Every festival site will tell you the lineup. Almost none will tell you that the shower queue is forty minutes, that the campground is a twenty-minute walk uphill from the car park, or that getting there means four hours on a logging road with no resupply.
Those are the things that decide whether you actually enjoy it. So we rate them.
Why these are separate from safety
Because they measure completely different things, and blending them produces a number that means nothing.
A festival can be extremely safe and extremely uncomfortable — excellent medical, drug checking, water everywhere, and also dust, heat and no showers for four days. Another can be very comfortable and quite hard to organise — hotels, short walks, and a ticket lottery plus two flights.
Three scores, never averaged. If you see a site giving festivals one overall number out of ten, it's telling you nothing.
Comfort — higher is easier on you
How physically demanding the experience is. Facilities, distances, exposure, sleep.
- 1 — Rough. Dry camping, no showers, long walks, real exposure to heat or cold. You will be uncomfortable and that's part of the deal.
- 2 — Basic. Camping with minimal facilities. You'll be dusty and tired but fine.
- 3 — Manageable. Decent facilities, working showers, water access, reasonable distances.
- 4 — Easy. Good infrastructure, shade, short walks, a bed within reach.
- 5 — Cushy. Day festival or hotels nearby. You go home clean.
What moves this score: shower and toilet ratio to attendance, walking distances between camping, stages and parking, shade and heat exposure, terrain, noise at night, and whether sleeping indoors is realistic.
A low comfort score is not a criticism. Plenty of the best festivals in the world are a 1 or a 2, and their crowds would be annoyed if that changed. The score exists so you can choose with your eyes open, not so we can rank rough festivals below soft ones.
Complexity — higher is more work
How much planning, travel and coordination it takes to get there and back. This is the only one of our three scales where a high number means more of something you may not want.
- 1 — Turn up and go. Buy a ticket, show up. Transit or a short drive.
- 2 — Light planning. Book a ticket and a room. Nothing tricky.
- 3 — Real planning. Camping gear, supplies, a few weeks of thinking ahead.
- 4 — Logistics project. Lotteries, shuttles, permits, long drives, group coordination.
- 5 — Expedition. Remote access, convoys, multi-day travel, everything carried in and out.
What moves this score: ticket system (open sale vs lottery vs registration), distance from a major airport or city, road quality and vehicle requirements, whether you must camp, resupply options nearby, shuttle dependency, and how much gear you have to bring.
Again, high isn't bad. Some of the most rewarding festivals are a 4 or 5, and the effort is a filter that shapes who's there. But you should know before you commit, not after you've bought a ticket.
How to read the two together
The combination tells you more than either alone.
- Low complexity, high comfort. A weekend anyone can do. Good first festival.
- Low complexity, low comfort. Easy to get to, hard to be at. Usually a hot, dusty, close-to-town site.
- High complexity, high comfort. A trip. Expensive, but you'll sleep well.
- High complexity, low comfort. The real ones. Enormous effort, genuinely rough, and often the best weekend of the year.
Limitations
These are judgements, not measurements. They reflect a typical attendee doing the standard version of the festival — general admission, standard camping, no VIP.
Buying into VIP, glamping or a nearby hotel changes comfort substantially, and we don't score those tiers separately. Weather changes comfort dramatically and unpredictably; we score for typical conditions, not the year it rained for four days straight.
Where we have not attended and cannot source enough detail, we leave the score off rather than guess.
Tell us if we're wrong
These scores come from attendance and from consistent attendee accounts. If you've been and our score doesn't match your experience, that's genuinely useful — especially on distances, facilities and travel. Get in touch through the contact page.
Last updated 2026-09-08.