Why Festival Dates Keep Sending People to the Wrong City
A four-day festival listed by its opening night becomes a one-day event everywhere else. A small, fixable problem that costs real money.
Photo: link preview from clubtoclub.it
C2C runs 29 October to 1 November. Transmissions runs 19 to 21 November. Dekmantel runs 29 July to 2 August. Listed by start date alone, each of those becomes a single-day event in calendars, in search results and in the posts people share with each other, and sooner or later somebody books a Saturday flight to a Thursday opening. The cause is unglamorous. Search engines and calendar apps read event pages through structured data, which has separate fields for a start and an end. If a page fills only the start, every listing downstream inherits the mistake, including the ones the festival has no control over. It is the single highest-value hour of technical work on most event pages, and it is almost always the one nobody schedules. Multi-day festivals that sell per-day tickets compound the problem. A listing that says "C2C Festival, 29 October" tells you nothing about whether the ticket on sale is for the opening night, the Saturday, or all four days. The reader is left to reconstruct the schedule from the official site, which is exactly the work the listing was supposed to do. A good event listing shows a date range, the city, the venue for each day where they differ, which day a ticket covers, and a link to the organiser. Anything less transfers the risk from the publisher to the reader. We are fixing this on our own events: full ranges, day-by-day venues, and an official link on every entry. If you find one of ours showing a single day for a festival that runs longer, tell us and we will correct it. It is a boring commitment to make in public, and that is rather the point.
Dates above come from each festival's own site.
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