THE PROBLEM
For most festivals, understanding the guest experience comes too late. Feedback is collected after the event, through surveys, forms, or reviews, when there is no longer a chance to fix anything until next year’s edition. By that point:
• Issues have already impacted thousands of attendees
• The same problems persist across multiple days
• Teams are left reviewing what went wrong, rather than improving what’s happening
The result is a structural gap. Festivals are evaluated after they happen, not managed while they’re live.
THE SHIFT
Karrusel took a different approach. Instead of waiting until after the festival, they introduced real-time guest feedback during the event itself. This gave them:
• Live visibility into how the experience was landing
• A continuous flow of structured and qualitative insight
• A shared signal across teams on what was working, and what wasn’t
• For the first time, experience wasn’t something to analyse later, but something they could see, act on, and manage in the moment.
On day one of the festival, a clear pattern emerged. Guest feedback showed that toilet queues were becoming a major issue. Within hours, the signal was impossible to ignore.
“What stood out straight away was how clear the signal was. Within the first day, we could already see patterns forming in the feedback.”
More importantly, the issue wasn’t just a minor complaint. There was a clear link between the respondents giving low scores for the waiting times at the toilets and how it impacted the overall experience score they gave.
“It wasn’t just that people were mentioning toilet queues, but how the dats showed that it was also dragging down their overall experience. That’s what made it something we had to act on immediately.”
This changed how the issue was understood internally. This wasn't isolated complaints or operational noise but a high-impact experience driver. Without intervention, this issue would have persisted across all three days of the festival, affecting a large share of attendees.
ACTING IN REAL TIME
Because the insight was captured live, Karrusel didn’t have to wait. The issue was identified on day one, escalated to the appropriate operators immediately, and addressed before day two began.
“Normally, you’d only discover something like that after the event. Theres a million things happening during a festival of this scale. And being able to get these signals delivered straight to you, without you having to analyse the data, is a lifesaver. This time, we were able to deal with it immediately. For us, that’s priceless”
This is where the model shifts. Instead of reporting a problem after the festival, Karrusel resolved it during the festival.
THE RESULT
The impact was immediate. Day 2 and Day 3 of Karrusel have a higher volume of attendees than day 1, and still there were virtually no complaints about toilet queues across those remaining 2 days. Strong operational scores were maintained across the festival, resulting in a consistently high overall experience.
Most importantly:
89% of respondents ended up rating the festival 9/10 for overall experience.
This wasn’t just a measure of satisfaction. It was a protected outcome preserved by fixing a critical issue before it could affect the rest of the event. An experience managed using live insight rather than being measured after the event.
Not all problems are equal, but the right ones can change everything. Karrusel identified:
• Which issue mattered most
• How it impacted the overall experience
• What needed to be fixed immediately
• This is the difference between analyzing feedback to measure an experience and using live insight to manage the experience
IMPACT AND TAKEAWAY
The true evolution in festival management wasn’t found in simple logistical fixes like cleaner facilities, but in a fundamental shift in how the event was operated. By making the guest experience visible in real time, teams were able to align their efforts around actual signals from the crowd. This allowed for a dynamic environment where decisions were driven by live data rather than mere assumption.
“The biggest shift for us was realising we don’t have to wait until after the festival to understand what went wrong. We can actually manage the experience while it’s happening.”
Karrusel proved something fundamental: If you can identify and resolve experience-breaking issues in real time, you can protect the outcome of the entire event.
This changes the role of feedback at festivals completely.
Don’t think of it as a reporting tool or a post-event exercise. When you can do it in real-time whilst the experience is still happening it becomes something else entirely.
It becomes an operational system for managing experience while it’s happening.
Because why wait until next year to fix last year’s problems, when you can turn tonight’s feedback into tomorrow’s improvements?
