Airlie Beach Hotel only venue not involved in music festival
The state’s most popular music festival went ahead this year at Airlie Beach without the participation of the town’s biggest venue. Find out why.
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The state’s most popular music festival went ahead this year at Airlie Beach without the participation of the town’s biggest venue, the Airlie Beach Hotel.
Airlie Beach Festival of Music founder Gavin Butlin said he has given up on the pub participating in the festival despite attempts to include them in the past.
“They’re the only venue in town that doesn’t support the festival”, Mr Butlin claimed.
“Every other venue in town was on board.”
In response, a spokeswoman for the Airlie Beach Hotel said they were not contacted this year by festival organisers in regards to participating.
The spokeswoman declined to comment further.
Just footsteps from the music festival’s big top, the Airlie Beach Hotel decided to host its own events across the weekend.
The hotel was purchased from by the current owners in 2019 from the O’Neill family, who Mr Butlin said were previously huge supporters of the festival.
But after two years of trying to include the pub, Mr Butlin has now decided to walk away.
“In the early days it did my head in, because we would advertise [the festival as] one town, all venues,” he said.
“It’s the only event that brings the whole town together.”
This year the festival welcomed 3000 people each night to the main tent, with a further 600 people attending the pre-festival ‘Passport to Airlie’ event and another 300 attending the after-party closing event.
Over the past decade the festival has hosted more than 600 bands and welcomed 70,000 attendees, generating somewhere between $15-18 million in total revenue for the Whitsundays.
Tourism Whitsundays CEO Rick Hamilton said there was no doubt the Airlie Beach Festival of Music had successfully established the Whitsundays as the heart of live music on the Great Barrier Reef.
“Coming to the Airlie Beach Festival of Music is one of those iconic, bucket-list experiences,” he said.
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