I’ve written about LuminoCity previously and cautioned that something was not quite right about it. What triggered my suspicions was the lack of info on the organizers (I mean zero info). A 16-acre project developed by an inexperienced team? What could possibly go wrong? Plenty as it turns out. After the first day, I saw the first of what would become a flood of horrid reviews. Currently 1.5 rating on Trip Advisor!

But, it’s actually 10X worse than I imagined.

This festival was a rip off. Disorganized, overpriced, and misleading in its execution. The shuttle was impossible to find and was in a shady ass area. We waited in line for two hours in the freezing cold, only to walk through a muddy venue. Uneven plastic tiles tripped everyone. It was a waste of $200. If you read the reviews on yelp, every single one of them is accurate. Do not waste your money

Luna_Plutonium, Instagram Dec 3, 2019

And for those of you who are wondering “what’s the Fyre Festival?”

Fyre Festival was a fraudulent luxury music festival in the Bahamas. It was promoted on Instagram by paid “social media influencers” like Kendall Jenner. It was billed as THE most phenomenal festival ever but the organizers had no experience putting on an event of this scale and it quickly turned into THE most phenomenal disaster when the first guests arrived and saw their “luxury” accommodations were FEMA tents in a parking lot. Plus, no food and no security. The organizers were ultimately sentenced to 6 years in jail and Netflix did a scathing documentary on the whole thing.

Scroll down to see Who Is to blame for NYC’s Luminocity fiasco.

I place the blame squarely on the media and on influencers.

And to a lesser extent on the festival-goers themselves for not doing their due diligence on something so new and untested (especially post Fyre festival).

What was the media’s role?

Every local TV news channel, as well as magazines and online sources, went all out in praise of LuminoCity. Not a single outlet had done even a scintilla of an investigation into the organizers. They bought in hook, line, and sinker. Shameful.

CBS plugged it on the evening news:

As did NY1:

What about influencers?

They primed the pump for LuminoCity and are implicated in this ripoff. And interestingly, every single Instagram image I screenshot from an influencer account was “experiencing technical difficulties.” Random or is something Fyre-ish going on?

FOMOFEED, LIKEWISE, PROMOTED THIS TO THEIR 125K FOLLOWERS

Some of their followers questioned why they were promoting this scam. This is where I got my first inkling that things were going awry on Randall’s Island.

BOTTOM LINE.

BUYER BEWARE – and that applies doubly when influencers are involved.

In checking out some of the posts related to #luminocity I also learned that many of the influencers are supplying content for legit news sources and NYC agencies e.g. Sarah Funk who gave it a rave review is travel producer and show host for Travel & Leisure and Forbes. But if she is also being paid by LuminoCity, that seems a bit shady to me.

But most shocking of all is the laziness of the reporting being done by the local TV news. They just did LuminoCity a huge favor by providing hundreds of thousands of dollars of free advertising at the expense of New Yorkers.

For many families, this has been a horrendous experience. They’ve come into NYC for this “fabulous” event and spent $200 or more only to have it turn into a nightmare. From festival goer’s posts, I also gather that LuminoCity organizers are not responding to people about dates or times even after they’ve been charged for the event.

Here’s hoping somebody looks into this because it’s a total scam and it’s giving NYC a blackeye. This needs to be made right.