Why Essex ‘ProseccoFest’ was a HUGE Rip Off

Having made my peace with the fact that I do not drink alcohol, and my friends do, I was under no illusions that going to a prosecco festival for my friends 30th birthday would grant me the same experience as everyone in the group who was drinking would have. That being said I am absolutely shocked that the event itself was so bad. I’ve always heard great things about Best Parties Ever and I’ve always loved Barleylands so I am obviously surprised either company would allow themselves to be associated with something that is quite clearly a scam.

The tickets for the event on the 18th of November set us back £19.70 each. You can get them online through Eventbrite, and as someone quite rightly pointed out – they do not profess to include anything in the ticket price. Fair enough. No one from our party was expecting anything free but the basics were not even supplied and the drinks in there were so grossly overpriced I’m not at all left wondering why no one was even remotely tipsy by the end.

When we arrived, we were quite abruptly told that we would need to wait until 11am because we were ten minutes early. We actually ended up getting let in about 11.10am, so they can’t be that particular about timings. The venue itself was beautiful if not a bit empty. The tokens were 3 for £10 or 20 for £60 and that doesn’t sound too bad until you find out that ONE glass of prosecco is 2 tokens and a bottle is 10 to 14 tokens. If you can’t do that math that means a glass works out at £6.66 and a bottle works out to £33.30 on the lower scale.

For a non-drinker you would think that the day would be less expensive, but unfortunately a cup of flat coke from a bottle will set you back a token, and so will a water.

Staff were incredibly unhelpful on the day. We were turned away from a number of bars after asking for advertised drinks with staff either telling us to go to another bar or point blank that they did not know why they were advertised as they were not available. To be honest it’s lucky we spent so much of the day chasing things we couldn’t actually buy because there was sod all else to do.

One of the main problems only occurred to use after about an hour after we had all started to getting serious leg cramp. There was NO WHERE to sit down. Yes, customers are expected to stand for the full five hour session. We resorted to sitting on the floor. So for £20 we got a band for ten mins, some cheesy disco music and to sit on a cold hard floor in the middle of a farm. Great success.

After the event, I put across my views of the day (as did many others) on the Facebook page. Unfortunately, ProseccoFest have been snidely deleting anything negative from their page. This is an art form mastered by scammers – the reason they are doing this is because there is an event next week and they just want to scam the next lot of unsuspecting idiots out of £100s.

To make this article fair, I looked for some contact details to ask if a manager wanted to explain some of the reasons for the above complaints. There were none. You can only find their email address if you go right into their terms and conditions, and in true scammer style they have not answered me. Many people have been saying they are going to ask for a refund, but it is obvious they are just going to take everyones money and run.

Thankfully, a few people I know and who are active on the page have said they are not going now next week because of all of the negative reviews. Hopefully this will be the last time Best Parties Ever and Barleylands let themselves get associated with something that is quite clearly dodgy.

If you do not believe just my opinion, here are some of the Facebook comments I screenshotted before they get a chance to delete them. I’ve edited out names as I have not had time to contact everyone and ask if I am able to use their first name and last name in a post.