Burning Man 2019 Tickets: How, When, How Much

Every September, a bunch of photos from Burning Maine appear on the Internet. They fill social networks: first of all, Instagram, then Facebook, and there it comes to LiveJournal and Vkontakte. And a lot of people firmly decide for themselves: "Well, next year I will definitely go there!" Any trip to the BM begins with the purchase of tickets - bought tickets, and you already count halfway there.

Now is the time to talk about how tickets will be sold this year, as their sales are just around the corner, and participation in them is better to plan ahead.

For those who don’t know, Burning Man is an annual desert festival held in the US state of Nevada. Participants build a city in the middle of an empty space for 70,000 people for a week, erect many beautiful installations and interactivity in it, ride on decorated cars and come off in every possible way. At the end of the week, a climax sets in: a huge wooden Maine and a beautiful Temple are burned.

This year the theme of the festival is "Metamorphosis", which is open to wide interpretation.

So, tickets for 2019. Tickets have been selling out very quickly for several years now and it’s not easy to buy them. But absolutely possible. All information about them is available on the tickets.burningman.org website, but it’s rather confusing there, so let me tell you what’s what.

Step 0: Create a Burner Account

This can be done now. Just go to this short form and fill it out. It takes 40 seconds. I'll wait. Then they will send you a temporary password by mail to continue registration.

Then everything is a little more complicated. The fact is that the organizers decided to distribute the sale into several separate stages. Each stage has a short registration period, and then there is a sale itself, in which only those who managed to register can participate. Therefore, registration is extremely important.

There are several stages. But if you read this post, then the Main Sale is the most important for you. I advise you to immediately set yourself reminders somewhere, so as not to miss these dates. (There is also a separate sale of tickets at exorbitant prices for moneybags, about it a little later).

Step 1: Register

Registration for the Main Sale opens at noon on April 3 and ends at noon on April 5 (this is California time, where noon corresponds to 11 pm Moscow time). The registration period is only two days, but at any time during this time you can go to tickets.burningman.org using the account created earlier and register for the sale.

Step 2: Sale

It will be held on April 10, also at noon in California. Here the accuracy of the watch and the speed of the mouse are extremely important. In total, about 23,000 tickets will be sold, but there will be more applicants. A lot. Therefore, you must act in advance. Go to tickets.burningman.org about half an hour before the sale, and find a link to it. Then you will need to reload the page exactly during (second per second), and you will see a link to purchase. People who are even late for 20-30 (and sometimes 5-10) seconds are no longer in time to buy tickets.

An important nuance: when placing an order, it is better to choose the delivery of tickets by mail than the option to "pick up at the box office". At the entrance to the festival at the box office there will be a separate queue in which you spend from half an hour to two hours of extra time.

Issue price

Each ticket will cost $ 425 + markup. In total, it will be possible to buy two tickets per person, and one pass for cars (it costs $ 100 + wrap).

There are a lot of wraps this year, and after them buying one ticket will cost you around $ 500. And if you buy at the maximum two tickets and a pass for the car, then more than $ 1,100 will come out!

Cheaply

There is also a special sale for the poor, where tickets are sold at half price, $ 210. This is a slightly different process where you need to submit a special application from February 13 to April 17. But they only have 4,500 tickets allocated for this, and if they run out sooner, then they won’t be there anymore, so the sooner the better, the better (information here).

For the rich

If you have everything in order with the money and you want to save yourself a bit of nerves due to the extra thousand dollars, then this is a sale for you: 4,000 tickets at $ 1,400 each (and with the markups already $ 1,600!) If, seeing this amount, you thought: "It's okay!" - then the registration will be from March 13 to March 15, and the sale will begin on March 20.

But what if it doesn’t work out?

Every year, many who fail to buy tickets at the main sale. Many of them despair and give up on a BM trip. This is the wrong strategy. After all, there will be a couple more opportunities to buy tickets.

And most importantly, a week before the festival in San Francisco there will be a huge number of them - all the people who bought tickets in advance, but at the last moment who realized that they won’t be able to go this year, will be looking for someone to flush them off. I’ll tell you that for my ten times at the festival I don’t know a single case of a person who until the last would like to buy a ticket for BM and could not find it in the end. Many who, left without a ticket, decided not to go somewhere in a month, but of those who were waiting until the last and preparing as if the ticket was already in their pocket, absolutely everyone successfully bought it. The main thing is simply to establish contacts and contacts with California friends in advance.