Café Fest Singapore fails to deliver, compensation angers ticket-holders further

Many had paid up to $30 for a VIP ticket that promised them discounts, express queues and exclusive access to a cluster of café stalls, live music and a goodie bag worth S$100.

When the inaugural Café Fest — a pop-up festival gathering of local indie cafes —  came round at Singapore’s Waterfront promenade last weekend, about 4,000 eager café hoppers arrived to an open area swarming with non-paying members of the public, stalls that had mostly sold their food out, snaking queues and no places to sit.

The event’s execution was also poor: from disappointing goodie bags, a lacklustre welcome drink and an unsupervised VIP tent to a lack of express queues and negligible discounts on food items, which ticket holders still had to pay for.

Organisers also initiated a “Just in Time” ticket promotion a couple of weeks before the event weekend and threw in a free three-month subscription to Spotify Premium, a popular music streaming service—this, evidently, was not given to people who had bought their passes earlier.

Things improved marginally on the second day, but many who visited on Saturday say they were too turned off to return on Sunday. An Instagram account called “CafeConFestSG” was also set up with posts protesting various aspects of the event’s organisation.

To make matters worse, after last weekend’s disappointment, angry customers found out a week later that the make-up compensation offered to those who had written in with complaints also had strings attached: vouchers in $5 denominations, to be collected in person on a first-come-first-served basis and tied with additional conflicting conditional usage terms.

“We understand that many have asked us for a full refund, but as a new start-up, we had to utilize S$5 from every ticket and channel the bulk of the revenue from ticket sales towards paying off the festival expenditure,” the organisers said in a Facebook post on Saturday. “The lapse in allowing the public to purchase from the cafes did not benefit us in any way, as we do not take a cut from the sales made.”

This meant everyone who bought tickets had to stomach a $5 cutback in value returned to them. While there is no minimum purchase necessary for the vouchers, they can only be used two at a time at most, and only within the month of October. A further caveat: customers can only collect one voucher from each of the six cafes involved.

“I really wonder where the bulk of the money went,” environmental engineer Wong Yong Cong, who bought two VIP tickets for himself and his girlfriend, told Yahoo Singapore.  “Anyone could have said they were ticket holders, besides — there was no way of telling who was who.”

For the 26-year-old, the only perk was the live music from local band 53A, whom he said he would have preferred to go to Timbre to watch.

Commenting on the compensation terms, he pointed out that even with the conflicting terms reconciled, he would still have to go to three cafés to use up the vouchers within the span of a month — an impractical situation, in his view.

“The compensation doesn’t feel sincere at all, especially by attaching so many terms and conditions to them,” he said. “If they gave unlimited usage, it would probably be better — at least I could pick one café to visit and eat a meal there.”

Another VIP ticket holder, Marcus Goh, observed that the organisers taking $5 off each ticket refund suggests that “the ones who bought tickets are effectively paying for the event for non-paying customers”.

“So it just pisses people off more. They paid, they feel cheated, and you are now saying ‘oh, you are footing the cost of our mistake’,” the marketing and communications manager said. “Also, their use of the phrase ‘full and final settlement’ just connotes they cannot be bothered to do any more about this… It’s a good thing that they organised this, but the execution was bad,” he added. “I’ll go next year, but I won’t buy tickets, that’s for sure.”

For Wong, accepting $5 less in refunds is reasonable, given that there would be miscellaneous costs involved in the organisation of the event.

“But the event definitely didn’t feel like a $30 one to me. I feel like I paid for the general public to enjoy,” he added.

Other commenters on the Café Fest Facebook post said they had already gone to the Consumers’ Association of Singapore (CASE) with complaints, with more saying they planned to do so as well.

“Disappointed with the outcome. Not impressed,” wrote Shuwei Tan, who asked why the restrictions on the vouchers were necessary. “Why don’t you issue an electronic voucher and email the group of people who sent emails earlier?”

“A scam followed by another scam. You keep saying ‘good café experience’. What you have done is add more bad experience to an already-bad experience,” said Anthony Tan.

“You guys organised the event and will stand to profit from it if it went well,” added user Shannon Zhang, who said he filed a complaint with CASE. “But since you guys handled it so poorly, you should have offered refunds to all and treat the loss as a RISK in doing business; a risk which you could have avoided if you had been more truthful.”

Undergraduate Joel Koh, 24, had bought early bird passes with two of his friends, one of whom had emailed the organisers requesting compensation. He said he would not, however, since it would be too much trouble — he also will be out of the country next month.

“I guess compensation is pretty good,” he added. “What is perhaps more frightening, though, is that originally, only $5 from every ticket was going to the festival—what about the rest of the money?”

Yahoo Singapore has contacted festival organisers and are awaiting a response.