction. A clause between businesses doesn't automatically settle the promises you've made to ticket holders.

Choose the admission promise before setting pass numbers

Here's the decision that affects almost everything else. Are you selling guaranteed admission to specified performances, or access to a programme where some rooms are first come, first served? Both can work. Buyers need to understand which they're purchasing before they pay.

A guaranteed seat is easy to explain, but it limits flexibility and requires you to allocate that seat. An open festival pass encourages discovery, but it puts more responsibility on the programme and door operation. You need attractive alternatives when a room fills, along with honest information about the likelihood of that happening.

A mixed approach often makes sense. You might guarantee the main evening concert and offer optional daytime sessions with published capacity rules. Another event might sell a general pass and separately book the smallest performances. Choose the arrangement that suits the audience, and confirm your ticketing setup can deliver it before describing it publicly.

Consider our fictional rooms. The hall has an approved audience allocation of 240 after staff, performers and other required occupants have been accounted for. The club's audience allocation is 160 and the gallery's is 80 on the same basis. Those figures are assumed for this example, not a method for calculating safe capacity.

Adding them gives 480 possible audience places at a moment when all rooms are operating. It doesn't prove you can sell 480 passes. If every buyer expects to attend the hall concert together, you have 240 places for that promise, before subtracting any audience places reserved for guests or other allocations.

This is where people can get carried away by the overall programme. Extra capacity elsewhere cannot fulfil a promise about one particular show. Ask what each ticket holder is entitled to attend, at what time, and whether the actual room can accommodate everyone entitled to it.

Our guide to multi-day event ticket types covers overlapping day and weekend passes. The same care applies across venues. A day pass and a weekend pass can both create demand for the same room, so their sales limits can't be planned independently.

Test the busiest hour rather than the average day

Once you have a proposed admission model, walk through the likely audience choices. Start with the performance everyone is discussing. Where will those people be beforehand, how will they get there, and what will they do if the room is full?

For the fictional festival, suppose 220 people hold passes with guaranteed hall admission. The gallery talk attracts interest from 120 of them, but has only 80 audience places. If the talk is optional and capacity limited, publish that clearly. Then make sure the 40 people who may miss it have a worthwhile alternative at the same time.

Don't solve that by assuming they will all enjoy a different act. Look at why they bought. If your campaign prominently sells the gallery speaker, a small sentence about capacity may leave a substantial mismatch between the ticket's appeal and the experience available. Move the talk, repeat it where practical, require a reservation, or stop using it as the main reason to buy the whole pass.

Speak with the artists and venues before changing the programme. Repeating a performance can involve another fee, a different technical arrangement or rights restrictions. It also changes the working day for staff. An attractive scheduling fix needs to be deliverable, not merely drawable in a calendar.

HSE's guidance on crowd controls covers entry, movement and leaving, including arrangements when arrivals could exceed a venue's safe capacity. For your festival, agree the queue limit and the point at which staff stop directing people towards a full room.

Keep the distinction between admissions and occupancy clear. Scanning a valid pass tells you something about entitlement. It doesn't automatically tell you how many people remain inside after others have left. Your chosen room-counting method must match the admission and re-entry arrangements, with someone accountable for keeping it accurate.

Build the programme around real journeys

A map makes nearby venues look convenient. The test is whether a person leaving one performance can reach the next entrance, use the facilities they need and get admitted before it starts. Walk those journeys at the times and in the conditions your audience will face.

Measure entrance to entrance. Include the time it takes to leave a seated row, collect a coat, cross a road and find the correct queue. Check the accessible route separately. A shorter route with stairs isn't an adequate basis for the published transfer time if some buyers must take another route.

Let's say the hall concert ends at 7:00pm and the club's next set begins at 7:15pm. Your test journey takes twelve minutes before leaving the hall or joining the club queue is considered. That timetable offers almost no room for ordinary delays. Either move the club start or describe the sets as a choice, rather than suggesting people can comfortably attend both.

Build the timetable with artist and production requirements visible. The audience might be able to walk between two rooms while a shared engineer cannot finish one changeover and prepare the next. Equipment doesn't arrive simply because the performer does. Give transport, loading and setup their own time.

Staggering start times can reduce sudden movements, but consider the whole pattern. If every smaller room finishes just before the hall opens, you've still created one busy arrival. Ask what happens outside the hall and where people can wait without creating a new problem.

Keep some genuinely useful time between the major performances. Food breaks and opportunities to rest can make a pass more usable. They also give you a chance to recover from modest delays. Don't advertise a continuous programme and then rely on buyers skipping the performances they came to see to make it manageable.

Also decide how you'll explain the programme while tickets are on sale. Show buyers an example of a visit they can actually complete, with the relevant admission rules visible. If an artist plays twice, make that clear so people understand they have another opportunity. If two performances overlap, let them compare the choices before booking. Ask the box office to record questions that recur. Several people asking whether a pass includes the hall may mean your description needs changing, rather than your team needing a faster standard reply. When you change a session time or booking rule, update the ticket page and timetable together. Tell existing buyers if the change affects their plans.

Check access across the whole festival

Someone deciding whether to book needs enough information to judge the experience they can actually have. A general statement that the festival welcomes everyone doesn't explain a steep route, a seated viewing arrangement or a toilet in another building.

Attitude is Everything's industry guidance treats accessibility as something to consider from the start, across information, policy and the event itself. That matters especially when your festival combines buildings with different arrangements. One venue's provisions don't describe the others.

Publish specific access information for each room and the connections between them. Explain the entrance, internal routes, seating, toilets and available assistance. Say what you have verified and what remains uncertain. Give buyers a contact who can answer questions about the combined programme, rather than sending them to negotiate separately with every venue.

Discuss access needs with the people responsible for delivery. A venue may have an accessible entrance that normally remains locked, or a lift that requires a staff member. If those arrangements are part of your plan, establish who will operate them throughout the festival and how an attendee requests help.

Review any reservation or queue system with access in mind. Someone who cannot stand for a long period shouldn't have to guess whether joining the queue is their only way to attend. Work out a suitable arrangement in advance, communicate it clearly, and make sure door teams understand it.

The same attention belongs in artist and staff planning. Confirm backstage routes, facilities and working arrangements rather than assuming audience access covers everyone. If a venue cannot provide something your programme requires, resolve that before the booking becomes an expensive obligation.

Keep the budget attached to the venue plan

Several small rooms can save you from paying for a large temporary site. They can also duplicate costs you expected to share. Separate venue budgets make those costs visible, while a festival budget shows whether the complete event can afford them.

For each room, list hire, production, staffing, equipment movement and the cost of the programme. Then add central costs such as marketing, ticket administration, management and the shared box office. Record each expense once. A shared engineer belongs in the budget at their full agreed cost, even if you split that cost between venues for comparison.

Look at what changes when you remove a venue. You may save its hire and performances but still owe the central team and the marketing bill. Or removing it may make the rest of the programme much simpler. That difference is more useful than dividing all festival costs equally and declaring every room equally expensive.

The financial question is whether another venue adds enough worthwhile attendance and income to justify the extra commitment. If it merely supplies overflow for a programme that is already poorly allocated, fixing the timetable may be cheaper. If it brings an audience you can reasonably sell to, test that expectation before booking more space.

Use a cautious sales case and a cash schedule. Venue deposits and artist balances can fall due before ticket receipts are available. Keep money needed for refunds and the remaining delivery costs visible when deciding what you can spend. A full box office forecast doesn't mean the money has cleared into your bank.

Agree when each commitment becomes harder to change. That might be the venue's cancellation deadline, an equipment confirmation or the next artist payment. Review sales and cash before those points, while reducing the programme is still an option you can realistically consider.

Compare a smaller festival with the proposed version

Try a simple decision before you sign the final room. Imagine the gallery costs $2,400 to operate, including its agreed programme and staffing. These are invented US dollar inputs for this example. Removing it saves that amount only if none of those commitments remains payable and no replacement activity is needed.

Now suppose you expect the gallery programme to attract extra buyers whose tickets leave $40 each after the additional costs associated with serving them. You need 60 additional buyers to cover that $2,400. That calculation doesn't establish that 60 people will buy, and it doesn't value the gallery's benefit to existing pass holders. It tells you what the direct sales argument would need to support.

Ask the uncomfortable follow-up. Are those people buying because the gallery is included, or would most have bought the pass anyway? If the programme mainly improves the experience for existing buyers, describe the expense that way. You may still decide it's worthwhile. Just don't justify it with sales you've already counted elsewhere.

Keep the smaller version available until the relevant decision date. It's much easier to choose between two costed programmes than to cut an announced festival in a hurry. Once buyers have paid for the larger offer, reducing it brings customer promises and potential refund consequences into the decision.

Give every door the same answers

Your audience sees one festival. They shouldn't receive a different explanation of their ticket every time they change buildings. Prepare a short operating brief that every venue lead can use, then rehearse the awkward situations together.

It needs to explain which passes are valid that day, which performances require a separate booking, how re-entry works, and what happens when a room fills. Include guest and artist arrangements too. A performer should not have to persuade an unfamiliar volunteer that their name on the programme entitles them to enter.

A central ticket exchange can simplify matters if buyers collect a physical pass before visiting rooms. It also creates another place people must find and another queue to manage. Publish its opening hours and last collection arrangements. Decide what happens when someone arrives at the club after the central box office has closed.

Loopyah's ticketing and check-in tools let you give door staff check-in access without sharing your login, and scan QR tickets from their phones. That can help you manage the ticket checks. You still need to test your particular shared-pass, reservation and re-entry arrangement before selling it, including what staff should do when a room reaches its limit.

Run the test with the actual devices, permissions and connectivity you expect to use. Try a valid ticket, a wrong-day ticket, a repeated presentation and a buyer whose phone cannot display the code. Include the busiest expected arrival period. A successful quiet test doesn't establish that your staffing arrangement can handle that rush.

Keep a clear route for questions staff cannot resolve. A door worker needs to know who can correct a booking problem and who can make a capacity decision. Those may be different people. Nobody should feel pressured to admit another guest because an argument is delaying the queue.

Run one festival with local venue authority

A central manager cannot personally deal with every delayed soundcheck, room count and missing wristband. Appoint a capable lead at each venue with defined authority, while keeping one person responsible for the overall programme and decisions that affect several locations.

Venue leads should know what they can decide without waiting. Stopping admissions when the agreed limit is reached cannot depend on reaching the festival director. Changing a performance time that sends people elsewhere needs coordination. Write those differences down and brief the people affected.

Check the licensing position for every building and activity with the venue and relevant authority. Don't assume the hall's arrangements cover the bar, or that a normal venue licence covers your proposed hours and programme. In England and Wales, GOV.UK's Temporary Events Notice guidance explains that this route applies to certain temporary licensable activities. Whether it's suitable depends on the event and existing permissions; other jurisdictions have their own requirements.

Agree who handles incident information and who speaks to ticket holders. If the gallery closes unexpectedly, staff at the other venues need the same current explanation. Otherwise, you can keep sending people towards a building that is no longer admitting anyone.

HSE's emergency planning guidance recommends clear emergency roles, proportionate plans and testing communication systems. Work through an incident with each venue lead, including how a local evacuation affects people walking towards that room. Use the relevant emergency services and competent advisers when developing the arrangements.

Test communications in the actual buildings and streets. If a radio or phone cannot reliably reach a venue, resolve the gap beforehand. Keep contact details and essential instructions available to the people who need them when their usual device or connection fails.

Prepare for losing one room

A multi-venue festival needs a plan for a local problem that leaves the rest of the event operating. The club might lose power while the hall is ready to open. The gallery might become unavailable before the weekend. These situations require different responses from cancelling the entire festival, but they still affect what people bought.

Start with the performance or admission you can no longer deliver. Which buyers are affected, what alternatives are genuinely available, and what changes do the contracts and applicable customer rules allow? Don't assume a nearby room is a replacement merely because its owner will lend you the keys. Check its permissions, safe audience allocation, production and access before offering it.

In our fictional festival, moving an 80-place gallery talk into the 160-place club could work only if the club is available and suitable at that time. It might displace another performance or require an earlier engineer call. Those changes have costs and affect other buyers. Work through them together rather than treating the larger number as the complete answer.

Agree who can approve an operational change and who reviews its customer consequences. Prepare clear wording that names the affected venue, performance and action buyers should take. A message saying the festival is continuing doesn't help someone already walking towards the cancelled talk. They need to know whether to stop, wait, request help or choose another performance.

If a closure happens during the event, tell nearby door teams before directing an audience elsewhere. Otherwise, the replacement room can receive a crowd it isn't prepared to manage. Keep the announcement and staff instructions consistent as the situation develops, including an honest explanation when a decision is still being made.

After resolving the immediate problem, record what you promised affected buyers and who will complete it. A refund enquiry or agreed follow-up shouldn't disappear when the venues close. Give your customer team enough detail to distinguish a buyer who missed an optional full room from someone whose separately guaranteed performance was cancelled. Their circumstances differ, and a generic reply will make that clear for the wrong reason.

Finish the plan by following one ticket holder

Before launch, ask someone outside the planning team to follow the proposed visit using only what buyers will receive. Can they understand the pass, choose a realistic programme, find the first entrance and tell which performances need an additional reservation?

Repeat the exercise when the schedule changes. A later start may suit an artist but break a connection to the next venue. A room replacement can change access, capacity and the value of a pass. Update the affected information together, then tell the people who bought under the earlier arrangement what has changed.

After the festival, compare what happened with the plan. Ask venue leads where queues formed, which transfers caused problems, and how often staff had to explain an admission rule. Read buyer feedback alongside the attendance record. A room being busy doesn't establish that people enjoyed waiting outside it.

Use that evidence when deciding whether to add another venue next year. If buyers could attend the programme they expected, the rooms operated properly and the event paid its bills, you have something worth growing. If the same popular performance disappointed people all weekend, solve that problem before selling more passes.