“I first heard about Fyre Fest when my best friend got a ticket for Christmas from her sister. Her sister work[ed] for Casamigos, which supplied all of the tequila for the festival. They weren’t necessarily in partnership, but [my friend’s] sister had been in communication with Fyre people and a bunch of her coworkers were going. So she booked one of the houses and got a really good deal. I asked for a ticket as a birthday gift because [my friend] was like, ‘You should come with us.’

“I had never been to a music festival. This would be my first one. I didn’t buy my flights until around March, just one month before the festival. I was completely unaware of all the issues, and that people were already talking about how it wouldn’t happen. My friend knew but kept it from me. Not in mean way, but she figured, ‘This is her first festival, I don’t want to freak her out.’ Because who realistically thinks a festival won’t happen?

“As the weekend got closer, I thought a few things were weird, but nothing made me reconsider. We had emailed [Fyre] a couple of times but it was really hard to get in touch with them. And their Instagram was posting the same staged photos over and over. There was nothing real about them, but you didn’t think twice about it — it’s marketing.

“My first real ‘Oh shit’ moment happened when my group met up in Miami to fly to the Bahamas together. The eight of us were waiting for our flight to the Great Exumas, and all of them were getting canceled or delayed. There were four flights departing an hour apart from each other; they all got delayed an hour, another hour, another hour. I think we were delayed three or four times. We asked the agents what was going on and they were like, ‘Oh, the airport is super small, they can’t handle all these people.’ Then one guy who knew someone in my group told us, ‘Blink-182 just bailed.’ We thought it was super weird, but we were also trying to be open minded. We thought, ‘We’re going to the Bahamas, how bad could it be?’

“We were just excited to be on a beautiful beach by the water listening to music; there’s really nothing that sounded better than that. And we wanted to swim with the pigs. A headliner canceling was strange, but this was still a vacation for me.

“Then we heard Major Lazer might bail. And then someone at the airport saw a photo of one of the tents on Twitter. The guy who showed it to us is one of the influencers in the Hulu documentary, and he was like, ‘I’m staying, I’m not getting on this flight.’ We thought he was acting dramatic so we responded with something like, ‘Yeah, we’re just trying to have an open mind.’ We definitely had our suspicions that something was not right, but we also wouldn’t be staying in the tents, so it didn’t seem worth getting upset about.

“We finally got on our flight; everyone was just ready to be there at that point. Because the plane was super small everybody had to check their bags, but the Great Exumas airport doesn’t have a carousel, so you land and you’re like, ‘Where are my bags?’ We were told they’d be waiting for us at the campsite, which seemed weird — how would they know where to find us, and vice versa?

“There was supposed to be transportation at the airport to take us to the festival site, but there wasn’t, so we got in a cab. As we got closer, we saw dozens of Bahamians in orange vests directing traffic, and all these gates, all these fences. We were definitely not on the beach; we were basically in a ravine. And then we saw all the tents and beds just everywhere, and this fake concierge desk. A little further out, we saw hundreds of people standing in line… at that point, we were just like, ‘Oh, fuck.’

“We decided to ‘check in’ to our villa. We maneuvered around the super long line and let the two people who work for Casamigos take the reins since they booked everything. When they came back they told us, ‘So they don’t have a house for us. They said they have no record of us coming and they don’t have a place for us to stay.’ My friend’s sister had some coworkers who were already there in a house, which was 30 minutes away. Now we’re thinking, “Why is it 30 minutes away, that doesn’t make any sense. Wouldn’t you have to get shuttled back and forth? That seems far for… you know, it’s an island.’

“While we were waiting for answers, we noticed a couple of people with their luggage, so we tried to figure out where they came from. That’s when we saw these 18 wheeler trucks at the top of a hill. Luckily, when we got our bags it was still light out — but that wasn’t the case for everyone. There were tons of bags and just two people reading out names and using their phones as flashlights to do it. At this point, it was probably nine or 10 at night.

“Then Billy MacFarland gets on top of this little white table in the middle of the street and he’s just like, ‘Everybody, shut up. If you don’t have a tent or if you’re waiting for a tent, go get one.’ He literally told people to ‘go get one’ — and people just started running. Then he said, ‘We have no villas.’ The eight of us collectively decided we were not staying in a tent, and that we weren’t splitting up. We ended up talking to someone [from Fyre] who told us about a nearby hotel. They agreed to bring us there, get us checked in, and ‘take care of the accommodations.’

“This was the first sign that maybe things would be okay. We got to the hotel along with 10 other people, there were probably 20 people total — and we stood in the lobby. It was almost midnight. Someone on the hotel staff told us we weren’t allowed to be there and asked us to step outside. As it turned out, they couldn’t accommodate us because they were completely sold out for the Regatta, the boat festival, which was the same weekend.

Photo provided by Christina

“The Fyre employee we’d been talking to said, ‘I’m going back to the campsite, and I need to find out where your house is. I’ll take you guys to this bar where you can get some food.’ We were starving at this point. The only food we’d seen was some bread and cheese they gave us before we went to the hotel. They’d advertised as if [Fyre] would be this amazing culinary experience but all we got was two slices of bread, one piece of cheese, lettuce, and tomato.

“The employee who’d been helping us came back an hour later and basically said, ‘Nope. I have nothing for you. We don’t have any houses; I don’t know what to tell you.’ So were like, “Okay, where are we going to go?” The airport is super tiny; you can’t really hang out there. At this point, they had stopped all the flights coming in later that night and the next morning, and they were actually holding people in one of the planes that had landed [on the island]. People sat in it for hours before they were sent back.

“At probably two, three o’clock in the morning, one of the local workers found us. She gave us keys to a vacation rental home. Apparently a lot of the locals working on the festival were also managers for these vacation homes, so I’m assuming they’re the only reason we found a place to sleep. If you’ve ever seen The Real World, where they see their new place and they’re screaming and kissing the ground and celebrating, that was us. We were so excited to see a bed and a roof and to not be sleeping in the grass.

“The next day, we woke up to emails that the festival was officially canceled ‘due to lack of infrastructure and weather conditions.’ There was still a lot of confusion and rumors. We were told by other attendees that Billy was arrested in the Bahamas. We were told by Fyre staff that some of the Bahamians working on the festival were acting like bounty hunters, trying to harm anybody wearing a Fyre wristband because they hadn’t been paid. Fyre staff told us to take off our wristbands so we wouldn’t be targeted. I’m not sure what their agenda was in telling us that, and I didn’t hear it anywhere else.

“We flew back to Miami later that day. Most of the people who’d stayed in tents left earlier. The airport was full of exhausted, hungover people. Everyone was shocked. Nobody really understood the magnitude of what was going on and we were all in disbelief. And then we saw the tweets — not only about Fyre being a scam but, ‘Oh, we love seeing rich kids flailing,’ or whatever. Nobody was happy. At that point the mood was, ‘Definitely time to go home. Get me away from here.’

“Before we could leave the island, we had to fill out this questionnaire to tell Fyre how much money was on our RFID bands so that we could get a refund. It asked, ‘Would you forgo a refund for free Fyre Festival 2018 tickets?’ We were like, ‘What the fuck?’

Photo provided by Christina

“The value of my ticket was $500, which I lost, but I did get the money on my RFID wristband refunded. That was another $500, and I got it back between four and six months later. I know the assumption is that everybody spent thousands and thousands of dollars — and a lot of people did, for sure. I met one person who’d spent $2,000. But had things gone the way they were supposed to, I think what I paid would’ve been reasonable for an all-inclusive music festival with chartered planes, a private villa, gourmet food, and everything else. In reality, we couldn’t buy anything on the island with the RFID bands. The [Netflix] documentary suggested Fyre sent that email [suggesting attendees load their RFID bands with $300-$500 per day] to get more money because they were running out; I was surprised I got that money back.

“At first we thought, ‘Are we huge idiots for believing this?’ But watching the documentaries made me feel less stupid because so many people did believe it. I did take the Netflix documentary with a grain of salt because Jerry Media co-produced it — they created the marketing campaign for Fyre — and they pretty much suggested they had no idea what was going on the whole time, which seems untrue. I watched the Hulu documentary with my friend from the festival and we were hysterically laughing — it was crazy to learn more and realize… we were there. All these people were paid to put this festival together, and now they’re being paid to share their insight on the whole disaster, and we were there.”