The online queue opened at 10 a.m. Monday, and people up and down the East Coast found themselves waiting hours for the chance to purchase a ticket.
Tickets appeared on StubHub for twice as much as the retail price.
No, this isn’t the Eras Tour or a Ravens playoff match. It’s the Maryland Renaissance Festival.
The increasingly popular event has sold out in recent years. Last year, tickets vanished by mid-September, the earliest in festival history.
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Jules Smith, president of the festival, said they sold more than 135,000 single-day tickets on Monday. The way the festival is set up, about 20,000 people can attend each day.
“It’s a whirlwind of activity” at Revel Grove, the site of the festival, Smith said. Vendors are arriving to set up for the season, which begins Aug. 23.
The festival, which is entering its 49th year, is set up with permanent structures in a wooded area in Crownsville, outside Annapolis. It’s open on weekends through Oct. 19.
As of Wednesday morning, single-day tickets remained available for purchase. Only two dates, Oct. 4 and 11, are sold out. Multi-day passes sold out within “hours” when they went on sale earlier this summer, Smith said.
Multiple people who spoke to The Banner worried that the festival was becoming too crowded, even with tickets still available.
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Matt Thorpe, who lives in Bowie, said he’s probably gone to the Renn Fest 20 different years. He started going when he was younger, as an employee of the festival and then a vendor. He even met his wife there.
But this year, seeing how many people were waiting in the queue for tickets, he decided it would be too crowded.
“It’s just so packed,” said Thorpe, whose wife is going through chemotherapy.
Thorpe said that he was glad the festival was doing so well, and that it was cool to see it gaining extra popularity from TikTok — but he’s worried about the festival’s future.
“It’s gotten so big that it’s difficult for anybody to navigate through it,” Thorpe said.
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Others online expressed frustration with the queue system for tickets.
Suzette Conrad lives in Northern Virginia but has come to the Maryland Renaissance Festival for eight years or so, she said.
Monday morning, she faced an online queue that said there were 90,000 people ahead of her in line. She thinks there’s a “scarcity mindset” in which people rush to the website to buy tickets as soon as they’re available, convinced they’ll sell out.
“It’s this big confusing, crazy mess where people are scared,” she said. “It’s definitely becoming more crowded.”
The online queue, Smith said, is run by an outside vendor that the festival contracts with. It’s set up to allow 100 people onto the website at a time and to filter out bots.
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Smith said he couldn’t say for certain that every single purchase this week was from a human, not a bot — but said he was “confident” that many automated attempted purchasers were “sent away.”
Despite the rush for tickets and frustratingly long wait times, festival attendees said they remained excited to go. And every person The Banner spoke with said they had been able to get tickets for their first-choice date.
Will Powell, who lives in Baltimore, said he’s been a little annoyed by large crowds at the festival before. And though he was “shocked” by the wait for tickets Monday morning, Powell said he’s glad to be going with friends — excited to dress up, get into the vibe of the day and watch the jousts.
“That’s always a good time,” he said.
Conrad is attending with friends, a self-described group of “nerds,” and said the festival is a great environment, despite the growing crowds.
“As adults, we don’t get as many opportunities to just play pretend like we did when we were kids,” she said. “I love getting the chance to do that.”
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