Wherefore art thou, 3000 extra tickets?

The mysterious ticket situation continues. What has happened? Two weeks ago, the Bureau of Land Management granted Burning Man a special permit for 2012 which increased the population of the event more than 20% from last year. This should result in about 11,000 more tickets, although BMOrg have already sold 58,000. That now looks to have been a bold, and successful, move on their part. Still, one would think from some basic maths that there should be 2,900 extra tickets becoming available to the Burner community.

Cory Roegner, who oversees the event from BLM’s district office in Winnemucca emphasized the BLM’s support for more Burners at the event, saying “the more people they can have, the better”. The BLM gets 3% of the gate, so of course they’re enthusiastic about a million dollar plus check. Just like we Burners are enthusiastic about thousands of more tickets becoming available to the community.

Possibly providing further indication that Burning Man has indeed jumped the shark, they also issued them a FONSI.

A few days later, Will Chase emailed about 100,000 of us with the good news in the Jack Rabbit Speaks.

We’ve been getting asked a LOT about when physical tickets get mailed out. If you requested that your tickets be sent to you, they’re going in the mail soon, and you’ll receive them by the end of this month (along with your Survival Guide – READ IT!)…

The BLM issued a one-year permit for Burning Man to take place on the Black Rock Desert this year (see: http://bit.ly/KCJ2Nf), and we worked with them to increase our maximum population to 60,900. As we’ve sold close to 58,000 tickets to date, that leaves us with a little breathing room.  We’re expecting some additional tickets to become available and will have more information next week.  Stay tuned!

Well, we’ve stayed tuned, and it’s now the week after next week. In fact, it’s been 11 days since we received this email. What gives, Jacked Rabbit? Where’s our tickets? Is everyone having too much fun at Avalon to deal with decisions like this? 2 weeks to say either “we’re putting them into STEP” or “we’re giving them away to the world’s biggest guest list” – or are you trying to come up with some new murky ticket allocation system, to help correct the inevitable slide in ticket value on the secondary market that’s happened over the last fortnight?

The 3000 or so tickets are worth about $3 million, according to StubHub. So whoever is sitting on this government-awarded gold mine, should hurry up and tell the Burner community that creates their party whether there is any chance for more of them to attend the event.

If anyone has received a physical ticket for 2012 Fertility 2.0 yet, please email us a picture and we’ll share it.